Photos just in from Bill Johnston in NSW show why Sydney is shrouded in smoke and why so much is still at risk this summer.
The sign marks the fire trail — which is lucky, otherwise no one would know it was there.
Spot the sign in the photo below. Spot the fire-trail.
How many fires would this stop? About as many as a solar panel.
Fire trail or fire trap? | Photo Bill Johnston
This is NSW fire preparation in 2019.
..
This is what a different fire trail looks like (one that works):
Fire meets fire trail, stops. | Photo: Bill Johnston
This break was small but still stopped a manageable fire. Only the ocean will stop a firestorm.
As as Bill says — rainfall lowers the temperature, and drought raises it. Wet soils are hard to heat. Wet woodlands are slower to burn. If there is fuel to burn, a lack-of-rain causes a high fire risk, and everyone knows climate models can’t predict rain on any short term or regional basis. The only thing we know for sure is that a warmer world is a wetter one. Thus and verily 1 + 1 = a new water bomber. Blame Climate Change and say Give us your money!
— Jo
———————————————————————————
Accumulated fuel is an environmental time-bomb
Guest post on the climate-science emergency by Dr. Bill Johnston
The Guardian decrys that if only Australia had reduced its minuscule emissions, something would have happened to stop kiddies and other arsonists causing the allegedly earliest, longest, hottest, beastiest fire season in Australia’s history.
Resident catastrophist at the University of New South Wales Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick was “surprised, bewildered, concerned”, IPCC’s Professor Mark Howden from ANU thought “the public had already joined the dots” – the most obvious being that fire needs fuel and that ever since restrictions on fuel reduction were imposed by various native vegetation and biodiversity reforms twenty or so years ago, fuel loads across eastern Australia have inexorably increased.
Although supposedly paid to think, Euan Ritchie, wildlife ecologist at Deakin University misses the obvious. Not reducing fuel loads will always look like a raging bushfire every seven years or so when La Niña fades, the landscape dries out and El Niño kicks-in. Fire in Australia has been around for as long as there is fuel to burn and they invented two sticks to rub together. [Or since God invented lightning]. Surely the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action[1] would also understand the ferocity of fire is only abated by preemptively controlling the fuel load, which in their time they didn’t do.
Of all the scientists in Australia, the Guardian could only find three to help push their ‘climate emergency’ barrow. Perkins-Kirkpatrick doesn’t understand cause and effect: drought is a prerequisite for high temperatures and that both are caused by low rainfall — not excessive heat due to climate change. Changing the definition of drought doesn’t change the weather and her 2017 paper with P.B. Gibson[2] was an exercise in scientific peak-nonsense. It seems the once prestigious Journal Nature will publish anything these days.
Basking in his own limelight, the former fire-chief Greg Mullins believes the government can make it rain. As Commissioner from 2003 to 2017 Mullins can’t escape the fact that he oversaw the massive build-up of understory fuel loads now resulting in wildfire. Maybe while strutting the world stage as Chair of this, President of that, Director of something else he forgot that summers are hot and often dry in eastern Australia and given the right conditions, accumulated fuel is an environmental time-bomb!
Victoristan is no different. I expect the state to pretty much go up in flames if we do finally get some summer heat.
210
When guvuhmint is in charge, cloud-tower rule from above the fray all the way… (like the EU.)
60
The Gippsland fires in Eastern Victoria
Are due to exactly this nonsensical thinking.
Utter idiocy by the bureaucracies.
Driven by a Greenist ideology.
200
Yes, but we must be mindful of the environment and that it is being saved for future generations by leaving management to nature in accordance with UN Agenda 21 now 30, Sustainability.
For example, the vast areas of grasslands in the Snowy Mountains high country that the first white settlers discovered, areas managed by the Australian Aborigines, have been returned to nature and are becoming choked with undergrowth including blackberry bushes, nature is wonderful, ask the Greens and other environmentalists.
sarc.
80
Nature is the very cruellest of mothers.
00
The only upside to the actions of the land management numpties is that once its burnt, it wont burn again for a long time….
However, manslaughter charges could be in the mix should human deaths occur , if negligence was proven….
60
That would never happen. Climate change is your get out of jail card that works without fail. See Dilbert: https://dilbert.com/.
40
I respectfully disagree…even with high temps, these mean nothing if there is nothing to burn….
40
Not many fires in the desert. Hot and dry
Nearly all the recent fire area was unkempt National Parks and State Forests.
And land backing onto those area.
Surprise, surprise..
If you build a bonfire, and it gets lit, it burns.
41
Some sort of liability should be place on the Rural Fire Service chiefs who set fire to the bush at Bell (Blue Mtn) recently. (See RFS “Fires Near Me”).
That area has not seen fire since ’94 and is deep with leaves, sticks and fallen trunks. The fire soon charged off towards Mt Wilson, jumping the road and causing all sorts of problems in that community. Then it raced down the valley towards Berambing and Mt Tomah. Due to very poor information sharing we in the voluntary brigades were unable to be of much use. I got caught away from home on a truck. By the time I’d fixed a lift home, my wife had had a heart attack with the dis-stress of facing an apocalyptic scenario on her own. Numerous houses burned down including my mud-brick shed containing many trade tools. Now the fire is south of the main road and we have a far worse situation than if we’d left the big Wollemi fire trickle southwards towards us.
The impression I get is that RFS Fire Control is totally out of depth and trying to make decisions based upon information in an air-conditioned office in a city. Anyone on the ground in the Blue Mtns would have known not to put even more fire on the ground in these conditions. Millions of dollars worth of damage has resulted. I’ve lost over $100k and the trees, wildlife and top soil have been incinerated. My daughter’s in-laws house is now just a tin roof lying in a pile of ash and we all then have to pay higher insurance premiums to cover the mega pay-outs.
It’s time for a replacement of the RFS chiefs and a serious look at changing how we manage our ecology and human habitat.
00
Indeed , not just Victoria , so much of Aussie land is a bbq waiting to happen .
Driving any where in our country but especially in hills or more wooded areas is beautiful but worrying at the same time .
It only takes a child or childish mind to strike a match and cause devastation to so many .
60
Off topic yet on topic:
Breaking News (yeah right)
https://www.spaceweather.com
268th day with no sunspots!
(2008 had 268 days with no sunspots)
Sunday the 15th of December could be a record-breaker – forget the UN’s Cosmic Debris nonsense, it’s the cosmic rays we gotta look out for.
Should we panic now? Welcome to the future (again).
30
Not much you can do about your exposure to GCRs — except, maybe, wear a tin-foil hat 🙂
They’re at their highest since the start of Space Age. Last year and this year have been very cloudy — the Svensmark Effect in action. The solar minimum is almost over, so we should be starting to see new sunspots very soon now.
10
GCRs create atmospheric ion trails — which lightning follows. This may help explain the November fires
00
Perhaps a scientist could do a study into how many areas get burned by wildfire one year and again the next year or even a couple of years later. If an area has been burned by wildfire one year, there will be little or no fuel to burn the next year so low risk of fire.
110
So true.
The RFA an the Forestry people are burning the buggery out of the State Forests, National Parks, Wildlife Reserves, Nature Reserves and all the other trendy sounding reserves down here around Batemans Bay in NSW.
They’re doing what they were prevented from doing in the cooler months of the last two decades by the stupidity of the green policies and cowardice of the green sucking Liberal and Labor politicians in NSW.
The Kings Highway has been closed for around two weeks. It just now reopened at 3.36 pm today. The Princes Highway has just reopened after two weeks of closure due to the fires. Businesses are going belly-up because nobody can get into the joint without making a 4-5 hours diversion through Cooma and Bega along the worst piece of Highway in Australia – the Snowy Mountain Highway – which has just one very short (800 metres) of overtaking lane in a distance of some 100 kilometres. Madness.
I also have to say that the Bill Johnston photo above (the first one) is spot on. It is typical of the Moruya State forest but understates the seriousness of all (yes all) the National Parks down around the south coast of NSW. They are in worse shape. Of course, that doesn’t include the ones that have had the guts burnt out of them over the past three weeks. 🙂
231
Sam, I raise this idea from time to time, but it seems people who have had businesses damaged and livelihoods damaged by these likely preventable fires, need to sue the green infested councils in a class action for lack of exercise of proper land management…..once they realise they can be taken to task, the game will change.
140
Both my Dad and his brother are old timber millers from the NE of Vic, both used to volunteer for the CFA in the day. They both agree that the current crop of central controllers is doing just that! They are evacuating and letting the bush burn until nature puts a halt to the madness. Dad was a very young kid in 39 on the Rose River but he can remember the streams of men marching into the bush to fight a far worse fire with nothing more than burlap bags and fire rakes. You look at the news feed today and there are plenty of clean trucks and clean overalls in view. Look for the ones actually working and they are thin on the ground.
60
Rose river valley is Gods country but not a place to be if a wildfire goes through .
10
WA knows how to fix bushfires – take a look at this graph (from this site!):
https://www.google.com/search?q=wa+bushfire+graph&safe=active&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBAU873AU873&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiPnoKDibLmAhWQzDgGHS3SDGsQ_AUoAXoECA0QAw&biw=1366&bih=657#imgrc=N3zbdidX0zQZaM:
After a bad year for bushfires in 1959, WA ramped up their prescribed burn rate, and as a result had few bushfires until 1996!I reckon even a politician can understand it!
PS: Well done Boris, good riddance to crazy commo Corbyn.
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I read some time ago that Western Australia has adopted the indigenous seasonal burning management but of course utilising modern technology coupled to the traditional method of patch burning over several years rotation patch by patch.
40
Exactly the graph I keep repeating:
Too much fuel causes extreme bush fires, not climate change
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/11/but-werent-solar-panels-supposed-to-stop-bushfires/
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/10/california-maybe-prescribed-burns-once-every-500-years-are-not-enough/
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/09/its-a-science-emergency-how-many-fires-can-australia-stop-with-solar-panels-and-windfarms/
No, WA is not copying Aboriginal practices, and the experts at Bushfirefront.org.au like Roger Underwood have decades of experience in managing Forest.
