(Transcript from SBS World News Australia Radio)
The Australian Greens say the typhoon should serve as a warning about the dangers of not addressing climate change.
But some climate scientists are warning against trying to draw links between the devastating typhoon and climate change.
With a humanitarian disaster in his homeland, Philippine climate change commissioner Yeb Sano was reduced to tears at United Nations climate talks in Warsaw.
"I speak also for those who have been orphaned by the storm. I speak for those people now racing against time to save survivors and alleviate the suffering of those affected. We can take drastic action now to ensure that we prevent a future where super typhoons become a way of life."
On a day when the federal government began the process of abolishing the carbon tax, Greens Deputy leader Adam Bandt branded Prime Minister Tony Abbott Typhoon Tony.
"The head in the sand approach to global warming in the face of the leaders of the Philippines themselves saying this is what we're in store for unless we get global warming under control makes Australian an international pariah and shows that at the end of the day Tony Abbott doesn't believe the science."
Accusing the coalition of being climate change deniers infuriates economist Danny Price, who helped the Abbott government develop its direct action plan on climate change.
He told the ABC that not wanting a price on carbon does not amount to a rejection of the climate science.
"It really grates with me that you have to believe in carbon pricing to believe in climate change. I think it's unedifying.
"It's not very helpful. I think it's sort of juvenile way of thinking about it. There are many different ways of addressing climate change policies, many different ways of influencing behaviour as we could have standards.
"We could have subsidies. We could have rewards. We can have education. To say that the only mechanism that will ever work is carbon pricing is in fact nonsense."
In its most recent assessment on global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there were no identifiable long term trends when comes to tropical cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons.
The IPCC says there will be fewer tropical storms as the global temperature rises but the strongest storms could get even stronger.
Bob Ward from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics has told Voice of America the models do point to fewer storms that could be much more intense.
"It's less clear what impact climate change might be having on the frequency, our models are not very clear at the moment but we might expect in the future that we might even see fewer but those that do occur will be much stronger than what we're experiencing now."
