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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?"
It burns! It burns!
wow, a first
...so it didn't cause the bushfires. Fires like this are normal. Suburbs sprawling into the bush are abnormal. Fifty or a hundred years from now it may be a different story.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
boring, getting tired of hearing about global warming.
The answer is no. ... we had to rely on the 22nd amendment to get the job done.
Despite Al Gore and Michael Moore's best efforts, climate change did not get Bush fired
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Some years ago, Fine Homebuilding did an article about houses that did and did not survive wildfires in California. The houses that survived had certain characteristics. They were clad with non-burning material like stucco. They had metal or tile roofs. They didn't catch heat under the eaves. They didn't have trees near the house. The plantings they did have mattered. There was one kind of ground cover that was full of water and that would burst if heated, releasing the water and cooling the fire.
The Australian houses I have seen (in pictures, I haven't been there) had almost none of the characteristics of the houses that survived the California fires. So, my question is; if you live in a country that has bush fires, why don't you build your houses to accommodate that fact?
Everything is caused by global warming. Next?
The ever increasing severity of wildfires in Australia, North America, and elsewhere have nothing to do with any hypothetical climate change. It has everything to do with honest to Cowboy Neal human intervention.
Every year, dry areas with lots of vegetation catch fire. This is natural. Every year, humans that are stupid enough to build flammable houses in fire prone areas fight the fires and put them out. This is not natural. If the fire was let to burn out on its own, the thick and highly flammable undergrowth would turn into fertilizer for the larger, healthier, and more fire resistant plants that have historically survived such wildfires. Unfortunately, because society likes to coddle the retards that build in fire prone areas, the undergrowth survives year after year and becomes thicker and thicker. Then when the conditions are especially ripe, like during a drought and wind storm, the brush that had been saved for all those years suddenly goes up and creates a massive fire with the fury of all the years that human intervention prevented nature from taking care of the problem. Lo and behold, the massive super fire is much more destructive than the natural fires would have been. Good job.
Flood prone areas with human settlement have the same problem. Levees prevent the natural yearly floods and deprive the land of the silt deposits that would have normally been left after the flood plains have lived up to their name. This causes the land to over time sink and become less fertile, and then when the levees fail OH MY GOD BUILD AN ARK THIS IS THE WORST FLOOD EVAR!!!1
tl;dr climate isn't the problem, retards fighting nature is
...just as the current cold winter in North America canNOT be considered as casting douby...
David Packham is our foremost expert in this area, he "wrote the book".
It is clear that when you let 35-50 tonnes of fuel build up per hectare by not backburning then you will get these sized fires.
We have had similar fires in the 1850s, 1870s, 1930s, 1980s. The common factor is the amount of fuel ready to be burnt.
Shouldn't Climate Change have actually reduced fuel load by killing the trees?
It has a lot to do with the fact that the Government departments failed to conduct the necessary backburning.
There will always be arsonists, lightning strikes and stray cigarettes. We can't stop ignition. We CAN reduce the amount of fuel available to a bushfire. Climate change has nothing to do with proper back burning.
It's been classified more as "global weirding" rather than "Global Warming." Where I am from, it's freezing cold, and has had colder weather here than we normally have. But you can't just speculate and attribute these weather storms to global whatever. They have and will continue to happen regardless.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
let's just wait for the findings of the Royal Commission before debating the merits of global warming vs green policy vs urban sprawl. The scale and ferocity of the firestorm has devestated entire communities. The sooner politics are removed from the debate the sooner the answers may be found. Neither side of the debate is immune from point scoring or spin. The fact remains that the indigenous Australians have used seasonal burning as a land mangement practise for thousands of years.The foolish guidelines allowing people to build combustable homes within heavily wooded areas without sensible conditions has led to the worst loss of life,both human & animal in the recorded history of the continent.To say the cause of this tradgedy is global warming is stupid
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.
Regardless of whether climate change is affecting bushfires, the bushfires will affect the climate. Put enough ash high in the air and we could cool the planet.
I'm a fruit pirate. I bought a watermelon once, and spat the seeds in the back yard. They grew into another watermelon,
There will always be arsonists,
Yes but I do think that if we made less of a song and dance about forecast fire risk days, fewer arsonists would see the opportunity to make a name for themselves.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
the project to JOIN THe gNAA!! so that their
so what was it that made such an unusual firestorm possible, and will it happen again?"
1. The failure to control the fuel load using prescribed burns.
2. Yes, unless they stop putting out every fire and enable the fuel load to grow and grow.
All you have to do is look at what happened at Yellowstone.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Stuff like this has happened before.
The 2 notable ones I remember are:
canberra a few years back
and ash wednesday back around 1984(I think)
whilst it would be nice to know better management plans, (planned burn offs work great IMHO)
I think blaming global warning seems like a bit of a "what can be blame today".