Underwood says that WA should be burning twice as much each year.
So that’s a 12 year rotation in WA, which should be a 6 year rotation. Burning about 15% of the area every single year appears to be what indigenous management did in California by the way.
My understanding is that Aboriginal fire management was much faster rotation than just one in twelve years.
130
According to the experts, deliberately lit fires were and are the main source of fires from 2000 on. Hard to see how controlled burns would work in that environment
https://aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/tbp/downloads/tbp027_05_wa.pdf
011
I was told just minutes ago that bushfires around Taree NSW were lit by local young indigenous people, one group chased by the police on foot and the boys were on bicycles, it is not known if they were caught.
One fire definitely and suspected two others.
My informant lives on a large property with Horses and had a neighbouring property house burnt down south of Taree and Old Bar.
50
yep – Purfleet is notorious
12
So none ever committed arson before the year 2000 ? Verrrrrrryyyyy interesting .
40
main source, not only
02
Mis-direction again, so funny
Most of the fires discussed there are small urban and metropolitan fires.
Of course they mostly start on private land. DOH !
Its when fires get into lock-up neglected inaccessible State Forests and National Parks, with large fuel load, that the intensity and size of the fires makes them uncontrollable.
71
What kind of superstitious nonsense is required to think that fire behaviour is determined by ignition source? I keep saying that Fitz is a cultist, and he keeps proving me correct.
For the record, human ignition has been a source of fire for as long as we’ve been using it.
Escaped campfire.
Hunting fires.
Embers dropped from fire bundles carried by travellers.
Fire stick farming and clearing.
Fires lit by cinders falling from steam engines.
Static discharges from agricultural machinery drive belts. (I attended a fire from this cause only last week)
Careless smokers.
Catalytic converters under cars..
How long does the bloody list have to be?
Fuel management is not intended to make ignition impossible. Its function is to make fires slower, less intense, more controllable and less lethal.
It does all that, as has been confirmed by repeated scientific observation and empirical measurement.
70
Peter, hmmm. Could be arsonists will always be with us, you think? So the question is, will they cause more or less death and catastrophe if we a/ reduce fuel loads with repeat cool burns, or b/ do no forest management.
So should we manage forests ourselves or let random teenagers do it instead with unstoppable firestorms that leap firebreaks, roads, and rivers?
When you figure out how to make a World Without Arsonists then get back to me and tell me how you plan to stop lightning, OK?
60
Yes, in the Kimberley Region and Kakadu NT
https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/traditional-kimberley-burn-project-reveals-wildfire-impact-reduction-ng-ya-104015
30
Jo,
My personal experience in the Top End around the uranium province and Tennant Creek areas of the NT strongly supported Aborigine fire practices as opportunistic, spur of the moment actions to make game easier to catch. There was no evidence put before me over 25 years of observations to indicate long term management plans like fire rotation on a 4 year basis.
What was obvious was widespread writing of academic papers and encouragement for the locals to go along with the re-writing of Aboriginal capability, like telling of stories that persisted for many generations.
It might have been different in other regions or with different players, so I have never put these observations into a social science paper. I did, however, sail close to the wind several times when calling out a couple of Federal Aboriginal Affairs Ministers for claiming such fiction as fact; and taking some to Court for not acting according to their enabling Acts. Geoff S
20
See if this photo link works.
It shows the fire at Dudley at the end of 2013 which threatened an old people’s home at Redhead.
From Bar Beach car park the fire is about 5 miles off but was very close to built up areas.
This, and the slightly earlier fire at Glenrock were unprecedented and solely due to mismanagement by LMSC, NCC HDWBd and National Parks and Wildlife.
https://mobile.twitter.com/MattCarrNH/status/392934895648919552/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E392934895648919552&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.illawarramercury.com.au%2Fstory%2F1859128%2Fhero-firefighters-save-nsw-from-catastrophe%2F
Following discussion on here a few days ago I walked around the Glenrock/Mudering Gully area that had been razed six years ago and took some photos.
But it’s all about the money saved by the institutions above who put off the maintenance.
Where did the cash go?
KK
110
Looks frightening, Keith. Fire is something you have to run from if you can’t fight it or prevent it. And the wholesale abandonment of good fire prevention practice is something I’ll never understand.
90
It depends on what the green infested councils are trying to achieve.
One thing I have learned is the greenies think long term, like 40 years.
Imagine sonething with intelligent, evil intent, but patient. Block all attempts to hazard reduction burn for 40 years. Then when the inevitable wild fires vome, blame it on UN-backed climate change, and offer UN promoted solutions.
The hard core greenies have been hijacked, it seems by communism. As such, given communists are good at setting up “sleeper cells” inside society, Soviet style, this stuff looks circumstantial until you realize its likely been planned all along, but over a time scale long enough to make it look a unique event.
Evil is evil, you need to understand your opposition to defeat them.
150
I’m sometimes hard pressed to have any conviction that significant numbers of people even know they have an opposition they ought to understand.
10
Keith if you head north from Bulahdelah NSW using the old Pacific Highway the drive passes through National Park areas choked with fallen timber and leaves, undergrowth and climbing vines covering the tree tops in many places.
I do not know if that was burnt recently when there were many bushfires in the area and north to Taree and beyond. But the lack of management is typical of many parts of New South Wales that I have visited.
60
Got any data on fuel loads?
06
Got any brains.
02
It is an honest question. There is lot of talk about fuel loads but I have not been able to find any data. I was hoping someone has spotted some.
00
In the 2018 fire west of Mackay that burned farms and forest and to within a few metres of the Eungella Chalet, volunteers with the RFS took a bulldozer on a low loader 45km up the Pioneer Valley to the Teemburra State Forest to help clear fire trails. Unfortunately they couldn’t find the fire trails. They were so overgrown they could not be seen.
290
The situation here is South Australia is interesting.
We all got a huge fright in 2009 when Black Saturday happened in Victoria.
Frankly by some fluke the bullet passed us by & and instead torched Kinglake, Strathewan, St Andrews etc.
And since then some of the various bureaucracies have increased hazard reduction burns.
But still we have dopey Greenist ‘conservationists’ blathering on about preserving nature & wildlife by not doing it.
They want to live & build in the bush because of it’s beauty.
And ignore the fire risks completely blaming the fires on “Global Warming”.
And they have a strong voice on social media.
220
When an organization or bureaucracy with responsibility for fire management gets it wrong or neglects its duty it is so convenient and PC acceptable to blame climate change. These people in times past having screwed up would have blamed witches instead.
190
Not much better around Victoriastan with track closures etc and fuel loads .
80
No to mention the 70,000 Ha of public bushland set to be locked away by politicians with another 1 million Ha proposed under National Parks management.
Bush Users Group United, B.U.G.U. have protested this from 2017, imagine the fuel loads then?
Agenda 21 anyone?
140
Dan the Man’s Agenda Stupid more like it. It’s just a pity none of them can ever be held accountable.
120
Dan appears to be UN-compatible.
The UN is a communist organization, ergo…
Interestingly, Dangerous Dans’ awful legacy wont be the power issues, but his “progressive agenda” of what appears to be deluberate moral corruption and confusion of a whole generation of innocents, through what appear to be marxist-inspired programs like the infamous trojan horse “Safeschools” program ….
50
Love song to those who are not so lovable…
My heart burns with desire;
I’ll be a fuel for you darling.
Not! 🙁
01
A spring fire threatened Taree back in the 1920s. The local temp was reported as being 104F…in the second week of October!
We can’t leave wilderness/regrowth country unmanaged. It’s hard once the economic imperative is gone, but if we want bush, we manage it. Living tiny in smart cities while abandoning the bush will just mean a regime of fire and ferals. If they think they can fix that by dialing back to a previous climate they won’t find a suitable climate in the last few centuries.
Maybe go full Jurassic? There’s your prob: all the wet times were hot times. Don’t go cooler, climate botherers, unless you like smoke.
150
We had proper forestry management 40 years ago brought in overtime to manage the hot fires previously endured
Once the this new norm was established, it was accepted.
Then the next goldfish environmental generation wanted to revert back to nature
Neville wran created a swathe of new national parks in NSW aa well as
environmental protection areas, stopped maintain fire trails etc etc
Now the new norm is 40years of fuel load build up and hot fires during this natural climatic cycle.
The gold fish brains within the Gangrenes want point the finger at everyone and everything except their own stupidity.
When will this rot end?
I doubt it will be with the next generation as they have been dumbed down by the education system and the liberal touchy feely policies of the loony left
All we have left is the Gretin Cretins
Still the landslide in Britain for their conservatives gives me hope.
In the end people vote what is best for their hip pocket nerve.
Ever higher electricity prices, job losses, stagnant wage rises and decreasing standard of living will provide the opportunity for a backlash by the voters
Probably not far away, then just need a strong man to appear.
As the old saying goes, cometh the hour, cometh the man.
210
Good one.
20
For Britain in 1979, after 5 years of the most appallingly incompetent and union dominated Labour
govt, it was a case of “cometh the woman”.
120
I understand that greenism in GB has resulted in canals and other stormwater drainage have been left without maintenance for a very long time and resulting in flooding that when they were managed had been avoided?
40
It happened in Newcastle as well.
Clogged drains.
Reduces costs.
Leaves more for fact finding trips by councillors.
KK
40
As I said before let nature its course and let it burn to clear the undergrowth. It has happened many times in past before this country was colonised. Trying to control all the fires and perform clearings everywhere is hopeless. The focus should be on keeping people away from danger and protecting as many significant structures as possible.
91
Even in the 60,000 years before colonisation the locals had to defend themselves against the ravages of bushfires. You can imagine the shear terror of eucalypts crowning, with the only escape being caves or rivers.
