Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.
The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.
The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.
Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. Surviving animals are abandoning their young in what is described as mass “starvation events.” At least 18 people are dead and grave fears are held about many more.
... and my favourite...
The bookstore in the fire-ravaged village of Cobargo, New South Wales, has a new sign outside: “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs.”
Australian wildfires were caused by humans, not climate change
Alarmists have been quick to blame climate change for the recent, horrific fires in Australia and California. Although human actions do bear a large share of the blame for the scale of this ongoing tragedy, the cause is primarily bad management policies, not dreaded climate change.Governmental decisions, made under pressure from environmental groups, have made what would normally be big fires into hellish conflagrations.
In Australia, there was a huge fire in the province of Western Australia in 1962, which led to a decades-long campaign of intense prescribed burning. At its height, from 1963 to around 1985, very little was burned by wildfires, but as more and more pressure mounted to suppress this practice, more and more of Western Australia was burned over, as shown dramatically in this graphic.
All of this goes to show that human (mis)management practices dwarf any effects of climate change on wildfires. And with regard to California, the University of Washington’s Clifford Mass has convincingly demonstrated that global warming should actually reduce, rather than enhance, the frequency of conditions that lead to wildfire disasters.
It’s very convenient for alarmist greens to blame the fires of Australia and California on global warming. In reality, the policies they themselves advocate are the culprits.
Celebrities, activists using Australia bushfire crisis to push dangerous climate change myth
The past two decades of escalating fire crises and it’s not climate change that has caused today’s disaster, but the criminal negligence of governments that have tried to buy green votes by locking up vast tracts of land as national parks, yet failed to spend the money needed to control ground fuel and maintain fire trails.
Instead, they bowed to an ideology that obstructs necessary hazard reduction and prevents landowners from clearing vegetation around their own properties, all in thrall to the god of “biodiversity.”
A quadrupling of ground fuel means a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire. Hazard reduction won’t prevent fire but it will reduce its intensity so that it can be controlled.
“Climate change has not caused the current fire crisis,” says Australian Capital Territory forester and former acting fire control officer Ian McArthur.
“Long unburnt fuels in national parks are the primary cause. Basic fire management states that a fire needs oxygen, a heat source and fuel. The only one of those that can be manipulated is fuel. The more fuel, the more intense the fire, the harder it becomes to suppress the fire.”
As dangerous fuel loads have been allowed to build up in southeast Australia, ever more cataclysmic fires have erupted until, finally, this season came a perfect storm of the country’s most extreme drought since the turn of the 20th century and record high temperatures.
For more than 20 years, Australia’s Greens party and greenies infiltrating government bureaucracies have obstructed the hazard reduction that experts like Cheney and McArthur recommend.
Climate change has become an excuse for green mismanagement.
Since November 2019, a total of 183 people have been targeted by police in the state of New South Wales (NSW) for 205 fire-related offenses, according to the NSW Police Force.
Police in the north-eastern state of Queensland are also taking action against people for fire-related offenses. Police revealed to AAP that 103 fires had been deliberately lit since September, with 98 people—67 of them juveniles—having been identified as alleged culprits.
it is important to understand that extreme ecoterrorists do NOT really want to preserve the environment or protect endangered species (like environmentalists); they are better characterized as wanting to destroy the world in order to save it.
Environmentalists + ecoterrorists are the biggest problem down under...
Re: It's getting warm
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 9:57 am
by Cousin Strawberry
The solution was foretold in 1981 by the RH Lord Humumgus.
The Humungus
None here are without sin, but I have an honorable compromise. Just walk away. Leave the pump, the oil, the gasoline, and the whole compound, and I spare your lives. Just walk away
Cue Per to come along shortly to say he was swedish
Australian wildfires were caused by humans, not climate change
Alarmists have been quick to blame climate change for the recent, horrific fires in Australia and California. Although human actions do bear a large share of the blame for the scale of this ongoing tragedy, the cause is primarily bad management policies, not dreaded climate change.Governmental decisions, made under pressure from environmental groups, have made what would normally be big fires into hellish conflagrations.
In Australia, there was a huge fire in the province of Western Australia in 1962, which led to a decades-long campaign of intense prescribed burning. At its height, from 1963 to around 1985, very little was burned by wildfires, but as more and more pressure mounted to suppress this practice, more and more of Western Australia was burned over, as shown dramatically in this graphic.
All of this goes to show that human (mis)management practices dwarf any effects of climate change on wildfires. And with regard to California, the University of Washington’s Clifford Mass has convincingly demonstrated that global warming should actually reduce, rather than enhance, the frequency of conditions that lead to wildfire disasters.
It’s very convenient for alarmist greens to blame the fires of Australia and California on global warming. In reality, the policies they themselves advocate are the culprits.