When people ask if I'm an optimist, I say "I hope so". --Bill Bailey
Climate change hasn't affected bushfire occurrences significantly in any way. This is all speculation and from a very unscientific standpoint as far as I can tell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfire#Significant_bushfires
Notice where many of these fires occur...Australia. And the documented dates go back to 1851. Climate change has nothing to do with anything, a bushfire is longstanding and naturally occurring event, and has been observed that way for 150 years on record.
Where is the data that shows that fires have occurred more often and burn longer and stronger AND the reason so is climate change and not the fact that suburban sprawl introduces woodland areas to power lines, lit cigarettes as litter, and other human fire related causes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_wildfire
There is the same issue with wildfires occurring in California. And an even bigger threat or cause of wildfires than global climate change is still lit cigarettes being discarded in woodland areas. More on that later.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2327145120071023
Here's a short article from Reuters discussing some basic wildfire facts in California.
* During Santa Ana conditions, fires can be easily ignited by nature, in the case of lightning, or by humans. Some are arson, while others can be sparked by machinery operated near dry brush, campfires or carelessly tossed cigarettes. Downed power lines also pose a fire hazard. Once the wildfires are whipped by the winds, they spread quickly and are extremely dangerous and difficult to fight.
* "Fire Season" officially begins in early summer and lasts through October, though officials say that as the state suffers through cyclical drought conditions, they consider the season to be almost year-round in Southern California.
http://ca.prweb.com/releases/20061010/6/prweb393120.htm
In September 2002, a wildfire that scorched 247 acres on the Camp Pendleton, California base was started by a cigarette butt tossed by a passing motorist.
In January 2001, a motorist driving along Interstate 8 in San Diego County flicked a cigarette butt onto the center median, sparking a fire that burned more than 10,000 acres, destroyed 16 homes and charred 64 vehicles.
http://www.kbtx.com/home/headlines/40452047.html
In Texas, people cause 95 percent of wildfires. The Texas Forest Service says residents should not engage in activities, such as throwing out lit cigarettes, welding and burning debris, that could lead to an accidental wildfire start.
So we are causing a vast amount of wildfires. In some places even 95 percent.
Maybe climate change plays a large role in bushfires, but I need way more evidence to convince me that it's not people being careless with litter, downed power lines, or household electrical fires, etc. causing the majority of these fires.
There will always be arsonists,
Yes but I do think that if we made less of a song and dance about forecast fire risk days, fewer arsonists would see the opportunity to make a name for themselves.
Except if you don't make a song and dance about fire ban days, you get people like some of my relatives who insist that a hot, windy day is the perfect time to hold an imprompt barbie with that pile of old branches in the middle of a paddock.
Poor urban planning and lack of forest management are definately contributing factors.
However: We've been in drought for 12 years, this has been the driest February on record, the hottest week on record was earlier this month and the hottest day on record was the day of the worst of these fires.
It's pretty easy to convince me of global warming after living through this.
But that is going to happen.
None of this has anything to do with fake climate change.
When Europeans first started to exert control over large areas of the Australian coast, they put a stop to the Aboriginal practice of starting bushfires annually. This was done to stop such fires damaging their crops and newly built properties for the most part.
However, this frequent and deliberate starting of bushfires had come into being as a survival strategy. By starting such fires often, the Aboriginies avoided having vast, uncontrollable fires that posed a real danger.
Since that time, bushfires have occurred that are exactly what the aboriginal practice had been designed to avoid, and due to the high density of Australia's coastal regions, the dmaage cost and death toll have been high.
This has been noticed to a greater extent recently because the press are looking for things they can point to as evidence of global warming. This alas is no such thing, its just evidence of man failing to adapt to the requirements of an atypical environment.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Without knowing the specifics in Australia, the fact elsewhere in the world is that many governments treat things like Russian Roulette.
With 6 cylinders, and 1 bullet you can keep pointing the gun at your head and pull the trigger.
You can keep making cuts to various departments and everything keeps going ok.
You pull the trigger a few times, and then, bang. Your dead.
And then, out of the blue, the shit hits the fan and your carefully managed cuts are too deep and you bleed to death.
"David Packham is our foremost expert in this area, he "wrote the book"."
So why is he peddling disinformation on the BBC and why is it that I could not find a description of his position at Monash?
"It has a lot to do with the fact that the Government departments failed to conduct the necessary backburning."
Please re-read the summary and look at the reference.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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....
âoeWeâ(TM)ve lost two people in my family because you dickheads wonâ(TM)t cut trees downâ¦â
The fires were a direct result of several actions:
1) A hot and drier than usual summer
2) A LOT of fuel on the ground
3) "Environmentally Concious" governance, including banning clearing of ANY land whatsoever, even banning clearing of land as a means of fire reduction.
4) Insufficient backburning, except for when it is too late.
Obviously 3) and 4) are the problems here. If either 3 or 4 (or both) were allowed, then the death toll and property losses would be far less.
Both 3 and 4 are the direct result of interference by greenies and environmentalists.
But seriously, these fires are nothing special. Victoria had devistating fires in the 1980s and the 1930s.
Given the relatively short time Australia has been populated, it's not hard to imagine that these fires are probably a 1 in 20 to a 1 in 100 year event.