In a contemporary context, how do you feel about reducing the size of National Parks?
91
40,000 years and even then the current “inhabitants” may not be able to lay claim to having been here then. Still, whoever was here, 60 or 40,000 is a long time.
51
There is evidence that humans were living around Lake Mungo 40,000 years ago, but a minimum of 65,000 years BP for the first entry to the continent.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22968
21
Yes, but not our current inhabitants who arrived later, but even so 10,000 years is a long time.
My point was that various racial groups have arrived here and the current indigenes are almost certainly not related to the original inhabitants as is often claimed.
50
The fuzzy wuzzy Tasmanians may have had Denisovan genes.
Of course the Indian immigrants fleeing climate change 4000 years ago brought new technology to the top end, but its debatable whether that was transmitted throughout the continent.
10
KK I have had the pleasure of travelling pretty much all round and through a fair bit of Australia and from what I’ve seen and heard I think you’re pretty much on the money .
The locals in some spots refer to the rock paintings and petroglyphs as being done by the old people who were here before us .
One ranger near Innamincka that we talked to had photos and stories about an ancient race nearby that had engraved shapes in iron stone that he claimed predated Mungo .
Not sure anyone will know for sure though unless concrete evidence is found although I’m still keeping an eye on the Warrnambool dig which puts man in the area about 100,000 years ago .
But the find is lacking in artefacts just what’s believed to be a campfire .
30
c. 40000 YA is when the Neanderthals went extinct in the Northern Hemisphere and the Australian Megafauna went extinct in the Southern. It was a very cold time and GCRs were at an all time high. Planetary magnetic field strenght was only 25% of normal.
Not a good time.
To add injury to insult, 39,000 YA Campi Flegrei erupted. Ooh: nasty. Definitely not a good time.
30
From https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsta.1976.0048:
30
National Parks are an example of Orwellian thinking. They are meant to be for everyone yet there is much restricted access. How about agencies being honest and call them Banned Parks or something.
160
“The Wastelands”
40
** chuckle **
That sums it up perfectly.
10
The aim under UN Agenda 21 and Rewilding, is to ultimately lock humans out of 90% of the land on earth.
Hypothetically, the blue UN beret may be as much a symbol of illegal occupation and subversion of our Sovereign laws. It puts the UN “peacekeeping” mandate in a new light….and those locals who have aided abetted such things as Collaborators.
40
Kings, philosopher and otherwise ever liked to manage the land and all that lay therein. In England the Royal Forest Charter established for hunting by William the Conqueror, irrespective of prior rights, is a case in point. By the time of Henry 11 I/3 of England was subject to the Charter.
While history doesn’t repeat itself exactly, power play has its parallels. Take a look at that Agenda 21 massive land grab by the UN, a 389 page detailed blue print for a new globalist resources-based, resources -controlled land seizure, for example, the UN-designed Wildlands Project, a master plan of Agenda 21, that is part of the design to transform land from public ownership to large tracts of no-go wilderness managed by technocrats, each eco-area protected by buffer zones and with designated corridors linking human habitation areas. In the United States, in 1993, the Clinton Administration adopted the Agenda 21 Wildlands Project Plan and here it is, easily available on the internet.
http://allnewspipeline.com/images/UN_SimulationMap21.jpg
Agenda 21, Chapter 7, Promoting human settlement development , is the program design whereby almost everybody is to be herded into cities for sustainable development. A framework for strengthening management recommended at 7.16. is the ‘United Nations Development Programme /World Bank/United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) Urban Management Programme (UMP), Its coverage should be extended to all interested countries during the period 1993- 2000.’
An allied program to the UN Habitat Sustainable Cities Programme is ICLEI the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. Section 7.21. Agenda 21, specifically recommends involvement with ICLEI, not surprising since ICLEI was responsible for preparing the Local Council section of Agenda 21.
A lot of local councils have already adopted Agenda 21 initiatives under names like ‘A Greener City.’ What these programs envisage is a way of life in cities across four domains of ecology, economics, politics and culture, the sustainable city that will feed itself with a sustainable reliance on surrounding countryside, power itself with renewable energy and produce the smallest conceivable ecological footprint and climate change impact. In my home town in OZ, the Melbourne City Council is already on board with new building codes for sustainable development. More high-rise development along public transport systems, punitive rates charges on single dwellings, bike zones on main roads and controls on energy use, twin planks of technocrat control, land use and energy , item 7.3, in their Greening City Policy.
30
When he was our Prime Minister Tony Abbott was asked about creating more National Park areas and he replied, noting his years of experience as a volunteer fire fighter, that we have too many already and managing them is unaffordable.
150
The aim about park creation is to lock up land so it cant be used by humans. Its nothing to do with parks.
I suspect even the Landcare programs have ties back to the UN via NGOs….one of ghe big thngs with landcare was targetting waterways.
40
I had a wry laugh recently. The local Landcare group made a big thing of planting loads of little native plants near the river in the middle of our village. Along came a storm a little while back and a huge eucalyptus tree fell all over them!
Said middle of the village is another flammable hazard…
50
OS,
In 1986 we took the Fed Environment minister to Court when they tried to use the UN world heritage scam to lock up our valid mineral leases in the Top End following our Ranger uranium discovery in 1969.
These days I lament the loss of the fire in the belly that has led to communism spreading through lack of fierce resistance. Geoff S
40
Maintaining “the bush” in a safe and manageable way will obviously cost significant funds.
Now, if the ABC was sold off, that would leave a billion dollars a year that could be used for the purpose of making the Australian bush somewhat safer from these intense bushfires.
This would be an infinitely better use of those funds.
262
Yes.
70
Andy
The ABC is an multi awarded pay Tv and radio network that we can never unsubscribe from. It is compulsory for every taxpayer to fund their subscription with an $83 dollar compulsory payment pa.
I propose that we should have the option to opt out of our compulsory subscription to the ABC.
We could do that by ticking a box on our tax return to decline our compulsory ABC subscription.
You would save $83 dollars pa that could be used to spend on a media source you choose, that is impartial, informative, inclusive, one that challenges you and is not full of ignorant, divisive, extremist, propagandist, left wing presenters.
If you believe the ABC is none of the above.. you don’t need to tick the box.
Simples
80
William x.
How about a box on the tax form that asks if you would like to direct that money to either
a. The ABC or
b. RFS for bushfire fuel load control.
What do you think the outcome would be? 😉
91
From BoM, no change in rainfall in Australia since 1900.
Is warming supposed to increase rainfall or cause more droughts?
Annual rainfall Australia
Annual rainfall Murray Darling Basin
Annual rainfall NSW
Annual rainfall WA
It’s not a climate emergency.
110
Well whadayaknow. From the BOM.
“Positive IOD events are often associated with a more severe fire season for southeast Australia.”
IOD values have gradually weakened since their peak of +2.1 °C in mid-October. However, the latest weekly value of +0.9 °C is still well above the positive IOD threshold value of +0.4 °C.
. . . cooler than average waters in the eastern Indian Ocean have now returned to near-average sea surface temperatures.
Seems help is on the way, but not just yet.
80
Not according to the current map
IOD has been going negative. We are getting more warmer water off WA now for weeks. Including in the Tasman, right conditiond for ECLs if the ridge collapses.
20
I’m not a fan of the BOM but isn’t that what they just said? Not many weeks either by the way.
All the action in the Indian has been in the north and west. Southern India and Sri Lanka were still getting monsoon falls 2 weeks ago. Madagascar had a cyclone about a week ago, as did the Horn of Africa (rain depression). There were actually 4 tropical lows in the Indian 2 weeks ago, all a long way from Oz unfortunately.
There has been cold water off WA and south of Indonesia for months, but the SST really heated up between WA and Indonesia about a week ago. It was sitting on 32 deg at one stage, but then it cooled again to about 28-29. Still above cyclone formation threshold of course.
For a more detailed picture of SSTs than Weatherzone you need to go here. Click to enlarge. Even now you’ll see lots of relatively cool water.
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/ocean/
You will note the Anomaly 7-Day Change off WA has cooled again, still, things are on the move as you say. The signs are very promising. A cyclone in the new year?
20
Wet season on the way up North !
But continuing dry here in SA !
30
The only “hot spot” is east of New Zealand,
thanks to el gordo’s blocking high 🙂
and possibly the Louisville Seamount submarine volcano chain re-awakening (?) or maybe that’s where all the Warmunists’ theoretical “missing heat” is hiding…
20
The greed blob wants the trees to burn. After all, if they weren’t burnt, humans might be able use them to do useful and meaningful things. Like build houses, furniture, and other things useful for living on earth. Yet, when they burn, they also cause the burning of houses, furniture, and other useful things made out of wood. As well as kill people and other living things who can’t escape the fire storms.
Don’t look at what “they” say, look at what they do and at the inevitable consequences of what they do. That will expose their true motivation.
120
Example Tasmania where State Forests set aside for sustainable logging for the timber industry were handed to National Parks by Labor Green government resulting in businesses closing and jobs lost and community economies ruined.
The Abbott led Government together with the Coalition Government in Tasmania that replaced Labor Green tried to have State Forests reinstated but could not get UN cooperation. UN the decision makers and not our elected representatives? Well that’s where Australia stands with so many UN treaties and agreements signed over the past 70 years or so. And the resulting implementation by our governments including the tangle of red and green tape protecting the UN based agendas.
60
The Abbott led Government and the Newman led LNP Government in Queensland did managed to overturn Labor’s Wild Rivers legislation that blocked development including new dams and irrigation farmland development that are LNP policy, to extend the Ord River WA irrigation area across the north through the NT and NQ. And area identified by the CSIRO about the area of Western Europe, just add water.
50
So then, who in effect is now in control of our land?
20
There are stats for how fires start but I’ve never seen stats for where they start , how many in national parks ,how many on private property etc etc .
Would be interesting to know !
