[rockdoc123]

These fire tornadoes have also been seen in recent California wildfires.....just another indicator that the extremely dry forests and soils created by global warming are changing wildfire behavior in ways that make them even more dangerous.

Please explain the fact they have been documented back in the twenties (as my post points out above) and that this is then related to "climate change". As pointed out the fuel issue is all about fire management and much less about climate change. If you have a hot year (as Australia had back in the thirties continuously) as long as there is a plan to deal with the tinder large fires are generally controllable. Australia has a problem with fuel management and is susceptible to fires...put two and two together.

Sensationalism might sell to the public but the fact of the matter is this phenomenon has been around as long as large wildfires have been present (we are talking about Australia so please explain the huge fires in the late 1800's).

But go ahead, ignore all the folks who have lived down there for decades and understand the issues (as my post above points to). Just invoke the old any reason to blame it on climate change is a good thing to do argument.

[sparky]

.
the Black Friday bush-fire 13 January 1939

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_bushfires

what make this year fire special is less their intensity than the fact they started early and have been ongoing
the really bad fire season is usually Christmas and January
there was the Camberra bushfire and the Victoria 2009 fires
plus any number pretty much each years
to the point that a year without some is remarkable in itself and usually make the next year a worst one

[Plantagenet]

....what make this year fire special is ... the fact they started early and have been ongoing
the really bad fire season is usually Christmas and January...

Same thing in California and up here in Alaska and in other areas around the world seeing increased wildfires.. In california the fire season is getting longer and longer to the point that fires can get going there almost all year long. The lengthening fire season is one of the clearest signs that global warming is helping trigger the fires, i.e. they are no longer caused by individual heat waves but instead reflect a longer and longer hot, dry season due to a hotter and hotter climate.

The news here in the US says its going to be hot and windy and fire hazard is elevated this weekend in Australia. I sure hope the Australian navy is able to get food and water to the 4000 people stranded on the beach after their town burned up before things get nasty again this weekend.

Cheers!

[rockdoc123]

And yet in the US since the early twentieth century both the number of wildfires and the area burned has been decreasing, not increasing. This plot from data at the National Interagency Fire Centre (NIFC.org) shows this quite well:



If climate change was mainly at fault both area burned and the number of fires should have increased, the exact opposite of what has been observed.

And as to the length of the fire season, a paper published not that long ago points out that is a result of man being responsible for lighting the vast majority of fires in the US. Fires that are ignited by lighting still have the same seasonality they always have whereas the ones created by man have increased on either end of the normal season. The idea being that human-created fires (matches, power lines, fire pits etc) can occur in higher moisture content fuels.

Balch, J.K. et al, 2017. Human-started widlfires expand the fire niche across the United Sates, PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617394114

Humans have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal “fire niche” in the coterminous United States, accounting for 84% of all wildfires and 44% of total area burned. During the 21-y time period, the human-caused fire season was three times longer than the lightning-caused fire season and added an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the United States. Human-started wildfires disproportionally occurred where fuel moisture was higher than lightning-started fires, thereby helping expand the geographic and seasonal niche of wildfire.

[Plantagenet]

Some officials in Australia are now blaming climate change for causing warming that has led to a series of recent catastrophic fire seasons, including the ongoing 2019-20 fire disaster.

officials-blame-climate-change-as-deadly-fires-continue-to-rage-through-australia

I'm glad there are some sensible people in the Australian government. Apparently the PM there is similar to Trump and likes to ignore the science and pretend climate change isn't real. Of course Australia is one of the largest coal exporters in the world and hence is partly responsible for producing immense amounts of CO2, and stopping coal exports would would cost jobs and damage Australia's economy.


Some say the world will end in fire --Robert Frost

Cheers!

[dohboi]

Good points, P.

The droughts also evaporate more water than earlier ones did, since temperatures, especially night time temps, are higher.

[dohboi]

I guess it's time to start up a new thread on wildfires for the new year.