Global Warming affect bushfires...
Ah, so that explains what happened at the Justice Department.
I dunno.
Does the pope shit in the woods?
What?
I blame the O2, there was a lot of it that day and it was from the direction of central Australia so it was hot and dry. i.e. strong nth wind in Summer = fire storms for Victoria Australia. If you want the historical info, look at soil cores, the carbon and ash layers from fires should give you an idea of what has happened in the last 1000 years or so, not that it is a long time, the first Australians have been there and lighting fires for 40 to 60 times longer than than.
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".
I live in Australia and I love the bush and all of our country.
Awhile ago the greenies (green political party and other environment supporters) mistakenly tried to stop natural bushfires and back-burning. The reasons being that nobody likes to see burnt animals (koalas, kangaroos etc..) or burnt plants.
However, there has been a turnaround in thinking regarding this. Bush fires actually bring around new growth and some plants only drop seeds when a bush fire goes through. Bush fires are actually necessary and if they are allowed to occur regulary then it's actually better for everyone. Because the greenies and other people stopped back-burning and because we intervene and fight bush fires the dead leaves, plants etc... don't burn but rather just sit there waiting as potential fuel for the next big one.
However, obviously nobody wants to see humans hurt. The answer to this is allowing natural bushfires and backburning. To stop this hurting humans we need to build fire breaks, surround housing with concrete fire breaks and build bunkers to protect humans who live near the bush.
Read these two assertions carefully:
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 intended effect is this; two conflicting statements cancel each other out. The net impact on the reader is therefore zero. This is an intentional deception.
The skeptical reader notes that the two statements do not, in fact, conflict. The first statement asserts insufficient fuel management. The second asserts some quantity of fuel management, but does not attempt to counter the original assertion.
The second argument asserts a quantity of prescribed burning that amounts to a square 24 miles on a side. Now that we've dispelled the ambiguity of a figure like "156,000 hectares" we can see that very little fuel management was performed relative to the size of the Australian bush, and this is asserted to be the "best result" in a decade!
This is now to be the basis for story after story, year after year of how "global warming" caused the bush fires. You people wonder why there are global warming skeptics? Shut down the boneheads that publish this sort of blatantly obvious nonsense in the name of "global warming" and maybe there wouldn't be so many. Or maybe there wouldn't be much to talk about.
Hmm.
There's a bunch of deniers who say that global warming is a myth, and that somehow Muslims are behind all this.
Of course, they are no different than the Nazis of the 1930's
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.
Jesus told me global warning was a lie.
He speaks to be through my dog, Winkers.
Usually he stays on topic, but he was lecturing me on intelligent design the other night when he let this one slip.
There's a very famous quote by a member of one of the burned out communities. Basically, he was upset that they had been asking for years to have accumulated brush cleared, or even the right to clear brush near their homes, but this was blocked by environmentalists.
The moral is pretty simple. Environmentalists make choices that try to balance people and nature, and if you choose nature sometimes over people, sometimes people will die for it. This isn't the only time this has happened, or will happen. When we make energy more expensive, that means more people will freeze. When we make water more scarce, more people will go thirsty. When we give more land to the animals, there is less land for farming, and so people will go hungry. If you make things more expensive, as green practices do, you make people poorer. That's just the way it is.
This is my sig.
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".
When the bush fire tragedy occurred I realized that it might of taken just box cutters and a bunch of nutters to take over an air plane to terrorize the US.
But in Australia, all it would take is some nutters and a box of matches.
That's a pretty frightening thought let alone what an actual organized concentrated coordinated effort in multiple places over Australia could achieve. :-(, really doesn't help me sleep at night.
the good article I would like to place in mysite http://www.refinancing-home-guide.us/
...just regurgitate what famous people tell you. Like how to "save" the ice caps.
If you really, really wanted to save the polar ice caps, you'd create a time machine and travel back..say, 19,000 years ago. Back when the polar ice cap extended down into what is modern day Illinois.
Which predates SUVs and industrialization by around...19,000 years or so.
That is one of the global warming metrics, right? Save the shrinking polar ice cap, right? You'd need to go back to a time when you can't blame humans. Even then, you'd have to go back yet again to the previous ice age, or any of the numerous ice ages.
In order to understand that simple scientific concept, you'd to do more than regurgitate Al Gore and co.
No way. A term that isn't used outside of Australia (OK in a few little islands too) occurs mostly in Australia!
That wouldn't be because the exact same thing is called a wildfire everywhere else would it?
For those of you who don't have a solid grasp of the language, "many" is not actually synonymous with "most", as is asserted here.
It should be pointed out that wildfires are "normal" conditions in southern California a distressing amount of the year.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What part of the cyclical nature of the Earth's temperature did I ignore?
You make me ashamed to be hanging out with you.
