Is Climate Change Affecting Bushfires?

TapeCutter writes "After the devastating firestorm in Australia, there has been a lot of speculation in the press about the role of climate change. For the 'pro' argument the BBC article points to research by the CSIRO. For the 'con' argument they quote David Packham of Monash university, who is not alone in thinking '...excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has led to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had...' However, the DSE's 2008 annual report states; '[The DSE] achieved a planned burning program of more than 156,000 hectares, the best result for more than a decade. The planned burning of forest undergrowth is by far the most powerful management tool available...' I drove through Kilmore on the evening of the firestorm, and in my 50 years of living with fire I have never seen a smoke plume anything like it. It was reported to be 15 km high and creating its own lightning. There were also reports of car windscreens and engine blocks melting. So what was it that made such an unusual firestorm possible, and will it happen again?"

Comments

Re:CO2 causes Global Warming?

[Aglassis]

Climate change isn't the theory. It is the effect. The theory is that greenhouse gases raise the temperature of the atmosphere of a planet. This has been well tested with small scale experiments and large scale observations (such as observing the atmospheric composition and temperatures of Mars and Venus). There are a lot of details that go into climate change, but the general idea is very common sense:

Step 1: Shine some light in the visible spectrum on an object through a gas that doesn't absorb a huge amount of energy at most of those wavelengths (for example, from any random object that you might see that has a 5780 K blackbody temperature).
Step 2: Choose an appropriate gas (like CO2 or methane) that will absorb a lot of energy from the blackbody emissions of that object (Stefan's Law).
Step 3: Watch the temperature of that gas rise.

Do you get the gist? It isn't rocket science. If you add a shitload of CO2 to the atmosphere, the temperature of the surface of the planet is going to rise.