And what a year it is already. Things are getting seriously crazy dangerous down under:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... ng-to-flee


Australia fires: tens of thousands stranded while attempting to flee

Visitors, who were told to evacuate a vast area along the NSW south coast before even worse fire conditions return, stuck for hours in gridlocked traffic

Tens of thousands of people remained stranded on Thursday evening while attempting to flee bushfire-ravaged areas of the south-east Australian coast – having earlier been urged to leave before the return of extreme and dangerous weather conditions.

The mass evacuation of communities in New South Wales and Victoria is among the largest ever emergency movements of people in Australia...

...“We have no capacity to contain these fires … the fires are going to do what they are going to do, and people have to get out of that area,” NSW Rural Fire Service deputy commissioner Rob Rogers said.

[Plantagenet]

The Wall Street Journal had an article this morning about the growing conflict between different parts of the world over fire-fighting planes. Apparently the US and Australia and Canada and Brazil etc. share the same set of planes used to fight fires. There are a limited number of 737s modified to transport and dump water, for instance.

And as global warming causes the fire seasons to become longer and longer, the fire seasons are starting to overlap and there aren't enough planes to go around. The end of the fire season in California is now so late it overlaps with the earlier start to the fire seas on Australia., and fires in the Brazilian rain forest overlap with both.

And the plane crews have to fly almost continuously in places like Australia. There is no longer a fire out there....the whole coast is on fire.

Or, as Greta put it so eloquently, "our house is on fire."


Fire season in Australia is longer....and fires are now reaching the inhabited coastal areas.....

Cheers!

[dohboi]

Interesting. I had no idea.

[dohboi]

Today (Saturday) is going to see an increase in the spread of fires not just in VIC but in NSW as well.

Sydney is having its borders under threat as the fires are jumping across rivers... fire crews are defending the border so far.

Kangaroo Island (about 1000km2) is having significant fire storms today. They are evacuating entire towns immediately.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/envi ... 1fa20c88dd

Here is a wrap up of the situation in VIC and NSW
https://www.news.com.au/technology/envi ... b3498f7b6c

[jawagord]

It’s an old story, most of these fires are caused by humans and exacerbated by humans, climate change has little to do with it.

There are, on average, 62,000 fires in Australia every year. Only a very small number strike far from populated areas and satellite studies tell us that lightning is responsible for only 13 per cent. Not so the current fires threatening to engulf Queensland and NSW. There were no lightning strikes on most of the days when the fires first started in September. Although there have been since, these fires – joining up to create a new form of mega-fire – are almost all man-made.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/arson-m ... 53bcl.html

A Black Saturday survivor whose home was the only one standing after the bushfires raged because he illegally cleared his land, says property owners should be allowed to take matters into their own hands if authorities don't act.
'I think it's a combination of ideology and ignorance. You need three things for a fire: heat, oxygen and fuel,' he said.'Now, we can't do much about the heat and we can't do much about the oxygen, so the only thing we have control over is the fuel.

'There's people who seriously believe organised burns are bad, but in Australia we've got really good fire services and they've only gotten better over the years.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ction.html

[Plantagenet]

....climate change has little to do with it..

Record warm and record dry conditions are the reason the fires started so early, the reason that there are so many fires, and the reason that the fires are so intense.

And the record warm and dry conditions in Australia are the result of climate change.


Decades of warming in Australia have produced record warm and dry conditions, resulting in increased risk of fires. This, in turn, is resulting in this years record fires

Cheers!

[rockdoc123]

Record warm and record dry conditions are the reason the fires started so early, the reason that there are so many fires, and the reason that the fires are so intense.

according to you. The vast majority of Aussies including the forestry folks have been pointing to the problems with management issues. As has been posted here above several times historically fuel has been managed by targeted fires. That has been the case going back as far as recorded aboriginal history. With no fuel there is no fire, it is that simple.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Record warm and record dry conditions are the reason the fires started so early, the reason that there are so many fires, and the reason that the fires are so intense.

according to you. The vast majority of Aussies including the forestry folks have been pointing to the problems with management issues. As has been posted here above several times historically fuel has been managed by targeted fires. That has been the case going back as far as recorded aboriginal history. With no fuel there is no fire, it is that simple.