As indicated in the article summary, the Victoria State agency responsible for controlled burned boasted about having burned 165,000 hectares the year before (and this was a notably high year). However, Victoria has 22.8 million hectares, almost all of which is probably relatively rural or even wild. I bet that means that controlled burning (in a relatively aggressive year) only turned over 1-2% of the land area threatened by wildfires. This strikes me as more support for the theory that Victoria simply has, due to decades of bad brush fire fighting policy, too much fuel in its rural areas. Once again, I see an unwholesome eagerness to blame a local problem on "climate change".
I suppose one could say that 1-2% of Victoria is a lot of land area, but keep in mind that in a 24 hour period a few days ago, apparently around 220,000 hectares was burned by brush fires. My take is that the planned burns were minuscule compared to the size of the problem. Further, one probably needs to burn these ares every 20 or so years. That would imply planned burning program up to five times as large as the current one, if my math is correct.
I have here an old family postcard dated 1902 or 1907 mailed from Australia. It is a painting of a huge bush fire. The note on the back says that they were the worst anyone had ever seen. All manner of people, lovestock, fields, forests and buildings were destroied.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Better than my attempt to explain it. To add, less than one percent of Victoria was treated to controlled or "planned" burns. Supposedly in a recent 24 hour period, more than 220k hectares burned. That is almost 1% of Victoria's land area in a single 24 hour period. Let us review the problem: Australia like the US and other developed world countries engaged in highly aggresive bushfire fighting for a long period of time. Then they follow up that precarious situation with woefully inadequate amount of controlled burning. Sure, let's blame global warming^W^Wclimate change.
You misunderstand. The argument is not that global climate change is causing more fires but that global climate change is causing the fires to be more intense.
As another poster pointed out, this part of Australia is suffering from one of the worst droughts recorded, the week before had record temperatures and the day the fires started was a record hot day. No matter whether human caused or otherwise fires start easier in hot dry conditions.
Whether the unusual hot dry spell is caused by natural cycles or is part of climate change is hard to say
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
By the Bushfire CRC and the CSIRO:
http://www.bushfirecrc.com/research/downloads/climate-institute-report-september-2007.pdf
From the concluding remarks:
"In this study, the potential impact of climate change on southeast Australia is estimated. Simulations from two CSIRO climate models using two greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions scenarios are combined with historical weather observations to assess the changes to fire weather expected by 2020 and 2050. In general, fire weather conditions are expected to worsen. ...
The number of "extreme" fire danger days generally increases 5-25% for the low scenarios and 15-65% for the high scenarios. By 2050, the increases are generally 10-50% in the low scenarios and 100-300% for the high scenarios. The seasons are likely to become longer, starting
earlier in the year.
These results are placed in the context of the current climate and its tendencies. During the last several years in southeast Australia, including the 2006-07 season, particularly severe fire weather conditions have been observed. In many cases, the conditions far exceed the projections in the high scenarios of 2050. Are the models (or our methodology) too conservative or is some other factor at work?"
Add to this, the fact that the place is tinder dry precisely because of the preceding 12 years of extreme drought AND the cutbacks to brush clearing and back-burning ("green" policies are an excuse for councils and state governments spending less $$$ - just like every other service they've cut), and you've got the "perfect (fire) storm" conditions we had on Black Saturday.
Given that climate change isn't going away, and that all the models indicate SE Australia will get drier and hotter, and given that governments aren't going to be increasing spending in this area any time soon (OK - maybe they'll be shamed into doing something for a couple of years before the new programmes get cut back again), it is HIGHLY LIKELY that this sort of thing will become a frequent occurrence (say every 2-3 years somewhere in SA, VIC, NSW).
By the way, NASA have a fantastic pic showing how anomalous the heatwave leading up to Black Saturday was against recent summer averages:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36900
Of course, while we were burning down south, the banana benders up north were setting new records for floods.
TFA lists a few of the most prominent ideas about what may be the reason for Australia's dry spell. Throws in a vague "maybe climate change has something to do with it somewhere in there too". Then goes on to point out the fact that the region damaged horribly by fires is a giant tinderbox because people apparently do not take issues like property management seriously enough to correctly evaluate the risks to their property and lives.
Forest management is a necessary thing regardless of climate change of any kind. In a fire prone area, this is especially true. And its abundantly clear that the governments of the area are failing to protect the lives and property of the people that pay their salaries. Negligence of a particularly disgusting variety.
I am getting tired of seeing so many damn tragic yet actually mundane things being rolled up in this BS "OH, and it might also be a sign of the apocalypse" reporting.
i have no idea if it is climate change.
what i do know is the following.
since 1997 the state of victoria, australia has had reduced rainfall activity:
http://www.melbournewater.com.au/images/annual_lrg.gif
this part is unexplained and is "possibly" due to climate change
the graph illustrates a lack of access to usuable water
of note melbourne is in stage 3 restrictions
part of this involves only watering gardens 2 mornings a week
there are places further in the bush up to stage 6 restrictions for several year
i do not know what this level of restriction entails
the point that is that the state is essentially drying up
fast forward and victoria received 3 days straight of 43+ degrees C:
http://www.theage.com.au/national/relief-for-melbourne-as-cool-change-hits-20090130-7tlp.html
the maximum heat during the period did not set any records
the major focus at the time was the failure of the public transport system
what went under-reported was that vegetation died
crops like lettuce and various fruits failed
you could walk past a fruit tree and step in dead unripened fruit
tree leaves turned colour and dropped resulting in an early autumn
it's the last point that is the most important
it ruined 8 months of back-burning efforts
there was now dry fuel laying around to be burned
that following weekend victoria hit a record 46.4 degree C temperature
the weekend was 'black saturday':
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/02/15/2491978.htm
One thins is for sure:
The hot gasses emitted by all politicians most certainly increase global warming.
