CGTN Europe interviewed Stephen M. Turton, a climate change consultant and professor of environmental science at Central Queensland University.
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00:00Thousands of people on Australia's east coast have been ordered to leave home
00:05before tropical cyclone Alfred makes landfall on Saturday.
00:09The storm has already brought heavy rain and wind gusts of 100km an hour
00:14knocking out power to more than 80,000 homes on the Gold Coast.
00:19Alfred is expected to hit Brisbane as a Category 2 storm
00:23in what would be the city's first cyclone in 50 years.
00:28Stephen Turton is a professor of environmental science
00:31at Central Queensland University.
00:33The more extreme core of the cyclone with the much stronger winds
00:38is yet to really cross the coast.
00:40It will do that later tonight, Brisbane time,
00:43into the early hours of Saturday morning.
00:45So the worst is still to come,
00:48but preparation is well and truly ahead of schedule
00:52and Australia is very used to dealing with natural disasters.
00:55We've got very high levels of preparation
00:58and hopefully there will be no fatalities
01:01or other people affected by this event.
01:04Once it crosses the coast, the big issue will be flooding
01:08because it's likely to drop a lot of rainfall,
01:12possibly up to 700mm of rain, maybe more in some places,
01:17and that amount of rain will certainly lead to major flooding
01:20of the waterways in the area, including of course the Brisbane River
01:24which is the main river that flows through the city of Brisbane
01:28and it's 2.5 million people.
01:30There may be up to a week of outages for electricity
01:34and that's just the nature of these kinds of events.
01:37You do lose power, but people are pretty resilient
01:41and they are also very well prepared,
01:44so they'll be able to survive as a community,
01:47in particular looking out for their neighbours and so on like that.
01:50In this part of Australia, tropical cyclones are very rare.
01:53The last one was 1974 and that was Cyclone Zoe
01:57and even that was not a fully fledged cyclone when it crossed the coast.
02:02So this probably is a game changer.
02:05It's a new event, it's novel to have a cyclone this far south,
02:10especially in the most populated part of Queensland,
02:13the state of Queensland.
02:15While you're speaking about it, on the other side of Australia
02:17there was a bushfire emergency going on.
02:20So Australia's got a mix of things happening at the moment.
02:23It's got a cyclone on one side and bushfires near Perth,
02:27or just south of Perth, yes.
02:29Whether we like it or not, if we keep emitting fossil fuels
02:33into the atmosphere and pushing our climate system
02:36into new territory, we will see more of these kinds of extreme events
02:41and nobody is immune to that.
02:43No matter where you live in the world, it will affect you at some point.
02:47So it's a global community problem that we all need to deal with
02:51as a global community.