Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

During the recent election campaign, I came across several constituents making the assertion that climate change was causing more weather related damage from tropical storms, bushfires, floods and the like. However, these claims have been totally debunked in a peer-reviewed research paper titled Normalised insurance losses from Australian natural disasters: 1966-2007 by researchers from Macquarie University and the University of Colorado in the USA. This was published on 24 April 2019 in the journal Environmental Hazards. Firstly, the study noted there is:

… broad agreement in the scientific literature and assessments by the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that there is little evidence that insurance or economic losses arising from natural disasters are becoming more costly because of … climate change …

That is the IPCC's official position.

They said of the Australian data:

… there is no trend in normalised losses from weather-related perils—

that's bushfires, tropical cyclones, floods or severe storms—

in other words, after we normalise for changes we know to have taken place, no residual signal remains to be explained by changes in the occurrence of extreme weather events, regardless of cause.

They also noted—and, again, I am quoting directly from the peer-reviewed research:

For tropical cyclone, the clear reduction in losses observed over time … consistent with declining numbers of landfalling cyclones observed since the late 1800s on the eastern seaboard south of Cairns.

They also noted that 1966, 53 years ago, was actually the most destructive year in Australia's recorded history of weather events.

So let's be very clear about what's happening. We have people who are saying they want to go back to having CO2 levels like they were in 1966 to stop the type of extreme weather events that we had in 1966! We have to be guided by the science, the data and the peer-reviewed evidence—and they totally debunk any claim that there is an increase in more weather damage in Australia.