But we will be controlled, won't we: http://www.infowars.net/articles/february2009/270209Warming.htm
Why would climate change reduce fuel by killing trees? I thought that trees need carbon dioxide in order to survive. From my experiences they should grow faster, not die.
The mention of 'engine blocks melting' reminds me of speculation about the Chicago fire over 100 years ago.
It wasn't Mrs. O'Leary's cow that was responsible, of course, and there is no proof of any theory ... but there is a very strange recent theory to consider.
First, consider some of the unique aspects of the fire. People jumped into the river to avoid the flames. There, far from any flammable material, many of them died. Autopsies showed that their lungs had been cooked from breathing air that should have been cool.
At the banks of lake Michigan was a steel storage yard, stacked with huge iron beams ready for the construction boom. These were also far from any fuel source, yet the beams melted to the ground. The intensity of the heat and the sometimes odd location of the heat indicated a very unusual fire.
It was unknown then that Chicago was not alone. Other intense fires occurred nearby and possibly across Siberia in various, mostly rural, places at around the same time.
In our time a theory has evolved that the fires had the same cause. This from Wikipedia:
"An alternative theory, first suggested in 1882, is that the Great Chicago Fire was caused by a meteor shower. At a 2004 conference of the Aerospace Corporation and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, engineer and physicist Robert Wood suggested that the fire began when Biela's Comet broke up over the Midwest and rained down below. That four large fires took place, all on the same day, all on the shores of Lake Michigan (see Related Events), suggests a common root cause. Eyewitnesses reported sighting spontaneous ignitions, lack of smoke, "balls of fire" falling from the sky, and blue flames. According to Wood, these accounts suggest that the fires were caused by the methane that is commonly found in comets.[10]"
You will enjoy the fruits of your further research into the subject.
...omphaloskepsis often...
On the day of the fires the temperature was 47-48 degrees, with 100kph winds and a relative humidity below ten per cent. We have had virtually no rain in 2009 so the country side was tinder dry. No amount of fuel reduction would change those numbers. When the fire risk index reaches 50 it is called extreme, on Black Saturday the index was well over 200. No amount of back burning would change that. The fire was so hot it could kill from 200 metres. Even today, three weeks after the big day, there is still an 1100km fire front burning through the more remote areas. It keeps getting hotter and dryer, the dams are slowly emptying, we have regular crop failures. It is time to stop coming up with bullshit excuses for what is happening. Climate change is already destroying our world and politicians continue to waste time on nothing schemes.
Sure, a lot of self-appointed experts are saying "there wasn't enough fuel reduction", plus a few real ones with barrows to push. We'll have to wait for the results of the formal investigation, but so far its looking awfully like those firestorms went straight through absolutely everything: bush that hadn't been burned for years, bush that had had recent fuel reduction, bush that had had recent summer fires, managed plantations, and even farmland with scattered trees. When it hasn't rained for weeks, the temperature has been between 35 and 45 degrees C for much of that time, and then you get 46 to 48 deg C with gale-force winds, EVERYTHING burns. You'll get little argument that fuel reduction burning reduces the impact of wildfire under "normal" summer conditions. But when the gale force winds blow at over 45 deg C (that's over 110 deg F), all bets are off regardless of prior burning.
"lovestock", eh? ewwww.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
"Generally the Co2 levels trail the temperature shifts, Global warming and Climate change seem to say they are now forcing it."
Yes, CO2 does rise with temprature however this is a deliberate misunderstanding of cherry-picked facts by the person who popularised this peculiar fiction.
The ice core data does indeed support the half-truth you state but the reason for the initial temprature rise at the end of an ice age is clearly related to the Earth's orbit. When this causes the ice to receed the permafrost melts releasing large amounts methane and CO2 which then ADD to the warming (ie a feedback). In the current situation humans are the ones who are adding CO2, which then causes the globe to warm, the ice to melt, and more CO2 and methane released from the permafrost.
We have had many exchanges in the past and I recognise you have the right to ignore the prefered cap and trade solution and rant against a tax solution in order to misinform and push your own politicaly inspired anti-science agenda.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I misunderstood the title and assumed it had something to do with G.W. moving to Dallas.
Nobody is saying "no more electricity". Nobody's saying "Turn it all off NOW".
Now, lets say 10 years to turn it all off, no more fossil fuel derived power.
10 years to build a water tub for rainwater. Is that impossible for the US?
