This week's extreme weather is just a small taste of things to come as the intensity of storms increases because of climate change, a scientist says.
Victoria University climate scientist Professor James Renwick said heavy rain events like cyclone Debbie and last month's 'Tasman tempest', which brought flooding in Auckland, had a clear human footprint.
The risk of seeing such storms was increasing as time went on, he said.
Bigger storms. More moisture. More fires. Worse droughts. Scientists have been warning us about these consequences for decades, so its not like we weren't warned. But successive governments have decided to dump the costs of emissions on the wider public, rather than where they belong: on polluters. And now we're all paying for it.