Ah! But proper forestry management takes advanced planning, commitment, and MONEY (at least in the modern, crowded world).

In places like the US and apparently Australia, forestry management isn't much of a priority.

So there's that.

[rockdoc123]

In places like the US and apparently Australia, forestry management isn't much of a priority.

So there's that.

apparently it was from the time before non-aboriginal settlers appeared until not that many years ago. The abos used fire to manage crops and wildlands and farmers and ranchers subsequently were burning off old crops each year. Those old burned areas act like fire breaks or back burns so any wildfire is limited. Recently the Australian government has made it illegal for landowners to manage land using fire and hence the large buildup in fuel. It is easy to simply blame everything on climate change....you don't need any proof, you just have to say oh it's getting warming and hence it isn't surprising A or B or C happens. But in this case it is well documented what the problem is. In the US it is similar albeit also different depending on where you are. Lots of homes built close together and close to treed areas in California exacerbated the problem of too much forest floor fuel. Add into the mix the natural occurrence of winds and you have a recipe for disaster. As the research I pointed to indicates, the main reason for the increase in fire season is not climate change but rather the fact most of the fires are set by man or his activities versus lightening strikes. The lightning strike season hasn't increased and the moisture content of fuel can be much higher when you have the typical man made fire setting (cigarettes, bbq's, house fires, power lines etc). But as I said, it is easier to blame climate change than it is to read something.

[dissident]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo

An example of the clueless view of climate change from the "climate change is a commie hoax" true believers.

1) Australia has experienced arson fires since forever. This includes fires set by firemen to justify their jobs.

2) The claim that regulation changes about brush burning are the key factor in these fires is BS. The period of
time for the alleged accumulation of fire kindling is way too short. We are not talking about Canada in the 1880s
where square timber logging resulted in the burning of 90% of the white pine stands because of the massive amount
of wood chips left on the forest floor which would actually experience spontaneous combustion under the right
conditions.

3) It is an undeniable fact that Australia has been experiencing a drying trend. This directly contributes
to the scale of the forest and shrub fires. Pretending it does not is simply retarded.

https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/OandA/ ... ng-climate

Don't dangle woke SJW morons as "proof" that there is no climate change, denier idiots.

[rockdoc123]

An article describing exactly what I have been saying.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/australian-wildfires-were-caused-by-humans-not-climate-change

Australian wildfires were caused by humans, not climate change

The similarities between Australian and Californian politics, vegetation, and climate have always been striking. Both places are drop-dead beautiful, far-left, and politically green. In both places, people like living around vegetation that every year dries out enough to burn sky high — with or without climate change.
This is thanks to relatively short rainy seasons surrounded by perfect beach weather. It is spectacularly green when it rains and tinder-dry brown when it stops. When rainfall is high, as it was for recent years in Australia, vegetation grows even thicker, only to provide even more fuel for wildfires.
At the same time, our culture of vegetation worship militates against purposefully burning things down. In California, these “prescribed” fires are now largely prohibited (because burning releases dreaded carbon dioxide), ensuring that disaster is always just around the corner. Ditto for Australia, where some burning is allowed but nowhere near enough.
Range managers, as well as the native inhabitants, have long known that unless we burn it on purpose before the vegetation overgrows, it will burn us, our homes, and, tragically, our towns. You can see this in the terrifying video of a family’s escape from the 2018 Camp Fire in California, where the tremendous amount of fuel lying on the ground is painfully obvious.

Australia has been ready to explode for years. David Packham, the former researcher at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, warned in a 2015 article in the Age that fire fuel levels had climbed to their most dangerous levels in thousands of years. He noted this was the result of “misguided green ideology.”