Those in the south of the US have need of AC but they need it because it's hot and sunny. Solar power and solar water heaters.
Those in the north of the US need heating, but they need it because they have little insulation.
Live closer to where you work. Electric trams picking up passengers run from municipal renewables.
Is this IMPOSSIBLE to do even on such a short timescale as 10 years?
But no matter what, it isn't "ALL off NOW!".
Global warming had nothing to do with the Australian incident. Bush, forest, snarf fires have pretty much always happened.
What happened to make it bodycount was that their government has more and more been taken over by envirowackos that prohibit people from putting trees down, even if it means living surrounded by a potential inferno.
I read about this guy that was gonna put down some two hundred trees to make a 100-meter fire clearing for his house. The government fined him. He said fuck it, and did it anyway. His house is one of the few that didn't burn to the ground.
Bottom line, even if global warming is that big a problem, the last one we should have fight that problem is the State and its army of mediocrity, incompetence and lust for power.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
"CLIMATE CHANGE" is a much more spectacular and scary than "we fucked up." If we say "climate change" causes problems that are more accurately attributed to our own actions, then we offset the blame to everybody else. If we say "we fucked up," then it is immediately obvious who is to blame.
If a hurricane comes through and ROFLSTOMPS your sub-sea level coastal city with ancient levees, you'll feel better by role-playing the victim. Lets keep citing "climate change" as the cause of every natural disaster: Living a fantasy requires less usage of anti-depressants!
Burning plants tends to make about 1 ton of CO2 per ton of plant. It turns out that if you burn the 35-50 tons of fuel you end up reducing the temperature of the fire by a significant amount so more trees survive. Many areas also are subject to desertification processes which means due to a lack of future water, there will never be as many tons of trees so what used to be a CO2 sink, no longer is as large. The numbers I remember for a forest like the one near Marryville will be about 15,000 tons of trees per ha while forests on the north side of Mt Macedon are closer to 5,000 and drop to about 1,500 tons per ha in areas adjacent to the deserts. If those numbers are accurate, then the failure to burn 50 tons of fuel you quoted may have resulted in a permeant loss of maybe 10,000 tons of CO2/ha in the worst burned areas near Flowerdale.
Hopefully someone will post accurate numbers since I'm sure the ones I remember are mixing up metric and imperial systems worse than a NASA space probe.
No, it wasn't climate change. I greatly suspect it was letting the brush build up for too long. Remember the big Yellowstone fire? Same thing. Older forestry and land management practice was to stop fires as soon as they started. But fire is an important part of the ecosystem, and regular brush fires keep the brush down and the fires moderate. But now we have lots of areas where we can't even do controlled burns anymore because the brush has gotten too thick.
If the media is reporting on this as a symptom of climate change, they're idiots. It is anthropogenic, but not the kind they're trying to assign blame to.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
On the day of the fires the temperature was 47-48 degrees, with 100kph winds and a relative humidity below ten per cent. We have had virtually no rain in 2009 so the country side was tinder dry. No amount of fuel reduction would change those numbers. When the fire risk index reaches 50 it is called extreme, on Black Saturday the index was well over 200. No amount of back burning would change that.
You can't burn what isn't there. There will always be weather like this sooner or later, global warming^W^Wclimate change or not. Controlled burning (not backburning which is a burn deliberately set during a bush or forest fire in front of a large burn to exhaust its fuel supply) could have reduced the intensity of the fires. It could have created burned out zones with much lower rates of propagation of the flames. Even in situations that are worsened by global warming, humans can do a lot to mitigate or exaggerate the effects.
You cannot control burn all the forest areas of the state. The fires started in the area east of Kilmore that has a fairly high population density making controlled burning of minor use. The Kinglake ranges also had a high population density so controlled burning would have had only minor impact. The firebreaks were useless. Controlled burning would have been effective around Marysville. Where I will agree with you is that that fires will become more common and the state must have some serious work done on reducing their ferocity. And that includes bigger firebreaks and more controlled burning. I however stick to my first point, on Black Saturday the fires would have occurred anyway.
The fires are still burning, indeed today is rated as bad as "Black Saturday". "After the firestorm" is still some time off. As of yesterday, there were 120 separate fires, 4 of which are major fires. The combined fire front is around 1000km.
This is plain wrong. The fire index for 1939 fires was 100, for these fires the index was 200+, a figure never imagined before it occoured.
Hiow do you backburn 20 MILIION hectares?
You dont.
www.discussglobalwarming.com/blog says, no it is NOT. Global warming is a hoax.
I see no such assertion. So where is that assertion of many=most that you claim I made?
Most is a larger claim than many. It's perfectly normal to show the larger claim in order to show the smaller.
I wasn't saying the poster claimed "most" were in Australia, I was claiming that "most" are in Australia due to naming (they would be called wildfires elsewhere and hence not be in that list) and hence it's not surprising at all that many of them have been in Australia.
If "most" of something has property X, then any idiot can see that "many" of that thing will have property X. So what exactly are you trying to point out to those of us without a strong grasp of the language?
Hello David.
