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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?"
boring, getting tired of hearing about global warming.
Everything is caused by global warming. Next?
The argument:
Global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect which is caused by greenhouse gases which are released from burning oil.
The problems:
1. Ignores the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect: water vapor.
2. Oil is formed by compressing organic material for a long long time. This means that, prior to life, this CO2 was already in the atmosphere. Meaning, life formed under conditions of higher CO2!!!
3. Global temperatures have not been tracked long or accurate enough to make the empirical claims that have been made.
4. Global warming has been replaced with Climate Change, and all evidence is, by definition, in favor of Climate Change. Ie, it is now disprovable since it accurately predicts the future can hold anything.
All in all I'm glad it it makes its way into every topic...
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
you know, sometimes inspite of our best efforts shit just goes very very wrong. we are not masters of the universe. to suggest global warming is to blame for the bush fires is media whoring at it's worse, and totally disrespecting those who died and their families just to push their own agenda.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
by the way people who take any opposing view on this subject -- no matter how valid their comments -- get modded as "troll". That is not a very adult way to behave.
At least one poster above had good and true things to say, but got modded as troll anyway. Some others may not have had all their facts right, but they were no more off than people on the "other side" of the question, and they got modded as troll too, even though the people who made ridiculous statements on the "pro" side of global warming were not modded.
That really sucks, folks. You can do better. That kind of crap makes me ashamed to be here on Slashdot.
And by the way, I just want to point out: the UN "TAR" or Third Annual Report on Climate Change, which is what much of this Global Warming argument is based on, has by now been found to be seriously flawed, AND politicized. Much that was in that report was not science, either. In fact, at least one paper the report was based on was an outright fake. You can't rely on flawed and discredited data for your argument, then turn around and tell others that their argument is "not science". That would make you a hypocrite. What you really meant (whether you knew it or not), was "that is not science, either".
1. [strike]Global warming[/strike] Climate change is not a fact. It's a theory. A bad one at that since it does not predict the current climate much less the near and far future and is not consistent with the data.
2. Climate change is now the fad since earth is not warming globally anymore. In fact, the ocean has been cooling since 2003 and the ice in the Arctic sea is now back at the same level as in 1979 and Alaskan Sea Glaciers are advancing for the first time in 250 years. Hey, those AGW fanatics are now shifting the goal post and make those facts proof of a climate change.
3. Bushes and forests have been burning since the dawn of time. The Australian fire was more fierce due to the idiots who "protected the environment" by banning clearing of vegetation.
Sydney Mornding Herald:
Last week angry fire survivors in Victoria pointed the finger at local authorities who prevented clearing of vegetation. At a public meeting in Arthurs Creek, Warwick Spooner, who lost his mother and brother in the Strathewen fire, stood up criticise the Nillumbik council.
"We've lost two people in my family because you dickheads won't cut trees down." Then of course, there is Liam Sheahan, the Reedy Creek home owner whose house is the only one in a two-kilometre area which survived the fires. In 2004 he was fined $50,000 for removing 247 trees around his hilltop house to protect it from fire. His two-year court battle against the Mitchell Shire Council cost him $50,000 in legal fees.
The current GW argument is now framed as an impossibly illogical syllogism. First they accused those with evidence against the claimed warming trend to be flat-earthers. But now that undeniable evidence shows the cracks in their warming theory, they rephrase their position as "climate change", but they do not change their conclusions. They still require massive programs to further control, tax and regulate virtually every activity.
So now they equate any climate change at all as "proof" of their models and their theories. Nobody denies that the climate changes, in ways both known and unknown, but that in no way implies that their interpretation of these changes supports their theory of anthropogenic global warming and its theoretical effects. So they have cleverly posed an irrefutable argument: Believe in "climate change" - yes or no. Neither "yes" as they interpret it is true nor is "no".