Climate now operating on "different baseline," Australian expert warns
Australia's climate is now "operating on a different baseline," with once-rare extremes increasingly becoming routine, a leading climate scientist has warned after the country's most volatile summer on record.
Monash University Adjunct Professor Andrew Watkins, a former head of climate prediction at the Bureau of Meteorology, said Australia's 2025-26 summer delivered some of the most abrupt and damaging swings between extreme heat, fire weather and flooding on record, News.az reports, citing BBC.
"What used to be rare is increasingly becoming routine. Even during a La Nina when we would normally expect cooler conditions, we saw extreme heat records fall across multiple states. That tells us the background climate has fundamentally shifted," Watkins was quoted in a statement from Australia's Monash University on Thursday.
The defining feature of this summer was not just the severity of individual events, but the speed at which conditions flipped, said Watkins, lead author of Australia's first National Climate Risk Assessment, released in September 2025, and a veteran expert on climate drivers and extremes.
"We saw catastrophic fire danger, flash flooding and record-breaking heat occurring in rapid succession," he said. "The pace of these transitions is accelerating, and that's what makes this summer so significant."
Southeastern Australia sweltered through its hottest temperatures since the 2019-20 "Black Summer," with maximums widely exceeding 40 degrees Celsius between Jan. 7-9, 2026, driving a 25 percent surge in a local hospital's emergency admissions. The heat was followed by devastating bushfires in the state of Victoria.
The Otways in Victoria epitomized the 2025-26 summer of "breakneck climate whiplash". Residents of Wye River on the Great Ocean Road evacuated under catastrophic fire danger, then a week later watched floodwaters carry cars out to sea after record rainfall, according to a Climate Council report released Tuesday. Watkins is a co-author of the report.
The report also documents flash drought conditions emerging within weeks, and unprecedented rainfall and flooding across the state of Queensland and the Northern Territory this summer, in some places lasting weeks and delivering a year's worth of rain in days, damaging homes, roads, farms and communities.
"When extremes arrive back to back, the impacts compound," he said, adding that such rapid swings are straining emergency systems, infrastructure and communities.
By Faig Mahmudov
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