Is Climate Change Affecting Bushfires? 397
TapeCutter writes "After the devastating firestorm in Australia, there has been a lot of speculation in the press about the role of climate change. For the 'pro' argument the BBC article points to research by the CSIRO. For the 'con' argument they quote David Packham of Monash university, who is not alone in thinking '...excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has led to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had...' However, the DSE's 2008 annual report states; '[The DSE] achieved a planned burning program of more than 156,000 hectares, the best result for more than a decade. The planned burning of forest undergrowth is by far the most powerful management tool available...' I drove through Kilmore on the evening of the firestorm, and in my 50 years of living with fire I have never seen a smoke plume anything like it. It was reported to be 15 km high and creating its own lightning. There were also reports of car windscreens and engine blocks melting. So what was it that made such an unusual firestorm possible, and will it happen again?"
Global warming isn't really cutting in yet (Score:2, Informative)
Oops (Score:3, Informative)
...just as the current cold winter in North America canNOT be considered as casting douby...
Global Weirding, not warming. (Score:2, Informative)
people are affecting bushfires (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Climate Change? No. (Score:4, Informative)
That's a nice theory, and it's a shame that it's wrong. The arid parts of Western Australia are home to chaparral, [wikipedia.org] the same as Southern California, although some of the species are different. Chaparral is notoriously prone to fire when conditions are right, and many of the species regrow quickly after a blaze. The plants aren't intruders that have pushed out the "more fire resistant native plants," they are the native plants. If you want to live there, you need to learn to keep the brush cut back, plant a barrier of less fire-prone plants around you and build a house that's not going to catch fire quickly when (not if) there's a wild fire.
Re:Global warming isn't really cutting in yet (Score:5, Informative)
This is incorrect, fire is normal but this one was not (regardless of the death and destruction). There is a metric called the Fire Danger Index [csiro.au] that is used to issue warnings and declare total fire ban days, it is calibrated on the 1939 fires having an index of 100, IIRC the ash wednesday fires that I also witnessed had an index of 70-120. The abnormal conditions [bom.gov.au] for this fire saw the index in the unheard of range of 150-200.
Re:Global warming isn't really cutting in yet (Score:4, Informative)
Much of the bush in the area (indeed the entire state) has been burnt several times since our last "wet period" over a decade ago. In the summer of 2006-2007 Melbourne was blanketed in smoke for two months where as the normal situation might see smoke for a week or two.
Re:Climate Change? No. (Score:5, Informative)
The ever increasing severity of wildfires in Australia, North America, and elsewhere have nothing to do with any hypothetical climate change. It has everything to do with honest to Cowboy Neal human intervention.
Every year, dry areas with lots of vegetation catch fire. This is natural. Every year, humans that are stupid enough to build flammable houses in fire prone areas fight the fires and put them out. This is not natural. If the fire was let to burn out on its own, the thick and highly flammable undergrowth would turn into fertilizer for the larger, healthier, and more fire resistant plants that have historically survived such wildfires.
You, sir, haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about.
The state of Victoria has been in the grips of the worst drought in a century for the past 12 years, leaving the whole state tinder dry.
The day of Black Saturday the highest temperatures on record were observed in many parts of the state, and extremely hot, dry and high winds were blowing out of the semi-arid center of the country.
You didn't even have to RFTA, you just had to see from TFS that here in Australia we do control burns in the off season, fuel management is a critical part of fire management in this country, especially when you consider that many parts of the country have acclimatised to the fire-stick agriculture practiced by the aboriginal inhabitant of this country for over 40,000 years
If you seriously think that the already observed climatic changes are having no impact on the prevalence and severity of natural disasters around the globe you need to pull your head out of your arse and realise that's not coffee you've been smelling.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:2, Informative)
1. Water vapor is by a feedback effect. Google "op amps" or something. Water vapor multiplies the effects of carbon (and methane, and other effects that are not modified by feedback).
2. The life that was supported was single celled algae. No cows = no steak = low quality of life.
3. Global temperature is dead accurate for 30 years. It has been measured to a high standard for a century, and has been reconstructed over millennium. It's been rising the whole time.
4. Yeah, we could shut down the THC, and screw up England and the West Coast. That would cool things down. Didn't you see the movie?