90
In NSW
https://aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/tbp/downloads/tbp027_05_wa.pdf
70% on private land (page 22)
IN Vic
https://aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/tbp/downloads/tbp027_03_vic.pdf
Similar (page 50)
04
Unfortunately, Peter, I don’t think you could have understood the two reports you referenced.
Page 22 in your first link relates to WA not NSW.
Neither of the report answers Robert’s question:
Page 50 in your second link doesn’t distinguish between public and private land.
Both reports are useless from that perspective.
90
Thanks Sam you saved me from another one of poiters links that go nowhere and are useless .
30
Fitz doesn’t understand fires or fire reporting, either.
1. Each fire records as a single incident, whether it is a rubbish-Bin alight or 250,000ha and 500 burnt homes.
2. The population and work density is far higher on private land. There are no headers in NPs. No haystacks, no angle-grinders and bugger-all mowers….. so far fewer ignition sources.
3…. Fitz’ own stat shows that despite all of the additional threats, with 70% of the land in NSW, and 70% of the fires…… private land fires are lower in number than you would expect.
20
Those percentage are mostly on account of small fires starting in the urban metropolitan areas which are a very large proportion of number of fires.
Of course a large proportion of urban metropolitan area fires start on private property.
DOH !
If you had read them, you would know that.
Or did you read them, and were attempting a deceitful mis-direction again ?
21
Two days ago I found a good video on the basics of how bushland that has been growing unfettered for a long time can be changed into lower fire risk landscape. I’ve linked to timecode 7:20 which has about 2 minutes most relevant to our situation. (Only their topic “5” is relevant, but feel free to watch the whole thing if you’ve got a spare 12 minutes.)
https://youtu.be/AvhC4z4w3G0?t=440
The two main steps are:
1) Physical removal of fuel where possible, such as removal of a percentage of trees of particular species and thinning of understory and undergrowth, especially near fire breaks.
2) Prescribed burning to reduce fuel load.
The joke is that landscapes with too much dead fuels accumulated due to the overuse of fire suppression are described as having a 1965-era approach to fire management. By the Americans. Ouch.
You guys are always so mean in saying the Greens just want to take us back to the stone age. Well, you couldn’t be more wrong! This video proves they do not want to take us back to the stone age. Only back to 1965! 😀
71
1965? That makes sense. Hippies started infesting state government departments as well as the universities about then…they are now senior managment and heads of department at the universities now.
30
USA Greenist stuff.
Utterly irrelevant to Australia on both counts..
30
So was there ever a time we didn’t have bad bush fires because we kept fuel loads low ?
And how much is a raging crown fire affected by the removal of ground level fuel in a cool controlled burn ?
41
‘So was there ever a time we didn’t have bad bush fires because we kept fuel loads low ?’
Apparently there seems to be evidence in Western Australia that hazard reduction lowered the number of bush fires during that period it was employed (but I believe that policy has lapsed in recent years).
‘And how much is a raging crown fire affected by the removal of ground level fuel in a cool controlled burn ?’
Once a crowning fire gets started and with strong winds forcing it – no. However low fuel loads may help the fire not to start up badly in the first instance.
90
Ian…
Even crown fires are mostly not self- sustaining without pre-heating from ground fuels…
Also, our family lost an old home in the Ash Wednesday fires of 83. We recovered a history of the old place, and there were a lot of fires in its history, but they tapered off severely after WW2. Thirty years later……..
10
The reality is we cannot stop bush fires because the bush is always ……well there.
The best benefit to reducing fuel loads in populated areas in my view is to enhance safe travel and escape of people, emergency personnel and animals.
60
and let the bush fires take their natural course. It’s nature’s way of clearing the accumulated fuel and promoting regrowth. Has been happening for thousands of years so why stop it? It’s like stopping climate change – NOT POSSIBLE so is a total waste of time, money and energy. Lunatics are in control in some agencies but I suspect not for long come the civil unrest that’s eventually going to surface as the left keep pushing and shoving their nonsense under our noses and turn to violence as a last resort to promote their evil agenda.
50
Definitely clear around trails, road, houses and infrastructure.
I have tall eucalypt forest behind my house which goes down to Lane Cove National park.
It hasn’t burnt in at least 40 years, and I can’t really see the worth in the cost of burning every few years.
I personally am happy to be able to prepare my own property for a fire and let the bush do what it wants to.
There is just too much to try to control and tame it all.
In this day and age of litigation and OHS, you can’t just start a fire to let it burn out, to reduce fuel load, it is now more of a expensive undertaking.
22
If was sitting in Lane Cove knowing all that would be bought to bear if I fire ever happened I would fell pretty relaxed about it to. Other in more exposed areas will readily see the worth in controilled burns, especially those that have see the alternative.
30
I agree George, fire can be managed only in limited areas, so the proper response is protect your property however you must before a fire.
IMO, completely ignore human-hating greenie political twerps, completely ignore the whining hard-core green activist vermin, completely ignore the useless as tits on a bull State Govt ‘regulators’ threats. The politicians and their agents would happily allow your family home burn down if just to increase the level of hysteria within the media whilst pretending to ‘care’. But they will use their agencies to threatening your life with ruin, if you dare lift a finger to help yourself. Or if you don’t allow the political stains to faux-‘care’ for you and faux-‘help’ you, while actually insisting on doing nothing but endangering your lot further. The politician’s whole aim is to never waste a crisis as that’s the best time to claim draconian authorities, and to usurp the land owners right to defend themselves and their property and lord it over everyone.
40
There is something very wrong with the Climate Change causes bushfires story.
Firstly a temperature increase of a tiny 1.2C over 100 years does not cause bushfires. That’s absurd.
CO2 has gone up 50% in 100 years and whatever the reason, our problem in Australia is with bushfires and how the prevent them and stop them.
Demanding that people stop eating hamburgers is surreal. Blaming the Prime Minister is ridiculous.
As well as that is the fact that the increase in CO2 is demonstrably perfectly natural anyway, caused by slightly higher ocean surface temperatures.
I think that is why the ABC has backed off. Claiming that ‘Climate Change’ causes bushfires is not only wrong, it is beyond logic, indefensible and insensitive and uncaring nonsense.
We live in a country devastated by droughts and flooding rains and bushfires. Doing nothing about any of these things in the last 50 years is our urgent political problem, not the increase in tiny CO2.
After 12 Royal Commissions, can our governments please do what they have been told to do? Not once did a Royal Commission blame failure to act on Climate Change.
And can someone tell Daniel Andrews he needs to act fast in Victoria. Or do we wait for the fires, count the dead and then have a Royal Commission? Again.
A land of droughts and flooding rains and bushfires. Not an ‘angry summer’ but an angry population fed up with lazy uncaring absurd politicians who care more about gay rights and polar bears and black throated finches and Grim Greta and welcome to the country ceremonies than the safety of the people they were elected to serve.
The British, American and Australian elections should be a warning to the lazy political classes of uncaring professional politicians in Federal, State and Councils, the people have had enough. Do your jobs or lose them.
140
Since the Andrew’s led Labor Government took office in Victoria, a couple of years ago there was a bushfire in Gippsland including in a National Park, a friend of mine was helping move cattle to a roadway to be loaded onto a truck, to get to the truck they had to be driven across National Park land. A couple of government officers blocked their way by locking a gate and ordering the cattlemen to keep off the National Park land.
Of course the cattlemen ignored the government people who were outraged.
70
No TdeF the ABC will never give up the extreme left view on climate –
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-14/bushfire-emergency-reveals-scott-morrisons-leadership-failure/11797826
They just use different reporters .
70
Yes a classic image by Bill Johnston -Fire trail or fire trap?
Note the dead tree, that must be left- by a left directive now. I was a resident of NSW many years ago. The area we lived in is basically unrecognizable today. My parents purchased a home, the property comprise of a deep gull the end of a spur, according to local history there had been properties burnt out at the top of the spur, when bush land likely extended from it. The home we purchased would not have existed.
We asked the local bush fire chief to give us advice. His advice straight away was to cut down the dead hollow trees. Many do know they become roman candles a can seed further fires.
Follow this and weep. there are two embedded audio’s
Steve Price and Matt Kean go head-to-head on climate change
After Steve ripped into the Environment Minister for linking Sydney’s smoke haze to climate change yesterday, Mr Kean has doubled down on his views.
https://www.2gb.com/steve-price-and-matt-kean-go-head-to-head-on-climate-change/
80
Minister Keane is a Liberal In Name Only leftist and an accountant, obviously not across the portfolio of energy and environment.
50
About that “fire trail” that worked:
Had workers gone through and sprayed water on the left (green) side? Also, lower left shows some clearing. Was that done as the fire approached, or sometime before?
They should turn goats into those brushy areas and clear out the low stuff – – “fire ladders.” There are mechanical means, but goats are quieter.
60
Goats? In fire prone dry VIctoria famers have agisted cattle in forest mountain areas in summer for far more than a century. This is now illegal. You are not even allowed pick up sticks without a permit. The extreme Green communist government state government blames farmers for Climate Change. And for bushfires. If the bushfires do not drive the farmers out, We are probably not far from a Green ban on farming.
110
And after white settlers discovered the grasslands in the high country they continued the seasonal burning tradition to maintain the grasslands.
Since the ban on grazing those areas are becoming overgrown and choked with blackberry bushes and other fire hazard material, my friends who have grazed cattle there all their lives and still ride horses there have told me, volunteer fire fighters as well.
80
Yeah i think enough is enough with greenies trying to ban farming…..i guess wecwill all starce to death.
I predict ( but sincerely hope it doesnt ) get ugly one day….someone will take a greenie council or hard core greenies to task, and it will likely kick off. Thing is, they wont be able to lock up everyone. Interestingky, most schools now have 2m high spiked fences by way of govt donation…now why is that?
10
When goats breed up in numbers they certainly do have an impact on low vegetation but are now culled out of National Parks in Vic.
