Brace for more extremes - climate experts warn after Queensland floods and Cyclone Yasi.

A WARMER Australia may face fewer storms like this year's devastating Cyclone Yasi but they could be more intense, extreme weather experts said today.

And Australians need to look beyond the experiences of their own lifetimes when preparing for extreme weather events like floods, fires and cyclones in the future.

Speaking ahead of a climate conference in Cairns, Melbourne University scientist Kevin Walsh said in some cases the public had let down their guard and had been taken by surprise by the intensity of recent weather extremes.

“The public remembers decade to decade trends in tropical cyclone incidents,” Dr Walsh, Associate Professor in Earth Sciences, said.

“Most people who are older remember in the ‘60s and ‘70s when there were lots and then they remember that in the 1990s there were fewer.

“The (thing) we find that is sometimes a bit frustrating is that sometimes folks will take that anecdotal knowledge of the past 10 or 15 years or so and assume that’s what it’s going to be like for the rest of civilization.”

Dr Walsh said warnings about the increasing intensity of storms in a warmer Australia came from latest modelling and that “the most intense ones, when they occur, are likely to be more intense”.

“The difficulty is because there are fewer of them we don’t know whether in a warmer world there will be more of the really intense category 4 and 5 cyclones,” he said.

John McBride from the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research said while scientists know more than ever about climate change they still cannot accurately predict what will happen in any specific place.

Despite this, and other disputes about climate science and model predictions, Dr McBride said some broad trends were obvious.

“Climate shifts and extremes go hand in hand,” he said. “It’s safe to say there will be more heatwaves by virtue of the fact that if the background temperature is higher you will have more days above particular thresholds.”

Drs McBride and Walsh are presenting at Greenhouse 2011, The science of Climate Change conference in Cairns this Friday.