There has been more fuel than this built up before, but never fires this intense. Why is that? It can't have something to do with record temeratures for several days leading to an unusually strong wind change, could it?
No we didn't. We had similar destruction caused by fire, but then we weren't using skycranes in those fires. We didn't have a week of 40 plus degree days leading up to fires, combined with such a strong wind change. Yes, that cool change was what set off the fire storm.
That's the thing about global temperature rising, some areas get hotter, some areas get colder and there's a crapload more turbulence between. Thus the devestating wind change that nearly blew me off my feet that Saturday.
Oh, now you're just being stupid. Trees in this part of the world are actually well adapted to high temperatures an arid conditions. It will take a bit more to kill them all. In fact there is some research that in the short term, higher CO2 levels encourage growth, so climate change potentially leads to more fuel.
Check your facts before posting shit like this. read TFA.
This is true. Climate change does have everything to do with the extreme weather conditions that lead to the fire. You haven't provided a single argument to counter this, and you have in fact made yourself look incredibly ignorant on the subject.
I don't therefore I'm not.
David Packham is not out foremost expert. He is an "Old School" fire researcher who believes that fuel reduction is the only solution bushfires. His view has been successfully refuted by Guy Rundle's piece in Crikey.
To Summarize Rundle's argument (copied from a comment to this article):
*The pros and cons of burning off are heavily debated among bushfire specialists.
Forest fuel levels have no effect on fire speed, which was the main killer in these fires.
*Dryness is a contributor to fire speeds.
*Forestry activities may promote dryness by thinning forest canopies.
*Climate change may be a factor, and if it is, a different set of strategies will need to be employed than if it isn't, so it's worth debating.
*Fires of the "Black Saturday" intensity burn through burnt-off bush because they move at crown and canopy level
*The burn off levels advocated by green groups, are of the same order as those advocated by those bushfire experts who believe that higher burn-off levels increase risk of fire without giving consequent benefit.
*Burn-off levels do not play a role in urban green votes, and they never have.
End Quote.
By the way one of the most prominent enviromentalist has stated that "Greenies" support fuel reduction burning to the full extent that forest scientists recommend.
My reading is fire that happened was due to the horrible conditions of the day. Any fire that existed on that day would have become a uncontrollable monster. My families farm was damaged by the Grass fire that swept through their area. Thankfully it was on the edge of the fire and the neighbours had a water truck and came over at night to save the buildings when a spot fire after the main front threatened the buildings (no one was at the property that night day. The person that was there left to defend his home further up the valley).
Spending a weekend repairing irrigation lines in the vineyard was eased by the car loads of people that turned up in town at the relief centre and asked to help out.
The sad thing is then I read this self serving hate-mongering drivel in the media that is trying to turn this event into another chapter in the culture wars. The best description I have found is also on Crikey by Ben Sandilands:
Tree huggers, "greenies", climate change deniers, climate change zealots, BMW drivers, horse owners, and the viciously intolerant like Danny Nalliah -- who claimed it was God's punishment of Victoria for supporting abortion -- or Miranda Devine's advocacy of blaming and hanging "greenies", are all fuelling a conflagration of indignation, entitlement, prejudice and hate.
Some of the stories, about people being fined for tree clearing that protected their homes (only 257 trees) flirt with agendas supporting the clear felling of more land for farming.
Others, like this morning's opportunistic call by the National Association of Forest Industries for an urgent bushfire summit lead-off with the big lie that "the current process of locking forests up in conservation reserves and national parks with no on-going fire management regime has proven to be fatally wrong."
End Quote.
This disaster has brought both the best and worst of people.
I however stick to my first point, on Black Saturday the fires would have occurred anyway.
This is part of the problem. We shouldn't be attempting to stop fires in bad weather conditions from starting. We don't have enough control over ignition conditions. Instead we should be reducing the intensity and extent of those fires. Firebreaks and controlled burns don't eliminate the fires, they keep them from getting bad as they did. They would slow down the growth and the reach of the fire which in turn would reduce how harmful the fire ended up being.
Here is a picture of the smoke and the cloud formations it formed. http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewkneebone/3261316889/ and here http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewkneebone/3261313629/
Let's see.
He said: Notice where many of these fires occur...Australia.
Note the use of "many".
You responded with: No way. A term that isn't used outside of Australia (OK in a few little islands too) occurs mostly in Australia!Note the use of the word "mostly".
So, he said "many", and you contradicted him using "mostly".
While it is true that the phrase bushfire may be only in use in Australia, the use in the OP's post was largely irrelevant to that, and your comment hinted that you believed that the KEY to his entire post was the use of the word "bushfire".
Of course, he didn't actually say that "most" bushfires were in Australia, so explaining to him that the word was only used there was pretty much irrelevant to his argument ("It's a BEAUTIFUL day", "No, you're wrong, the grass is green").
BLOCKQUOTE>Most is a larger claim than many. It's perfectly normal to show the larger claim in order to show the smaller.
Umm, no. It's not. Two of three is "most". Two is NOT "many". See how that works? They are not necessarily a subset of the other.