We actually have been using the NSW helicopter and (operators) designed specifically for aerial culling .
20
The deer are eating the goats out of house and home around my way
50
There is a reason for that , Victoriastan won’t declare deer as an invasive species and these days they are pretty much everywhere throughout our state .
30
Robert….
Calling deer names doesn’t do much to deter them.
Some friends and I removed 400 from the environment over the last two seasons.
It’s called “hunting” and it’s banned in most National Parks. Just another example of how locking people out of the environment is harming, not helping.
It’s a tossup whether NPWS stands for “Pests and Weeds” or “Sparks and Wildfires.”
50
In NSW they have R licences for huntingn in parks…
20
In NSW there is no recreational hunting in National Parks other than a tiny “trial” that seems to have had more observers than hunters. The R-Licence is only for State Forests.
It was intended to cover National Parks, but the Premier who agreed to it welshed on the deal when the Greens made a fuss.
In Victoria, hunting is allowed in many State Forests and – in a restricted form – some parts of the Alpine National Park.
Most NPs are protected breeding areas for deer, and declaring them “pests” is nothing but gesture-politics.
10
Even Parks want them listed as noxious vermin , if the classification changed years back maybe just maybe the numbers may have been kept low enough to make an impact .
The classification changes who can hunt deer legally on public land except most national parks .
Vic and tassie are the only two states still listing them as game animals .
00
Venison is delicious. Can you hunt/control the deer?
30
Yes it is ok Sophocles and free range .
00
Same as ours
10
We have a long history of disastrous unintended consequences of using introduced feral species to control other species in Australia. No one’s interested in repeating that again, John.
30
Around this area
“After 30 years of failed climate politics, let’s try science!”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/12/13/after-30-years-of-failed-climate-politics-lets-try-science/
20
that’s what the UN wants people to think it’s doing.
10
It’s been interesting who the alarmist media go to for expert commentary on the fires. I would’ve thought that Andy Pitman would’ve been the go to man on fires because of its relationship with drought . I suspect that even though he attempted to walk away from his clear and unambiguous comments that global warming does not cause drought I would think that under the pressure of TV cameras he may be reticent to lie under the spot light. He has been noticeably missing as an expert during the fires.
If one looks at the temperatures in Australia the fires have not been associated with particularly warm and dangerously hot weather ( except for 1 or 2 days) which would indicate to me it is fuel not global warming that’s the culprit. Even though the weather this Sping and summer in Australia has been not as hot as normal ( especially in Victoria) the BOM will miraculously declare 2019 to be one of the hottest years ever.
50
Former Greens Leader Bob Brown and the fairies at the bottom of his garden in Tasmania said to be where Greens go for advice?
30
Greens are pretend conservationists. They do nothing genuine to help the environment like volunteering to clean up rubbish, remove weeds from national parks, help care for injured native animals, help fight fires, donate money or labour to conservation charities etc.. Like all other Leftists, they just destroy.
70
Look at their attitude towards Tony Abbott’s Green Army, an initiative that was doing actual conservation and environmental management but because of the Greens intense hatred for anything that remotely resembles conservatism and of course Abbott Abbott Abbott!! it was derided as ineffective by the left and the MSM.
I honestly believe many would reject a cure for cancer on their death beds if it was found by a conservative.
70
They opposed Abbott’s direct action on climate change as well, iniatives that would not undermine economic prosperity.
30
Turnbull organised the budget razor gang, the Expenditure Review Committee, to end the Green Army. A spiteful act by a hollow man.
60
OFF TOPIC
Ha Ha, look how the Elites are driving in luxury cars and using taxis at the UN COP25 “climate change” conference. And hardly anyone is using the electric car charging stations. And almost no one using public transport. I trust they could find parking for their private jets.
https://youtu.be/iLOc2VQ_5LM
70
The early morning view of the car park appears to be experiencing a dash of global cooling. Or could it be smoke haze all the way from the Australian bush.
20
The problem is that most of the environmental “reforms” that result in national parks being impassable with huge fuel loads and invasive flora and fauna are made in the air conditioned conference rooms of the inner cities, over coffee and snacks with the occasional glass of chardonnay; by people who have never been past the cleared parking areas and tourist centres which they think epitomize the rest of the park. With honorable exceptions like Tony Abbott they only see the burned out remnants from an escorted air conditioned vehicle and after a firestorm the forest floor looks pretty clear. No problem, no blame, attribute it to climate change and have another chardonnay.
50
Just listened to the Steve Price interview with Matt Kean, and Steve kept running up against the polis’ answer, that he was following the advice of the experts in his departments. Now somehow that has to be challenged, and there has to be someone of high profile taking on the Human Resources industry, and it’s ability to create and maintain the bureaucracy’s and now business world’s cultures. The green’s are able to say- ‘it’s nothing to do with us. We’ve never been in power, on any level.’ But when you have a body (well it’s more than a body. HR is like an octopus, it is now in everything. I wonder who appointed the wonderfully diverse Westpac board?) whose primary drive is to create diversity and a leftist mindset, in all management structures. (people questioning the ABC, and it’s attempt to delve into their presenters sexually and race, are missing the point. It’s not the ABC, or even the BOM. They are just the soldier ants. Go on attacking them, and good luck, you’re fighting with shadows. We have to go for the Queen, and the Queen is their HR departments. They set and maintain their culture. And they often are not popular in those offices. But until someone rips into them, and exposes what they are doing, we will continue on our inexorable decline.
Another thing not being pointed out clearly. Most Australian forests are eucalyptus. They grow to burn. It’s their life cycle. If you are going to live among eucalyptus you have to expect big problems with fires. These aren’t fish and bicycles.
70
The heads of Services are political appointees.
They owe their jobs to their political masters.
They know what advice is acceptable, and what isn’t.
Plus….. big fires make for big headlines, which makes for big budgets and high profiles.
30
Both of them need to be reminded that there are liars, grand liars and experts. and experts are generally X-spurts where X is the unknown quantity and a spurt is a drip under pressure.
30
saw this on Sky News Front Page last nite, headlined something like “Worse to come”, but it’s behind paywall:
TasWeekend: We are all sitting in the line of fire
The Hobart Mercury – 11 hours ago
We are all sitting in the line of fire … in these heavily fuelled perimeter hills of Hobart, the zone firefighters call the urban interface…
Bringing it back to something resembling the open Glover vista would reduce the intensity of fires if they were to ignite here, as they did in the 1967 bushfires in which 62 people lost their lives around Hobart. It would also make subsequent regular hazard-reduction burns simpler and safer…
did the above get written because of this?
5 Dec: ClimateChangeNews: Fire bombs: Hobart lies in the path of climate disaster
Around the world, communities are living obliviously close to climate-driven fire disaster. In the first in a series of reports, Karl Mathiesen visits Hobart, Tasmania.
Both on land, and in the atmosphere, humans are creating bigger and bigger problems for ourselves.
This Climate Home series will examine a dangerous trend in three distinct but related landscapes – Australia, western North America and the Mediterranean.
In each of these places, climate change adds what Bowman, a professor in fire ecology from the University of Tasmania, calls “the plus”: a dialling up of danger as weather patterns shift towards a more fire prone future…
I’m horrified at the complete disaster about to unfold,” he says with the bluntness of someone who has given up trying to coax people into listening to him. He could be dismissed as an alarmist. Indeed, he says, he often is. But this cataclysm has happened before.
Almost fifty years ago, on 7 February 1967…
In the intervening half century, the city has stretched up its encircling hills, reaching further into the embrace of the forest.
“You can see why they want to do it,” says Bowman. “Wake up in the morning and listen to the birds. It’s marvellous… Culturally we are really decoupled, we want to have it all.” But he believes the piper must be paid…
But Bowman isn’t so much interested in the trees as what lies beneath. On Knocklofty, just behind the suburb in which my mother has her home, twisted thickets of tea tree, black wattle and native cherry make the forests impassable…
It’s this incredible volume of fuel that haunts Bowman, whose own house is just 250 metres from the forest edge. When the fire comes, the undergrowth acts as a ladder for the fire to reach the explosive eucalyptus crowns. The forest, according to Bowman and other fire managers I spoke with, is as primed as it was in 1967.
Now add in the changes to southeastern Australia’s climate as the planet warms. There will be more big wet spells that promote growth, then droughts and heatwaves that make catastrophic fires like 1967 ever more likely…
Globally, the length of the fire weather season increased by nearly 19% between 1979 and 2013. This has been particularly true in eastern Australia…
When Hobart was first settled, the woods were open and airy. This was the result of thousands of years of fire management by indigenous Tasmanians, says Andry Sculthorpe, an ecologist and member of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Regular burns diversified the hunting fodder and allowed for easy passage…
Before Aborigines, there were other landscapers. Megafauna, such as the hulking Palorchestes azael…
Given the headlong rush towards dangerous climate change humanity is currently engaged in, Bowman and Sculthorpe both advocate controlling the factors close to home. Hobart’s city council does conduct seasonal burning. But the walk I go on with Bowman reveals the inadequacy of the programme. The grasses and leaf litter are blackened and the occasional stump has been torched, but the medium-sized scrub, that ladder to the treetops, remains.
Bowman says the only way to defend against “the plus” is to transform the landscape. This, he says, would involve a drastic slashing of all undergrowth in a 500 metre perimeter around the city. A massive programme of biomass removal to create an open forest buffer around the city…
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/12/05/fire-bombs-a-city-in-the-path-of-climate-disaster/
20
just posted a comment which has gone into moderation, but I dated the Climate Change News article wrongly, in that it was written in 2016, not 5 Dec this year.
of course, it could have been written now.
40
This essay on bushfires from the Australian Meteorological Magazine 1952, long before BoM became corrupted.
http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/docs/1952/douglas.pdf
30
Good grief EG !
Best print that off
Before the BOM finds out you have it.
30
Global warming has increased the probability of fire, but the current fire risk is the result of our management of the bush and the way we interact with it.