Yesterday I spoke with a friend whose sister lives outside Sidney. Their neighbor lost the entire farm plus several hundred sheep and they are adamant if they had been allowed to burn off areas of their land on an annual basis (as was tradition) there wouldn't have been the level of fuel that was necessary for a climax burn of this nature.

This in not about climate denial, it is all about understanding how nature works and how one has to manage it properly by taking responsibility (assuming the gov't won't regulate you in such a way to prevent that).

[Plantagenet]

Yesterday I spoke with a friend whose sister lives outside Sidney. Their neighbor lost the entire farm plus several hundred sheep and they are adamant if they had been allowed to burn off areas of their land on an annual basis (as was tradition) there wouldn't have been the level of fuel that was necessary for a climax burn of this nature.

This in not about climate denial, it is all about understanding how nature works and how one has to manage it properly by taking responsibility (assuming the gov't won't regulate you in such a way to prevent that).

Are you actually suggesting that the best way for Australia to prevent future bushfires is to "manage" things by burning off the existing vegetation in advance? Really?

That idea might work on a single ranch, but it isn't a very good way to manage the real problem that the entire continent of Australia is facing, i.e. as the climate becomes hotter it produces a longer fire season together with drought conditions and record hot temperatures across the entire continent of Australia. Similar climate changes are affect New Guinea and Indonesia. The climate is warming...there is no denying that.


So far over 12 million acres of forest and grassland have burned across Australia, and the fire season is only reaching its peak now. The climate is changing and growing hotter across Australia....and that inevitably leads to more fires. Certainly better planning and land management would help them manage the fires, but it isn't going to stop the fires burning huge areas in the future during more frequent and extreme hot and dry summers as the climate grows warmer and warmer.

Cheers!

[Plantagenet]

The high level of bushfire activity in Australia was PREDICTED by climate sciences over a decade ago

Report-PREDICTED-Australias-bushfire-crisis-precision-12-years-ago

The science here is very simple. There is more CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the air each year. The greenhouse gases cause the planet to heat up. By using supercomputers and climate models predictions can be made of the magnitude and effect of climate change in various regions and localities.

The prediction for Australia was for increasing temperatures, more drought, longer fire seasons and more bushfire activity.

And so it has come to pass.


Looking ahead, we can predict with some confidence that there will more heatwaves, more drought, and more bushfire activity in Australia as the climate warms even more.

Cheers!

[rockdoc123]

Are you actually suggesting that the best way for Australia to prevent future bushfires is to "manage" things by burning off the existing vegetation in advance? Really?

that is exactly what they have been doing for hundreds of years or perhaps you can't be bothered to read anything anyone posts here? Here is a plot that explains the situation. There were serious fires back in the thirties and the Aussies responded with an immense program of controlled burn as time progressed government restrictions had the area of controlled burns significantly decrease and at the same time the incidence of natural fires increased. I hardly think that is a coincidence

The climate is changing and growing hotter across Australia....and that inevitably leads to more fires. Certainly better planning and land management would help them manage the fires, but it isn't going to stop the fires burning huge areas as the climate grows warmer and warmer.

Once again please explain the huge fires in the late nineteenth century when "global warming" didn't exist? Perhaps also explain the large fires in the middle of the twentieth century right in the middle of heavy precipitation and colder temperatures. The bottom line is without fuel there is no fires. Which is why the Aussies who actually live there and understand what is going on are adamant that it is a fuel issue that needs to be dealt with.

If it is all to do with increased heat then why is there no direct correlation between where the fires are and where the greatest increase in measured temperature has been over the past 40 years?



Its simple, it isn't the areas that have heated the greatest it is the areas with the largest growth in population with the greatest chance of human sourced fires (matches, lighters, bbqs etc) and where the government has been actively stopping land owners from executing controlled burns