“Australia is on fire,” tweeted teenage climate evangelist Greta Thunberg, decrying the lack of “political action [to combat] the climate crisis.”
“Australia is committing climate suicide,” ran the headline in the New York Times.
Australia through the past two decades of escalating fire crises and it’s not climate change that has caused the disaster, but the criminal negligence of governments that have locked up vast tracts of land as national parks, yet failed to spend the money needed to control ground fuel and maintain fire trails.
Instead, they bowed to an ideology that obstructs necessary hazard reduction and prevents landowners from clearing vegetation around their own properties.
If ground fuel is reduced in a scientific, systematic fashion every year, fire intensity is reduced to a manageable level, no matter what the weather conditions. A quadrupling of ground fuel means a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire. Hazard reduction won’t prevent fire but it will reduce its intensity so that it can be controlled.
The only practical way to prevent unmanageable fires is to reduce the one variable we control: ground fuel.
For more than 20 years, Australia’s Greens party has infiltrated government bureaucracies that have obstructed the hazard reduction that experts recommend.
Despite their attempts to rewrite history, submissions to bushfire inquiries from as far back as 1992 are evidence of green opposition to hazard-reduction burning as a threat to “biodiversity,” and their urging that resources be spent instead on water-bombing helicopters, as well as on the amorphous task of stopping climate change.
Paul Plante says
“The temperature became torrid, and on the morning of the 6th of February 1851, the air which blew down from the north resembled the breath of a furnace.”
“A fierce wind arose, gathering strength and velocity from hour to hour, until about noon it blew with the violence of a tornado.”
“By some inexplicable means it wrapped the whole country in a sheet of flame — fierce, awful, and irresistible.”
There we are talking, of course, and I doubt poor little Greta even has a clue, because if it happened before she blessed the earth with her presence, why, it never happened, at all, given that the world was created just for her the day before she was born, about the Black Thursday bushfires which were a devastating series of fires that swept approximately 5 million hectares of the state of Victoria, Australia, on 6 February 1851.
One million sheep, thousands of cattle and countless native animals were lost in that conflagration.
According to Wikipedia, which is intended to help un-confuse poor little ignorant lost souls like Greta Thunberg who apparently prefers ignorance and hysteria-mongering to educating her young self, the Black Thursday bushfires, were caused in part by an intense drought that occurred throughout 1850 when the continent suffered from extreme heat.
On 6 February 1851, a strong furnace-like wind came down from the north and gained power and speed as the hours passed.
The weather reached record extremes.
By eleven it was about 47 °C (117 °F) in the shade.
The air cooled to 43 °C (109 °F) by one o’clock and rose to 45 °C (113 °F) around four o’clock.
So is this something new that is happening today?
Going back to Wikip0edia for some “science” on the subject to counter little Greta’s hysteria, we have:
Intense bushfires are not uncommon in southern Australia.
The region is one of the three most fire-prone in the world.
Within the last two hundred years, the area has experienced and documented at least twenty-five major fires, beginning with Black Thursday in 1851.
The intensity of these fires is due in part to natural fuels, such as sclerophyll forests in the region.
While adapting to cope with drought and predators, the trees’ leaves turn into prime fuel for fires.
They become tough as protection from dry conditions and to increase the efficiency of nutrient use.
They also develop tough spikes and chemicals to protect themselves from small animals.
The leaves’ tough surface allows them to last longer and build up on the forest floor and the chemical makes them flammable..
The abundance of flammable fuel can cause an inferno with a single spark.
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WHOA!
Scrub all of that and get it out of the record, lest we upset poor little Greta and the hysteria-mongerers at the New York Times who want us to believe that before little Greta and the Guardian newspaper came along and started warning the world that it was going to come to a fiery end because of feedback loops and carbon overshoot, and forcings, there never was a wildfire in Australia, and but for the carbon pollution the United States of America have been pumping into the earth’s atmosphere since 1751, life there would be serene.
To close, when people ask me why I needed a little Kuboda tractor with a back-how, my answer is so I could dig a big enough hole to bury all my engineering books and degrees in, instead of burning them to create more carbon dioxide, because the AGE OF ABJECT IGNORANCE brought forth by little Greta and the Guardian and the New York Times has made them absolutely worthless.
Carla Jasper says
Age of abject ignorance says it all. Thank you for an intelligent posting. It feels like we are in a perfect storm.
Paul Plante says
On the radio news, I heard some fool in whatever passes for government in Australia going on about how he was going to put together some type of government commission to do a study as to why wildfires in Australia burn so hot.
So, how about some “science” here, like the following:
Most types of wood will start combusting at about 300 degrees Celsius.
The gases burn and increase the temperature of the wood to about 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit).
That, of course, is high school science.