Australia Already Feeling Climate Change

A good article from October but still relavant about how Australia is already experiencing the effects of climate change and why it is one of the first places to do so.

I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this
most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the
course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a
crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France
and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. “In many ways, it is a disaster
of biblical proportions,” Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told
reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that
Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on
the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere.
“Australia is the canary in the coal mine,” says David Karoly, a top climate
researcher at the University of Melbourne. “What is happening in Australia now
is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the
future.”

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-change-and-the-end-of-australia-20111003#ixzz1dJ7uMTsi

I know I have seen the effects locally as in less snow, shorter winters and fallen levels of Lake Huron. Everyone used to have snowmobiles in the garage as you needed them every winter, not so now.  Condos built at the shoreline now are far from the water.  Places we launched boats when I was a kid are now too far inland to do so.  Beaches I swam at you can either no longer do so or they are now farther inland and shallow to the point you can sit down in the water but only a toddler could actually swim.   There have been too many changes just over decades to ignore or blame entirely on Nestle for stealing Great Lakes water and bottling it to send all over.  What changes have you observed?