Celebrities, activists using Australia bushfire crisis to push dangerous climate change myth
The past two decades of escalating fire crises and it’s not climate change that has caused today’s disaster, but the criminal negligence of governments that have tried to buy green votes by locking up vast tracts of land as national parks, yet failed to spend the money needed to control ground fuel and maintain fire trails.
Instead, they bowed to an ideology that obstructs necessary hazard reduction and prevents landowners from clearing vegetation around their own properties, all in thrall to the god of “biodiversity.”
A quadrupling of ground fuel means a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire. Hazard reduction won’t prevent fire but it will reduce its intensity so that it can be controlled.
“Climate change has not caused the current fire crisis,” says Australian Capital Territory forester and former acting fire control officer Ian McArthur.
“Long unburnt fuels in national parks are the primary cause. Basic fire management states that a fire needs oxygen, a heat source and fuel. The only one of those that can be manipulated is fuel. The more fuel, the more intense the fire, the harder it becomes to suppress the fire.”
As dangerous fuel loads have been allowed to build up in southeast Australia, ever more cataclysmic fires have erupted until, finally, this season came a perfect storm ofthe country’s most extreme drought since the turn of the 20th century and record high temperatures.
For more than 20 years, Australia’s Greens party and greenies infiltrating government bureaucracies have obstructed the hazard reduction that experts like Cheney and McArthur recommend.
Climate change has become an excuse for green mismanagement.
Since November 2019, a total of 183 people have been targeted by police in the state of New South Wales (NSW) for 205 fire-related offenses, according to the NSW Police Force.
Police in the north-eastern state of Queensland are also taking action against people for fire-related offenses. Police revealed to AAP that 103 fires had been deliberately lit since September, with 98 people—67 of them juveniles—having been identified as alleged culprits.
it is important to understand that extreme ecoterrorists do NOT really want to preserve the environment or protect endangered species (like environmentalists); they are better characterized as wanting to destroy the world in order to save it.
Environmentalists + ecoterrorists are the biggest problem down under...
[/quote]
Even Trump has now admitted that global warming is happening.
Re: It's getting warm
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 3:00 pm
by Strangelove
Per wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2020 1:45 pm
Even Trump has now admitted that global warming is happening.
Well of course global warming is happening!
But mankind isn't to blame, and mankind can't bring it under control.
Also, the alarmists are overstating the danger and degree of climate change.
For example, the fires in Australia are much more a result of green mismanagement than global warming.
CLIMATE CHANGEGlacier Park in Montana Set to Remove ‘Glaciers Will All Be Gone By 2020’ Signs
Montana’s Glacier National Park is being forced to remove all signs that read “glaciers will all be gone by 2020,” after the doomsday scenario didn’t happen.
Some of the signs were already removed last year as it became clear the prediction wasn’t going to unfold.
Now the rest of the signs will have to be taken down too.
Glacier National Park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen “told MTN News that the latest research shows shrinking, but in ways much more complex than what was predicted. Because of this, the park must update all signs around the park stating all glaciers will be melted by 2020,” reports 8KPAX.
In the late 90’s and early 2000s, scientists predicted that man-made global warming would cause melting glaciers, leading to rapidly rising sea levels that would sink coastal cities and towns.
The more dire forecasts have proven to be totally inaccurate and some glaciers are now growing.
Back in June, NASA reported that the Jakobshavn Glacier in western Greenland had thickened and “has grown for the third year in a row.”
The glacier prediction is by no means the only forecast global warming alarmists have got spectacularly wrong.
At the end of the 70’s, climate experts said that a new ice age was coming. It didn’t happen.
Paul Erlich’s prediction that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation due to crop failure by the 1980’s also didn’t happen.
The 2004 prediction that major European cities would be underwater and that Britain would be plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020 didn’t happen.
Al Gore’s doomsday warning that the Arctic would have ice free summers by 2013 didn’t happen either.
Maybe since these “experts” been caught lying time and time again, we should stop listening to them.
Something needs to be done about the excessive greenhouse gas emissions emanating from the pink alarmists of the world!
Re: It's getting warm
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 4:25 pm
by Cousin Strawberry
Climate hoooey!
Its all about getting into your wallet Per. Dont buy the bullshit
Re: It's getting warm
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 8:17 pm
by Topper
Similar story to BC the past few years, endemic pine beetle destroys pine forest leaving dry fuel and grassland for the next lightening storm. Oh, must be climate change. LOL
Re: It's getting warm
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 9:20 pm
by Strangelove
OOPS did I post that already?
Re: It's getting warm
Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 4:13 am
by Per
Topper wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2020 8:17 pm
Similar story to BC the past few years, endemic pine beetle destroys pine forest leaving dry fuel and grassland for the next lightening storm. Oh, must be climate change. LOL
To some extent. The mild winters in recent years have made the spruce bark beetle population sky rocket in Sweden.
