There is a paradox at the heart of our experience of extreme weather in Australia, and very likely everywhere in the world, which is making it harder than it should be to understand underlying changes taking place here and globally over many years.
Australians don’t like dwelling on the heartache and misery of losing things important to them. Like people everywhere, when hit by an exceptional weather event they want to move on and forget it ever happened.
At the same time older Australians, perhaps to reassure others that we can handle whatever the world throws at us, like to talk up the impact of an event in the distant past: “You think that was a storm? I remember when…” That’s fine as long as it doesn’t blur one’s judgement about the scale of events today.
The fury of the Hobart fires of February 1967 imprinted on my young mind a once-in-a-lifetime apocalypse. But memory is not the best guide. The large death toll on that day (64) reflected general unpreparedness for a fast-moving fire, but many wildfires since then, including Victoria in 2009, southeast Tasmania in 2013, southwest Tasmania in 2019 and of course Black Summer (2019-20), by any analysis were more intense and devastating for the natural environment.
Drought and fire featured in Australia’s extreme weather in the years up to Black Summer. Since then it’s been mostly storms and rivers of rain, culminating in this month’s NSW floods. With each event thousands of victims join the chorus: they’ve never seen anything like it.
The World Meteorological Organisation reports that in 2024, the hottest year on record, there were over 150 extreme weather events which were unprecedented. This included horrendous flood events in Pakistan, Senegal, Brazil and Italy, six typhoons in a month in the Philippines, and super-typhoon Yagi, which displaced 3.6 million people in Vietnam.
Heatwaves last year in Japan, Iran, Mali and Carnarvon in Western Australia inflicted heatstroke on whole populations. Soaring temperatures during heatwaves peaked at 49.9C at Carnarvon in Western Australia, 49.7C in the city of Tabas in Iran, and 48.5C in a nationwide heatwave in Mali.
And now, multiple flood records broken in NSW after half a metre of rain in two days and nearly a metre in a week. The numbers are staggering: 700 people rescued, five drowned, over 50,000 isolated at the height of the floods, over 10,000 properties inundated. And volunteer rescuers and emergency services at the limit of their endurance.
Many flooded parts had barely recovered from 2021 floods, not to mention a drenching in March from ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred. If recent disasters are anything to go by, the damage in stock losses, unliveable homes and wrecked businesses will take months to assess and many years to resolve.
Some will feel they must relocate, driven by the nagging fear of a recurrence every time there’s rain on the roof. And in the months and years ahead, all the flood victims and everyone else – including you and me – will be asking the question: will we be able to meet the cost of insuring our homes?
Meanwhile other very different weather extremes are unfolding in southern Australia. The worst drought on record is what farmers across South Australia and Victoria are calling the current dry spell – even worse, they say, than the disastrous Millennium Drought early this century.
Large parts of Tasmania and wide swaths of land from western South Australia to Victoria’s South Gippsland have not had rain of any significance for a year or more. Dams are empty, paddocks have turned to dust and farmers are drawing on rapidly-dwindling hay stores – tonnes of it a day – to keep their animals alive. They too may have to consider relocating.
Exceptionally warm ocean water is another, largely separate, climate extreme. The die-off of farmed salmon which washed up on southeast Tasmanian shores in late February, caused by bacteria spreading in warm water, was small fry compared to what has been unfolding in South Australia.
Starting in March, across 4000 square kilometres of coastal seas, an algal bloom has killed untold numbers of fish and other sea creatures, many washed up along thousands of kilometres of toxic coastline from Port Lincoln to beyond the Fleurieu Peninsula.
This is what climate change looks like. The annual World Economic Forum Global Risks Report puts extreme weather events at the top of humanity’s challenges in 2025. We have known what must be done since before the 1992 Rio Earth Summit: end fossil fuel use and learn to live with, not against, nature. We must keep asking, why has this not happened?