Two of three is "a few", but it's also "most".
Two hundred of five hundred is "many", but not "most".
Note that something can be "most" without being "many", and can be "many" without being "most".
Which all reduces to: you shouldn't inflate his claims by using a larger term than he uses. That's not good argument technique (well, it's not if the other fellow is paying attention. It's used quite a lot, and quite a lot of people rather foolishly find themselves believing "most" is what's being talked about when they started out discussing "many").
On a final note, I have a toothache, and I have a catscan tomorrow to determine the progress of my cancer, and I'm generally in a nitpicking grouchy mood.
For which I apologize.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
We weren't talking about any of those cases.
The only reason "many" is not "most" in your example of three things is that the word "many" doesn't apply. I was talking about an actual concrete case, not in general. Clearly if the word many doesn't apply at all to some set then any claims using that word don't make sense.
I didn't claim that something which is "many" must be "most" - I claimed that something which is "most" is also "many". I was trying to speak English, not mathematics - I wasn't referring to generic subsets but to a given subset "bushfires in australia" of the set "bushfires". Though even if you do try and pretend I was being more formal than I was:
"""
If "most" of something has property X, then any idiot can see that "many" of that thing will have property X.
"""
in other words,
If there is a subset A of the set S, such that MOST(A) is true, then MANY(A) is also true.
That doesn't make any claims about the existence of other subsets which also satisfy MANY(), so your "can be "many" without being "most"." statement is irrelevant.
Your "something can be "most" without being "many"" is irrelevant also because we are talking about and actual list on wikipedia, that the term "many" does apply to.
So what is your point?
The Op claimed "many bushfires are in Australia", I gave a reason why "most bushfires are in Australia". I still fail to see how that reason could no apply to the "many" case. I strengthened my claim, but the original claim is completely encompassed by it.
Seriously, you never do that? You always show only the exact thing at hand? When you kid asks "why are the leaves on that tree green?" you only ever answer about that exact tree, without mentioning that most trees have green leaves for that reason?
Let me repeat myself, just for fun:
The OP made a comment as if there was some strange reason why many of the bushfires in a list were in Australia. I pointed out that that's because it's an Australian specific term so most of them will be. I could have used the word many, it would be a weaker claim - but why I stated many because I had a quick glance and obviously many of them were.
I should have said "all", which is what I originally though, but I didn't want check the list for some odd case (I just did now, and yes all of them are from Australia). Luckily I didn't, I'd hate to imagine what that would have triggered in your nitpicking.
By the way I nitpick, but this is a stupid one. I wasn't expanding his claim. I was making a larger one which would include the smaller one. I wasn't expansing his claim in order to disprove the larger case, because I wasn't disproving. I was agreeing! He said "many" were in Australia. I said "most" where, obviously agreeing. In fact "all" where.
If I was disagreeing you would have point. If I has said "you fool, most are in New Zealand" then I would be making a fallacious argument. But I didn't. I made the stronger claim because it was obviously true, and I didn't want to say "all" and then see I didn't see one item in the list.
I also happen to agree with the OP, bushfires are not new in Australia, and neither is drought.
The fact is that the hottest 10yrs on record have all occured in the last 12yrs.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Huh? Trees survive drought pretty well, and Eucalypts at least seem to enjoy high temperatures. Why should they get killed off by hotter, drier summers?
Your point about fuel load is spot on though.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Look here, I'm not saying the planet is not somewhat warmer today than it was a century ago. I'm just saying that I doubt that CO2 is the cause of that because even in these last 100 years there is not a good correlation between CO2 and temperature.
If you're interested in some of the deeper thinkers that think the sun is the more important player in climate, have a look at Nir Shaviv and especially On climate response to changes in the cosmic ray flux and radiative budget
Er, what? CSIRO doesn't just make this shit up you know.
Fuel load is one factor. Another factor is the number of days when it's really hot and really windy, and it's this latter that's projected to increase. The Aussies would need to cut the fuel load to keep the risk of significant bush fires the same, assuming the trend of increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall continues.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
NAS testimony, Mann's post.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If climate change, nee global warming, has caused the extreme temperatures experience in Victoria, please explain why, on February 6, 1851, temperatures reached 117 deg Fahrenheit at noon. You can bet it reached 120F by 2:00pm. The whole state appeared to be burning. In fact, people in Tasmania could see the great pall of smoke and some thought the end of the world had come. It has also been suggested that the years of drought are NOT caused by the Southern Oscillation Index but the Indian Ocean Dipole, which has not been associated with global warming. The DSE and the councils in Victoria have been infiltrated by greenies and any suggestion that controlled burns have been common place are crap. One man cleared around his house to 100metres. The council only allows 20m. That man was fined $30,000 plus $20,00 costs. His was the only house in his area to survive. Don't try to link this with climate change, it just shows your desperation to make climate chane appear real. If there is to be any climate change, it will be another mini ice-age like the last lime that CO2 reached 400ppm.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) H.L. Menc