Speaking of which - still no snow here.
Mild winters -> more spruce bark beetles -> more dry fuel + hot summers = more intense forest fires.
I own forest myself, and albeit I have planted some spruce, I mainly have pine, which is the safer choice here.
The recommendation now is to move away from spruce and especially to have more diverse forests with more leafy trees.
In part because a more varied forest makes insect infestations less likely than in monocultures, in part because deciduos trees slow down forest fires, whereas pine and spruce speed them up.
There’s been an increase in forest fires in recent years in Sweden as well, and it has nothing to do with how we maintain our forests. The main factor that has changed is that summers have become hotter and drier.
An exaggerated focus on spruce in forestry is a contributing factor, but that’s nothing new. That goes back to the 19th century. As long as summers were wetter it posed no problem, but because of the changing climate we need to mix in more birch to prevent fires from spreading. If you go back in time, birch trees were almost considered weed. My grandfather used to just cut them down and leave them on the ground as fertilizer for the ”real” trees. But times have changed. In a hotter climate we realize their importance. They contain huge amounts of water and make it easier for the fire fighters to help restrict a fire.
My forest hasn’t burned yet, but there was a fire in my sister’s forest a few years ago. Luckily it’s close to a city and was detected early on, so the fire fighters put it out right away. It was only an area the size of a football field that was destroyed. I went out there a couple of times, because you need to patrol a forest fire that’s been put out daily for two weeks, to make sure it doesn’t flare up again.
Yeah, that’s the thing about science, there is no dogma, so you hear many different voices, but the two people talking about cooling in the 1970’s were in the minority back then already, and their concern was based more on the cyclical nature of climate. If it were not for anthropological global warming we probably would be on our way toward the next ice age already, but certainly not in our lifetime.
The guy predicting fewer hurricanes is just wrong, and definitely in the minority, and the others are correct about what will happen but off in how fast it will happen. Glaciers are shrinking at an alarming pace and the arctic polar cap has lost roughly two thirds of its ice mass since the 1970’s. At some point it will all be gone, but it’s hard to predict exactly how soon.
Re: It's getting warm
Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 5:27 am
by Per
Btw, let’s revisit the chart you posted:
I realized that the catastrophic fires of 2018 seemed to be missing, and then realized the chart only went to 2016. Oh well. Not that important. But let’s take a closer look, shall we? The scale to the right only goes to 600,000 hectares, which makes sense given that all figures presented are below 500,000 ha. But the catastrophic fires of 2018 razed some 1.8 million hectares, so three times the entire scale of that graph. If the greatest area ever recommended to burn off was below 5 hundred thousand, forest fires clearing off 1.8 million hectares ought to have had at least some effect on clearing off shrubs. Sure, maybe not in the right places, but seriously, it’s pretty reasonable to believe at least some of the fires occurred where shrubbery posed a fire hazard and ought to be burned off, right? I mean, fire hazards tend to increase the risk of fire, so it is logical to assume at least some correlation.
So anyway, in 2018 more than three times the highest number ever of hectares recommended to be burnt off burned. Shouldn’t that then logically decrease the risk of fires for the next few years?
But so far this winter more than 6.3 million hectares, more than ten times the scale of your chart, more than twelve times the highest number presented in it, have burned in Australia, and the fire season, which peaks from january to february, has barely begun.
If you bring the chart up to scale, so the fires of this season could be included, the lines already in it would basically become two flat lines right at the bottom of the chart.
By posting that chart, and by claiming it has some sort of relevance to the hell and brimstone scenario taking place in Australia right now, it kind of seems you haven’t really grasped the scale of the disaster.
Per wrote: ↑Sat Jan 11, 2020 5:27 am
If the greatest area ever recommended to burn off was below 5 hundred thousand, forest fires clearing off 1.8 million hectares ought to have had at least some effect on clearing off shrubs. Sure, maybe not in the right places, but seriously, it’s pretty reasonable to believe at least some of the fires occurred where shrubbery posed a fire hazard and ought to be burned off, right?
Wrong, it doesn't work that way.
To put the rest of your argument in perspective, check this...
Anyway, you attacked my original graph, so I think I'll just withdraw it and invite you to respond to the argument I presented above instead.
If you like.
Or not, I'm rather hungover today so...
Re: It's getting warm
Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 6:29 am
by ukcanuck
Slaps forehead, of course it’s not human activities causing climate change. It’s human activities starting fires!
Why didn’t I see it before?!
In BC we have the same problem! It’s not human caused climate change it’s humans mowing down vast tracts of natural forest for a hundred years then replanting thousands of hectares with only one or two kinds of commercially viable trees that die off to bug infestation leaving literal forest sized BBQ pits for the 4 million and counting humans to go camping and accidentally burn it all down.
So glad that’s settled. Fuck it bring back those styrofoam Big Mac cuntainors