I was brought up in Healesville, a logging town on the edge of the great divide 70 km from Melbourne. The town was directly affected by fire in 1939 and 1962, and 2009, with numerous other fires in the area. In the 60s all residents of Healesville were very aware of fire, farmers plowed fire breaks and planted green summer crops and the township was surrounded by farmland with very few houses in bush areas. Now Australia wide there are millions of people living in or adjacent to the bush, we have created a disaster waiting to happen. It has always been impossible to fight bush fires when conditions are bad, people living in the bush face loss of property or worse when fire eventually comes. Global warming has increased the probably of fire, not the fact
Before Europeans came to Australia forests were more open, aboriginals regularly burnt the bush, dramatically reducing fuel loading, and selecting for fire loving plants. Large areas that are now dense bush was once open forest, European stopped the burning and created the current situation.
We have to dramatically change how forests are managed, remove people from treed areas, or accept that property will be lost and people will die. In 2003 Canberra lost 490 houses, even cities with eucalyptus and native plants are at risk. Populated areas with native trees will have to be cleared or we have to stop living there. Insurance companies will eventually stop insuring areas that have an unacceptable fire risk.
Almost every photo of a burnt house is surrounded by eucalyptus trees!
If the Australian bush gets hotter and drier, nature will eventually correct it, with repeated fires creating more open bush, with less fire risk.
20
What global warming?
60
I agree with a lot of what you write, Rod King, but not your automatic assumption that there is global warming.
50
Don’t know if there is global warming, climate is an extremely complex system that I don’t fully understand. But if you look at the climate over hundreds of millions of years, there is a correlation between temperature and CO2. The last 3 million has been an ice age with the lowest ever global CO2 levels and an extremely variable climate. The lowest ever CO2 was 180 ppm during the Lower Glacial Maximum, 25,000 years ago, which was about 8 degrees colder then present and the sea level was 120 meters lower. Is there CO2 induced global warming, buggered if I know but the recent trend is warming.
13
Rod….
Closer analysis of those ice-cores revealed a lag of about four hundred years. CO2 increases FOLLOWED temperature increases, not the other way around.
That’s the first thing.
The second is that the global area burnt per annum has declined. So there is no good reason to argue that warming has made fires “more likely”. Fires have become less likely, regardless of what you imagine to be happening to the climate.
As for fire mitigation…. frequent fire does not reduce the likelihood of fire,- that’s a contradiction – but it reduces the frequency of INTENSE, LETHAL, FAST-SPREADING fires, which are the ones that do the most damage.
The fires that hit Canberra were allowed to burn for a week before severe weather arrived and pushed them east to the suburbs. It’s not about “preventing” fire, but making it possible to control them before they get big and lethal.
80
Rod, I gave a green tick for overall message of your post above.
I did hesitate though, because of your incorrect misconception that global warming from CO2 is real.
World temperatures in the long term are shown to be exclusively the result of considerations related to the orbital mechanics of the solar system.
There are very clear records over the last half million years that show four cycles of glaciation and subsequent thawing, each cycle being 100,000 to 110,000 years.
Minor variations in temperature and sea levels in the last “interglacial” that has so far lasted 7 or 8 thousand years, are just that, minor.
Past records show that orbital mechanics has governed the last half million years but also that cycles do change and a new pattern may emerge.
Whatever, it is certain that CO2 from humans has no way of controlling Earth’s atmospheric temperature.
Bushfires, whether in California or Australia, are due to political arrogance and abusiveness that seems to be a feature of human activity from time to time.
Pol Pot and Hitler and Ch Mao used bullets but modern methods are much more subtle: come save the planet, while in fact destroying it.
KK
70
‘Before Europeans came to Australia forests were more open …’
https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1469-8137.1998.00289.x
30
“Global warming has increased the probability of fire”
That is a scientifically unprovable assumption.
The current drought is because of cooler water than normal above and below Australia.
The blustery winds are because of a wavy southern jet stream.
Nothing at all related to the beneficial increase in atmospheric CO2 having any warming effect.
In fact, Australian temperatures have had zero trend this century.
71
Yes I should have said “may”.
An increase in temperature should increase rainfall globally, but would also change the distribution of rainfall. How would it change rainfall in a particular location. I don’t know, and it’s such a complex problem I doubt any one knows.
11
‘Yes I should have said “may”.
Not good enough.
The correlation between CO2 and temperature is no coincidence, at the Last Glacial Max very little CO2 was being liberated from the cool oceans.
30
And Henry’s Law shows the relationship between the two.
Cheers
Dave B
30
southern hemisphere jet stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDKHoX0izGE [2017]
The Southern Ocean doesn’t push the southern jet stream around as much as the northern mountains push the northern hemisphere one around.
The Roaring Forties and the Screaming Sixties can be spotted …
00
So 1.2 Celsius has changed the risk of bushfires or their severity? How?
20
TdeF, I suggest you ask your local 12 year old schoolkid. They can’t read or count, but they can tell you everything about climate change and its effects.
20
I’m not resident in Australia nor a citizen. I lived in Melbourne for about 10 months from Jun 1990 to April 1991. One thing I did notice about the landscape: every eucalyptus tree was surrounded by other eucalyptus trees.
30
G’day Rod,
You’ve raised a hot topic here in NSW with a minister using your words, 2 letters in today’s SMH supporting that claim and the day’s editorial doing the same. The minister claims that “no one can deny” the truth of his claim. I do deny that claim, as do those who’ve already replied to you above.
Various Commonwealth ministers also support the claim, softening it somewhat by including other possible causes.
No one who has made the claim has supported it any adequate fashion, in my view because it is not possible.
If you look at the map in the RFS app “Fires near me” and examine it carefully you’ll see that all the big fires are in, or coming out of National Parks, with fuel loads way above the “unstoppable” threshold.
I am working on a letter to SMH to register my “denial”.
Cheers
Dave B
50
Good!
I’ve been aware of bush fire since I was little, digging in the ground with my little tin bulldozer, I found layers of charcoal and wondered how it got there. Healesville faced fires in 1962, I was 5yo and watched all the hills around us burn. Funny, thing like this stick in your mind.
The only way we can deal with the disaster we have created for our selves is change our relationship with the bush.
I don’t have much hope, until a major disaster all they will do is keep arguing. I keep on hearing how the fires in NSW are ‘Unprecedented’, have they forgotten the 1939 Black Friday, 1983 Ash Wednesday, or 2009 Black Saturday fires? Maybe there has to be a major capital city suburb burn before they understand.
Rod
20
I was told off by a ranger in a Tasmanian national park once when he spotted me dragging a dead fallen branch to the firepit at my campsite. He said ” Look mate, I don’t want to spoil your day, but I wish you wouldn’t do that ” and suggested I either drive out of the national park and forage for wood in the surrounding bush or look around at the other empty campsites and take any leftover firewood previous campers had laying around.
50
The ranger would obviously be unconcerned when the forest under his care burns to the ground. And are people not part of the ecosystem? What does he think Aborigines burned for firewood? (Note that it isn’t 100% certain Tasmanian Aborigines could make fire on demand but it appears they used it when available.)
50
Obviously he had nothing better to do.
50
A look inside Greta Thunberg’s car she was driven in to COP25. Full of plastic rubbish!
https://youtu.be/r8SyoRwV_To
40
St Greta ! The hypocrite !
Who can the Greenists trust ?
Not her !
30
680 homes have been destroyed so far by greenie policies!!! And on top of that a huge amount of wildlife habitat.
40
So in the 2nd photo there is a stump. Would that indicate that this was previously a state forest, certainly the signage is the common type for NSW State Forests, although 99-4 is also listed on the mid north coast. If it was still a forestry trail, it could be overgrown for any number of reasons, most likely is that the coup it protects has already been logged. If it is now part of the state parks, conservation areas then the management plan for that area might preclude a trail there. Given that there is not solid proof given for the position that this is neglect, these two sceptical scenarios are equally likely.
The third photo, allegedly showing how a fire trail stops a fire, could just as easily be showing how to lay a controlled burn. Again there is no way to authenticate, and to be fair, it could be one or the other, going on the limited evidence presented.
As I linked to earlier, there were lots of hazard reduction burns around Sydney in May, which sort of puts a crimp in the idea of “massive fuel buildup” as well, and as posted earlier as well, the life expectancy of dead material on the forest floor around Sydney is around 10 years.
Now for the projected impact of climate change, and this was published in 2005 and is bang on the money http://www.cmar.csiro.au/e-print/open/hennessykj_2005b.pdf
012
Fitz
Massive areas that WERE State Forest are NOW National Park…… and one of the consequences of National Parks has been a policy of closing the fire trails.
State Forests do not merely put in fire trails for logging purposes. They are FIRE trails, put in to assist in the control of fires because trees are valuable, and when trees have value, it’s worth spending $$ to save them. (Plus SF have all these big yellow machines that are great for building firebreaks when they aren’t logging).
Yes, that could easily be a controlled burn, but that is as much to the point as anything else. The PURPOSE of fire tails is to allow access so that we CAN put in controlled burns, whether for fuel management OR back-Burning to control wildfires.
You really are as “pig-ignorant” as you admitted to being regarding the legislation.
Unlike you, we don’t consider one hot day or one photo to be “proof”. It’s illustration of principle.
Happy trolling…… Peter.
120
Oh and BTW, I spend most of my winter weekends in State Forest….. driving the very same fire trails that you assume would be grown over ifthey weren’t used for timber-getting.
Well they haven’t been used for timber in over a century…. but they ARE used for fire mitigation.
How many times do you have to prove that you don’t have a clue?
120
What we need is more humans engaged in forests. We need foresters, millers and excavators who know how to shape a road and do the right rollovers and drains, but also licensed firewood cutters, 4WD clubs, MTBs in groups and on singletracks, licensed shooters (v important!), archers, equestrians, bushwalkers/runners/triathletes, responsible dog walkers, cleaning bees etc etc. Special encouragement for registered clubs of all sorts.