OK, The Day After Tomorrow was a little inaccurate, but the idea of global warming freezing New York does have a grain of truth, you just wouldn't get supercell ice tornadoes, or whatever they made up to make it more exciting. The process would take years, or decades. Compare it to 300 (Spaaraaa!) which was also a weird mix of real history, and crazy impossible special effects.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:2, Informative)
2. But if you follow global warming models, as Al shows them to us, the CO2 quantities at that time would make it impossible for even the most basic cellular life to form.
3. 30 years is not a long time. The biggest collection of temp. data used in favor of Global Warming came from NASA and was plagued with a Y2K bug (bizarre, I know). Methods for reconstructing millenia old temperatures are scientific, but well, untested. We may be warming, our indicators suggest we are, but we don't have the data to make an empirical claim.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:5, Informative)
2. Oil is formed by compressing organic material for a long long time. This means that, prior to life, this CO2 was already in the atmosphere. Meaning, life formed under conditions of higher CO2!!!
Confusing wording, but there is bit of accurate information in it. Much of the world's petroleum is believed to have been formed during periods that were warmer than now, with higher levels of C02, perhaps as much as 2-3x higher or more. While possibly a paradise for some kinds of plants and algae, it should be mentioned that such periods were also accompanied by Anoxic Events [wikipedia.org] and enormous waves of mass extinctions.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:5, Informative)
2. The CO2 absorbed by that organic material has been sequestered for millions of years. The climate required for our lovely little civilisation began a few thousand years ago and depends upon that sequestration.
3. Global temperatures are easily tracked back via examination of ice cores and other scientific methods, back long before thermometers and writing with which to record any observations made.
4. Global warming begets climate change, so functionally they are one and the same. Close observation of past events allows prediction of future events.
5. You have no clue and blindly parrot propaganda without consideration of facts or logic.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:4, Informative)
Nope, you can't [dailytech.com]
historical perspective (Score:3, Informative)
When Europeans first started to exert control over large areas of the Australian coast, they put a stop to the Aboriginal practice of starting bushfires annually. This was done to stop such fires damaging their crops and newly built properties for the most part.
However, this frequent and deliberate starting of bushfires had come into being as a survival strategy. By starting such fires often, the Aboriginies avoided having vast, uncontrollable fires that posed a real danger.
Since that time, bushfires have occurred that are exactly what the aboriginal practice had been designed to avoid, and due to the high density of Australia's coastal regions, the dmaage cost and death toll have been high.
This has been noticed to a greater extent recently because the press are looking for things they can point to as evidence of global warming. This alas is no such thing, its just evidence of man failing to adapt to the requirements of an atypical environment.
Global Warming My Arse (Score:2, Informative)
The fires were a direct result of several actions:
1) A hot and drier than usual summer
2) A LOT of fuel on the ground
3) "Environmentally Concious" governance, including banning clearing of ANY land whatsoever, even banning clearing of land as a means of fire reduction.
4) Insufficient backburning, except for when it is too late.
Obviously 3) and 4) are the problems here. If either 3 or 4 (or both) were allowed, then the death toll and property losses would be far less.
Both 3 and 4 are the direct result of interference by greenies and environmentalists.
But seriously, these fires are nothing special. Victoria had devistating fires in the 1980s and the 1930s.
Given the relatively short time Australia has been populated, it's not hard to imagine that these fires are probably a 1 in 20 to a 1 in 100 year event.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:1, Informative)
....Please explain how we can test "climate change"....
That is easy! Climate ALWAYS changes, at least it has historically. Sometimes it gets a little warmer, and sometimes a little cooler, but it is always changing. There are many cycles in nature, climate being just one. There is indeed evidence that long ago the average temperature of the Earth was significantly warmer than it is today. Greenland is called that for a reason. It was within human history once a green land. Ice cores drilled to the bottom of the ice contain molds, pollen and other microscopic evidence of plant life now still in existence on the East Coast of the United States.
The climate of Earth has always changed up and down, warmer and cooler, long before people discovered oil and coal and started burning them. In fact, climate changed before there were people at all and it will continue to change no matter how much we pretend to be able to do something about it one way or the other.
Re:Global warming isn't really cutting in yet (Score:5, Informative)
I think one of the primary issues is we haven't let native Australian's burn the bush the way they always have in the cooler months of the year (say around May or June). I remember seeing something about this on the ABC that because the burning was being done in those cooler months the intensity of the fires were greatly reduced and the most volatile fuel was burnt.