I used to have the forest to myself for decades, but I’ve noticed a big increase in usage in recent times. The only MTB used to be mine, now we have a great singletrack for events far exceeding my skills. And Forestry are back to get some timber, by sheer luck, just in time.
Unfortunately we also have a Bob Carr Park on our hands. Something has to be done about those monstrosities, I just don’t know what. They were an opportunity for rugged Bob to model his too-new Paddy Pallin outfits as he jumped out of helicopters, now they’re an excuse for neglect.
The globos want the people OUT with disrespect. We need to push IN with respect. Work out what the opponent wants, and do the opposite. People can be grubs in the bush, but we need people to maintain what people have made. There is no pristine nature. It’s all change forever, and that includes climate.
Push IN to the bush.
60
Moso…
Funny how they claim to be “saving” the bush for “ future generations” but when you ask what future generations will be able to use them for….. the answer is the same.
Nothing
50
Yes, Peter. It’s just going to be left to the ferals and fire, not to mention the dumpers. The rest of us will be stuck in pig-smart cities staring at our pig-smart screens.
Another use…
We could save the world’s art galleries, museums and monuments from the plague of school groups. Take a class to some nearby scrub, farm or coast and find some interest in its botany, geology etc. Don’t do that occasionally, do it a lot; and offer more extended adventures in school holidays. Conduct school sport in state forests. Insist on fresh air intake, movement and observation, restrict use of electronics. Learn pack-in, pack-out.
Anybody wanting to explore the cultural wonders on the other side of the world can be told: “Get job, save up, travel where you like.” That goes especially for globe-trotting litterers like Greta.
40
PeterW – you do not need to maintain a fire trail where logging has already occured, which is what I wrote. I did not say the trail was used for logging now did I? I just said it was a forestry trail – going by be signage. It was you that turned it into a fire trail used for logging. Either way, we can not know for sure exactly what the primary purpose of the trail is or was now can we.
I thought you were on call 24/7/365 – how do you get to drive in state forests? And I’m still waiting for that declaration which would allow free meals for the fire crews.
As to my comments, being sceptic means questioning everything, something that is rarely done here, although I would call myself a cynic first.
19
Fitz…
Stop being a fool.
A fire trail is used for access to and suppression of fire. It is there because timber is valuable and needs to be protected from fire as much or more than any other property. That is through the entire life of the stand, not just while harvesting.
Secondly, even in country that is not being used for timber production, fire suppression in summer is required because fires don’t respect boundaries. They come out and burn things. You can ask your neighbours about that.
…… And if I am called, I will go. But you didn’t read that, did you.
You aren’t a sceptic and you misspelled “cultist”.
You cling to your ideology and discard any evidence to the contrary, far too easily.
80
But you can not go if your are in the middle of a forest now can you?
As I said, if the trail is overgrown, then there are a number of possibilities for that. The only location information for that trail number is that it is on the mid north coast, but the post said it was near Sydney. It could well be an old sign, in a area now under different management. Without being able to accurately find a geo marker for that trail, all is assertion and speculation.
Still waiting for that declaration by the way
04
Don’t lie, Fitz
Of course I can go, it just takes a little longer.
20
He’s not a scientist either.
20
It was very wet, this from BoM
‘During the 2010–11 La Niña, most of mainland Australia experienced significantly higher than average rainfall over the nine months from July 2010 to March 2011. Parts of Tasmania also received heavy rainfall while southwest Western Australia missed out, experiencing its driest year on record.’
10
National Parks and Wildlife Service carried out hazard reduction activities across more than 139,000ha in 2018 and 2019. The recommended burn requirement is 5%. National Perks and Reserves encompass over 7 million hectares requiring annual hazard reduction burns covering 350,000 hectares. So there is indeed massive build up of fuel load.
60
NPWS have a different management objective than just putting fires out.
https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/about-npws/managing-fire-in-parks
03
Different management objectives…..
So is roasting their koalas part of this?
Results matter more than shiny PR.
40
Hazard reduction
Talk, but not do.
The greenie way that has caused the intensity of recent fires.
31
Must be my fault then.
50
Exactly.
Anybody who gives succour to the green anti-cool burn activism carries some fault.
Accordingly, you are at fault.
50
“Must be my fault then.”
You worship the greenie agenda.
You even do everything you can to deny that fuel load was the major contributor to the intensity of the fires, despite provable facts.
So you and your ilk and agenda should certainly accept a major part of the blame.
41
The relevant phrase is ” Aid and comfort to the enemy…
The enemy, of course, being those who do harm to our community in the pursuit of their own ends.
40
‘Climate change projections indicate that the south-east is likely to become hotter and drier in future. The aim of this study is to assess potential changes in fire-weather risk associated with future climate change, due to the enhanced greenhouse effect.’
Badly flawed, there is no such thing as an enhanced greenhouse effect.
‘ … this was published in 2005 …’
Remember the strong La Nina around 2010 and the Brisbane floods, climate change in action, world temperatures dropped briefly. We should see a repeat of this natural phenomenon around this time next year.
31
el gordo – can you link to a paper that shows that there is no enhanced greenhouse effect?
I included that reference to show that what was predicted then is coming true today.
12
“The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C, over the period 1880 to 2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist.
The total increase between the average of the 1850–1900 period and the 2003–2012 period is 0.78 [0.72 to 0.85] °C, based on the single longest dataset available (see Figure SPM.1). {2.4}”
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf
Enhanced you say?
Clearly you don’t have a clue as to what the word “enhanced” means.
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-observations-for-tropical-tropospheric-temperature/
The enhanced failure of the climate “science” is clear for all with eyes to see.
40
“can you link to a paper that shows that there is no enhanced greenhouse effect”
One does not have to disprove a fairy tale
You know that so such thing has ever been measured or observed on this planet.
You know you are incapable of producing any evidence that it does exist.
You been asked and have failed every time.
The enhanced greenhouse effect is nothing but a piece of science fantasy, and you cannot prove otherwise.
31
The BOM report you linked start there Technical summary with the words…
Each part of that is a provable lie or mis-direction.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/rainfall/
As anyone can see, 2018 , while it is dry in SE Australia in 2018, it is no worse than some periods in the past, 1957, 1982, 1994, 1940, 1944
So lie number one
And “extremely hot days.. in what record? the one that BOM has adjusted all past hot days, or the actual real data?
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Percent-Of-Days-Above-950F-Vs-Year-1888-2019-At-All-Long-term-Australia-GHCN-Stations-Red-Line-Is-5-Year-Mean-Percent-Of-Days-Above-950F-vs-Year-1024×933.png
21
And yes, we are in drought conditions, but not because of increased atmospheric CO2
It is because of cool sea temperatures above and below Australia.
Droughts have been of similar intensity many times in the past.
It is part of the “normal” Australian Climate.
21
A child could have predicted a bad fire season in Australia at some stage..
They could also look at the massive build-up of fuel load due to idiotic locking up and neglect of State Forests and National Parks…
… and realise that there was a tinderbox/bonfire just waiting for the right WEATHER conditions to come along.
31
If Fitz can’t link to a paper proving that everyone dies, eventually, then according to his logic, we can expect to live forever, right?
30
Tell us PF,
What percentage area of the recent fires in NSW was National Park or State Forest ?
21
I sent you links to three or four papers — not Guardian-type articles, but real scientific papers — earlier this year. Go find those links, download and read those papers. I can’t be bothered sending them to you again, you’re a Space Cadet.
20
Hello, Peter.
The only information about the location of these hazard reduction burns in that linked story is:
“burn-offs in the Blue Mountains national park”.
That won’t affect the fuel build-up and intensity of the fires:
• that were encroaching on Colo Heights two weeks ago, which is surrounded by Parr State conservation area and Comleroy State forest.
• in Wollemi National Park (current ongoing fire).
• in Yengo National Park (current ongoing fire near Perry’s Crossing).
• in Nattai National park (current ongoing fire encroaching on southwest Sydney)
• in Newnes State Forest (current ongoing fire north of Lithgow).
• …or anywhere other than in Blue Mountains National Park.
Yet the wind can and did carry the smoke from all of those areas, at one time or another, into Sydney, with attendant respiratory difficulties. (eg animated wind map for 4 December shows a north-westerly going into Sydney.) One cannot imply that hazard reduction burns were done and didn’t help to reduce fire severity when the side-effects were experienced from multiple fires that were not given fuel reduction burns in the only evidence you’ve cited.
The CSIRO paper you linked gives a range of 4% to 25% increase in v.high/extreme fire danger days by 2020. That is a factor of 6 uncertainty in the range, which itself tells you how uncertain these predictions were in 2005 without even needing to wait 15 years to compare them to actuals.
Table 2 in the document says (in part) for Sydney:
2005 | 2020 High scenario
Normal | Mark 2 | Mark 3
8.7 | 9.2 | 9.5
That is what you want to hang your climate-change-dunnit hat on? An extra 0.8 days of extreme fire danger per year. An extra 19.2 hours of extreme fire danger per year in the modelled average. In spite of all other actual factors you want to highlight climate change as the most important cause? Would you like to double-down or maybe instead change your argument?
What if prescribed burns had been done in those other State and National parks, surely the fires would burn less intensely or for less time or be easier to suppress? Uncontrolled burns were what the aborigines did and controlled burns have been the advice of many experts for the last 20 years, and since it is one of the few factors of bushfire that we can actually control it is worth doing.
Inevitably fires happen. If we can choose to burn 1% and only 1% at a time, we end up with far less smoke and animal impacts than when they spiral out of control all at once. Having a hexagonal pattern of untouched wilderness zones and fuel-controlled zones bordered by firebreaks may be a good compromise as it would allow any fire in the wilderness to be more easily stopped once it reached a fuel-managed zone. Neighbouring hexagons being done at different times of the year allows animals a shorter distance to travel to reach safety. It does what experts have been saying, there is nothing in Greens policy against this, and I can’t see the Liberals saying no to a way out of the #BerejiklianBushfires meme. What do you think?