This also had the effect of leaving the less volatile fuel in the ground, so the soil had a higher carbon content and was less prone to bushfires. Ironically, the Aborigines in question were being paid by a power company to do the burning because it offset the power plants carbon emissions.
The reality of Australia's management of the land is we have a lot to learn from Native Australian's, and that's a humility that goes beyond just saying 'Sorry'. Until we grasp that, as a nation, we will have more of these bushfires.
Re:Why don't the Austrailians build differently? (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks to the influence of the environmental lobby in Australia, we have situations like this:
http://www.theage.com.au/national/fined-for-illegal-clearing-family-now-feel-vindicated-20090211-84sw.html?page=-1 [theage.com.au]
Summary: the Sheahan family of Victoria bulldozed a firebreak around their house to protect them in case of a catastrophic bushfire. Of course, anything that involves killing trees places you somewhere between "pedophile" and "war criminal" these days, so the family were taken to court by the local council, and ended up $100,000 poorer.
Then a catastrophic bushfire came along and the Sheahan's is now practically the only house left standing in the district.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:4, Informative)
No it hasn't. That period includes The Little Ice Age, [wikipedia.org] which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England. If you're basing your post on the Hockey Stick Graph, [wikipedia.org] you need to be told that it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be an artifact of badly handled data, and thoroughly debunked.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:5, Informative)
1. This is simple high school science. Water vapour in the atmosphere is at it's "satuartion point" and is totally dependent on pressure and temprature, this is why you get dew drops forming in the desert overnight. Any amount of water vapour you pump into the atmosphere will fall out as liquid within days.
2. Coal is the biggest contributor to GHG, the carbon locked up in coal, oil, etc was never present in the atmosphere all at the same time (unless you want to go back before multi-cellular life appeared).
3. Opinion that is not supported by fact or mathematics.
4. The term "climate change" was introduced by skeptics who pointed out that the term "global warming" could be construed as biased.
If you would like to post a link that backs you up we would all be interested, as it stands you are simply trolling by parroting psuedo-skeptical talking points.
Re:Climate Change? No. (Score:4, Informative)
As for the observed temprature change being too small to affect large scale environmental change this is a silly argument that is easily debunked by observing Artic sea ice, it's like saying a teaspoon of sugar in your tank can't possibly do any harm to your engine. The amount of energy required to lift the global temprature even one degree is staggering yet the main cause of that increase is an increase in CO2 mesured in parts per million. That trapped energy must go somewhere and it does so mainly in the form of kinetic energy (below a 5km ceiling).
The government may or may not be incompetent but you are ignoring the facts in my summary and you are also ignoring the fact that most of the state has already been (naturally) burnt in recent years, particulaly in the summer of 2006-2007.
Re:Why don't the Austrailians build differently? (Score:1, Informative)
I do agree with you that in normal bushfires a less flammable house is better. But there is one fact that I've noted in the stories for the Vic bushfires that makes me think that safe concrete houses would go too.
Survivors that did have homes that were considered safe and that had an effective fire plan before the fire talked about the ember attack forcing it's way inside the house through cracks in doors, windows etc despite wet towels and then setting fire to the inside of the house. They talked about plastic buckets (positioned inside) full of water melting from the heat of the fire outside.
These fires have changed the rules. I know where I am, in a bushfire prone area, that when it comes time to build I'll need more than a house that doesn't burn on the outside, it will need to stop the fire getting inside, I'll need a fire bunker too... or a friendly wombat.
Somebody also mentioned warning sirens may have helped. In the some of the high death toll areas they did have warning sirens but they never sounded. The fire started, spread and hit the towns before anybody knew there was a fire, they had minutes if they were lucky.
All in all a harsh lesson that anybody in a fire prone area should not waste.
No, postcard proof (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:5, Informative)
I guess that you fail to consider that the "shitload" of CO2 (from all sources, including man-made) account for a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So if 0.5% constitutes a "shitload", what would you call the other 99.5%?
And since you brought up observations of Mars and Venus, perhaps you can explain how the recent warming trend has also been detected on Mars? That would lead the cause of warming to be something the planets have in common - the Sun. Empirical measurements show solar output higher, so wouldn't you think that the most likely explanation would be the most logical one, rather than simple-minded "explanations" of processes that we don't nearly understand?