40
Andrew I posted the paper to show what was predicted back then, it is proving to be accurate. As to the quantification of the added risk, I would say that they are slap bang on the middle of the projections.
You do not appear to understand Parks and the management goals that they have adopted. It is basically that they will work to control fire by standard means, on their boundaries, but the heart of the park is not to be burnt intentionally by any means. This is why new parks will allow existing fire trials to overgrow, but those on the periphery will be maintained. NSW Parks maintain a staff of 1200 odd fire fighters, with their own equipment. They will never allow such a regime as you are advocating, and for sound ecological reasons, at least, in my view. As this link shows most of the fires are on private land, where the landholder is neglecting their responsibilities https://aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/tbp/downloads/tbp027_02_nsw.pdf
SO rather than focus on the 10-15% of the problem, why not focus on the 70% (which is the contribution of fires on private land)
06
A child could have predicted a bad fire season in Australia at some stage..
All they had to do was look at history,
They could also look at the massive build-up of fuel load due to idiotic locking up and neglect of State Forests and National Parks…
… and realise that there was a tinderbox/bonfire just waiting for the right WEATHER conditions to come along.
You do not appear to realise that those so-called goals were never properly carried out, because of the agenda against burn-offs and the agenda to lock-up land and let it go to neglect allowing huge fuel loads built up.
You even admit this point yourself.
61
Your pdf is essentially saying that small farms occurring on farm properties are numerous, but generally easily controlled and small.
Its when these fires get into neglected overgrown State Forests and National Parks with incendiary fuel loads, in naturally occurring drought and windy conditions, that the sort of intensity of fire become unstoppable.
Thanks for a link confirming everything we have been saying.
51
“why not focus on the 70% (which is the contribution of fires on private land)”
In urban metropolitan areas
The big fires don’t occur there.
Grass fires on farms are generally quickly controlled and small.
Its when those fires get into high fuel load neglected forest areas during drought and high wind situation that the trouble really starts.
Would you agree to cutting the ABC budget to give more to the RFS for a proper system of prescribed burns in National Parks and State Forests, PF ?
Which is more important to [[snip] your] agenda.?
41
As the 2003 Canberra fires illustrate.
Approximately two dozen fires were started by the same lightning front as it passed through the region west of Canberra.
The majority were on private land and were extinguished quickly without causing significant damage
The two fires that were NOT extinguished quickly, because they were on forested public land and the authorities chose to fight them “at the boundary”, burned for over a week before they came out under the impetus of extreme winds, heat and humidity.
The fires on private land killed nobody and burnt very little.
The fires managed according to the policy that you have just outlined, killed four people and burned five hundred homes.
Further, your claim that they (NPWS) will never allow…… is an admission that that organisation is a rogue service, servicing only its own agenda. Not the public, and not the elected government.
60
Fitz,
We are in the most unprecedented, catastrophic bushfire season that has ever happened, ever!!!!!!!
May it be possible to phone and ask for your advice, in what I should do, if I am once again risking my life, saving lives and property on the fire ground in this unprecedented, catastrophic, bushfire season?
I humbly ask because you have proven to be a bushfire expert that is so learned and qualified, a leader in your field.
I want to spend time with my family over the summer break.
I don’t want to be a charred corpse.
Help me, I am scared
30
I’m reluctant to accept that suggestion for several reasons. Firstly the data is old and may not reflect current conditions. More pertinently the figure of 70% ignores the NPWS fires because it comes from only the fires the RFS attended which carries the disclaimer it “only includes the 36 percent of cases where tenure was identified”, meaning in 64% of RFS’ vegetation fires we have no data on whether it was private or public land. IMHO the causes of a tenure being unrecorded are likely to have a bias and it’s more likely a tenure was not recorded because it was obviously not a private property with an obvious building on it. Hypothetically if 10% of unrecorded tenures were really private the total would come out at 35% private not 70%, but we don’t know.
In support of your point is their statement “many large deliberate fires originated outside of and subsequently spread onto NSW NPWS tenure.” It’s not stated how much of “outside” was Crown or State Forest versus private land. A rather large number of fires are deliberately lit, hovering around the 40% mark. The only part of deliberate fires that can be systemically addressed from a land management perspective is the illegal fuel reduction burns. Unironically, this figure could be lowered by simply making it legal so that land managers won’t be inhibited from asking for professional help in getting their fuel reductions done safely. A decriminalisation and harm-reduction approach could help there as it has in other issues such as illicit drugs. But admittedly that makes little difference when such burns are tiny minority of deliberate fires. Further progress in that area is entirely psychological, starting with childhood upbringing, and won’t catch every one of them before they become a firebug, nor will it address the twisted people we already have out there in society.
It’s still hard to accept that private land ignition points should be the focus of solutions for two other reasons. Firstly The thorny part of the debate is avoiding roasted koalas and hazardous smoke levels in big fires (while preserving biodiversity). These effects both increase with area burned. Focusing on the number of fires is a distraction from the causes, because “Most fires were small, with the number of fires decreasing with increasing fire size.” State and national parks are bigger and denser than the private land meaning larger fires can only occur there.
Second reason is cute tree critters are more widely known for inhabiting the public parks rather than private land.
A more intense public education programme on preventing accidental incendiary sources would certainly help on the numbers. But it will not alter the fact that the intensity is proportional to the fuel load, regardless of ignition source, which is why fuel reduction pays back regardless of the ignition location or cause.
20
That is not a “goal” that is a methodology.
If the middle of the park is never to be burnt intentionally, then the only possible consumption of the fuel must necessarily be unintentional burns which we can presume will be at the worst possible times. It always has to go somewhere, sooner or later. The obvious consequence of this is less frequent but more intense burns, which is bad for the environment and bad for the people as well. I’m not sure if that was the “goal” but that sure has been the effect of what they are doing.
00
And I’m not allowed to bait him back, is that what you are saying AZ?
21
Thanks Jo and the many commentators who added fuel to this post on fire (fire post perhaps…. Ummmm).
I’ve been looking around taking pictures and comparing various photos and news-feeds of all those anonymous fires that feature on the ABC news, The Conversation and research-free cataclysmic ‘reports’ pushed out by the Climate Council. A common denominator is that crown-fires are always fueled by understory. There are also examples of where fire damage was considerably reduced by previous burns.
It is the young understory with its shallow roots that first feels the effect of drought and invariably it is the failure to control understory before it reaches a height of about 1-metre (roughly) that controls how high it will flare and the damage it does to overstory. Look carefully through the many photographs of the 2018 Tathra fire – part of the problem there was that housholders were legally unable to protect their properties by taking action outside their boundaries. The local council did not do so either and word has it that the RFS was hamstrung by green-tape in doing preemptive control burns.
The Soil Conservation Service of NSW once received allocations from the State budget to maintain fire trails and control soil erosion in NSW national parks, forests and on foreshore land under its control. This all ceased years ago. Except for those used for public access, fire trails are not regularly maintained – most are cleared only as necessary and the one in the picture was cleared during the Lake Cathie fire so a back-burn could be used to try to stop the fire reaching and crossing the Pacific Motorway and entering the drier country to the west. Thankfully that did not happen. However, the fuel is still there waiting for another day.
Cheers,
Bill
20
One thing one should never do is put the government in charge of the science of the environment. (Which is what it 99% is). Here is my local forecast for today:
“Mostly sunny. Medium (40%) chance of showers in the far northeast, becoming less likely late this afternoon and evening. Near zero chance of rain elsewhere. The chance of a thunderstorm.”
So does it rain when there is a thunderstorm or not?
20
Not always…..
Dry lightning storms are a thing to hate.
30
I saw two thunderstorms in Victoria when I was there. Both times there was no rain — just hail; tennis-ball sized stones. The cloud walked across the land (west to east) on legs of lightning. No rain at all. I didn’t stay around to see how much fire they each set.
New Zealand thunderstorms are almost always accompanied by heavy rain.
30
News flash! November 1st is always the start of the total fire ban season in SA. What about your neck of the woods?
One handy tip I did pick up this summer is not to hang around in active volcanoes either and now to check the aircon filter by the looks of the weather forecast.
30
My District declares the Statutory Fire Danger Period ( Total Fire Bans are a different thing) restricting what and how you can burn, on the 1st of Nov in a typical year. We vary that, in consultation with senior RFS volunteers, as required.
This is along the Murray from Jingellic to Mulwala
20
Paper ignites at 232.78 deg C (451 Fahrenheit), leaves ,ay catch alight a little cooler. So the temperature has increased due to global warming, yes it is dry, very dry – it is a bad drought. This is Australia. The question is, where is the spark or flame to ignite it?
there only so many dry lightnings or stupid campers.
No it is arsonist and terrorist. And would not be surprised green/climate mad activists.
20
To say that only the ocean will stop a fire storm is wrong. For years, property owners used to light fires to stop fires. As property owners, we used to head a few km’s down wind and back burn – back onto the main fire against the wind. Of course, because this practice worked, they outlawed the practice of self management about 30 years ago. Property owners know more about managing their land than anyone else, be it flood, drought, fire, disease etc. The trouble is, we are so over governed, common sense was removed from the equation.
60
City planners who grow cities only on the radial arms of the arterial transport corridors are making it more difficult to burn off and control fuel loads. Conditions suitable for burning are much less likely to occur when you have population on 3 sides of an area. This combined with poor management of fuel loads in national parks have created a perfect (fire)storm or events. City planners need to infill the undeveloped area. They don’t like doing this because it means they need more roads and when they need to clear populated areas to do that it shows that they have failed at planning (one job!).
00
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-detects-drop-in-global-fires
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1356
http://www.globalfiredata.org/analysis.html
NASA global fire database shows no trend for Australia, present year excluded.
00