First, the Earth's atmosphere consists of about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, and trace other gases (including water of about 0.5% and CO2 of about 0.05%). Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas, oxygen is not a greenhouse gas, and argon is not a greenhouse gas. Thus, of the 32 K greenhouse effect, CO2 plays a very important role. Water is the dominant greenhouse gas, but it primarily serves to amplify the effect of other greenhouse gases since warmer air can hold more water. Additionally, water isn't as significant as it may appear (having a tenfold higher concentration than CO2) because it will precipitate out at colder elevations. Thus, CO2 and methane are the primary greenhouse gases that are really driving the greenhouse effect (with their effect amplified by the water vapour).
Second, the possible effects of a slight increase in solar intensity have been noted. They are too small to account for the increase in atmospheric temperature if they exist. And even the largest potential effect could only account for about a quarter of the warming that has been observed.
Actual bushfire science from September 2007 (Score:5, Informative)
By the Bushfire CRC and the CSIRO:
http://www.bushfirecrc.com/research/downloads/climate-institute-report-september-2007.pdf [bushfirecrc.com]
From the concluding remarks:
"In this study, the potential impact of climate change on southeast Australia is estimated. Simulations from two CSIRO climate models using two greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions scenarios are combined with historical weather observations to assess the changes to fire weather expected by 2020 and 2050. In general, fire weather conditions are expected to worsen. ...
The number of "extreme" fire danger days generally increases 5-25% for the low scenarios and 15-65% for the high scenarios. By 2050, the increases are generally 10-50% in the low scenarios and 100-300% for the high scenarios. The seasons are likely to become longer, starting
earlier in the year.
These results are placed in the context of the current climate and its tendencies. During the last several years in southeast Australia, including the 2006-07 season, particularly severe fire weather conditions have been observed. In many cases, the conditions far exceed the projections in the high scenarios of 2050. Are the models (or our methodology) too conservative or is some other factor at work?"
Add to this, the fact that the place is tinder dry precisely because of the preceding 12 years of extreme drought AND the cutbacks to brush clearing and back-burning ("green" policies are an excuse for councils and state governments spending less $$$ - just like every other service they've cut), and you've got the "perfect (fire) storm" conditions we had on Black Saturday.
Given that climate change isn't going away, and that all the models indicate SE Australia will get drier and hotter, and given that governments aren't going to be increasing spending in this area any time soon (OK - maybe they'll be shamed into doing something for a couple of years before the new programmes get cut back again), it is HIGHLY LIKELY that this sort of thing will become a frequent occurrence (say every 2-3 years somewhere in SA, VIC, NSW).
By the way, NASA have a fantastic pic showing how anomalous the heatwave leading up to Black Saturday was against recent summer averages:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36900 [nasa.gov]
Of course, while we were burning down south, the banana benders up north were setting new records for floods.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think stone age people can clearcut forests....
Why not? The more common way would be burning the forest, but 6 billion people with stone axes could get rid of most forests rather quickly.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, there are other variables, such as supplies in urban areas that would be looted. Also barring some extreme act, we would be unlikely to have no governance (e.g. in the event of a catastrophic final economic collapse). Here in Ireland for example, it is likely that electricity could be provided for maybe an hour a day just using native resources and the handful of older hydro/peat power plants we have (of course, here the electricity company is semi-state owned/run, other places may not have that luxury). Many essential services have at least a couple of days grace period (battery/fuel back-up) that may allow further time for emergency measures to ensure native resources can be utilised to keep very basic services going. In a sense, I'd expect Ireland, at least outside Dublin, to be more back in say the 1930s (the era of rural electrification just beginning) than complete collapse of society.
Personally, our approach is to have stockpiles for a week or two of disruption - anything beyond that and we are all pretty stuck anyway! A couple cans of fuel and generator will keep the freezer going (10 mins per hour) and charge the UPS (for broadband/phone) and one laptop (for uncensored outside news). Our telecoms infrastructure has at least a week's back-up (state-run TV/radio plus land-lines, some mobile telecoms and wireless broadband) and a special crisis mode that TV services are switched to in the event of an emergency (tested just a couple weeks ago at 3am).
We probably have native food production to last for a short time (e.g. native power can probably ensure continuation of minimal milk production for example), long enough to switch farm production to essential supplies (probably not enough for anything beyond rudimentary survival for the first year). It would be worse than during WWII though ("The Emergency" as it was called here - the State did go into crisis control-mode, and took direct control of many sectors of society to see us all through it). Undoubtedly many people would be doing manual labour again - e.g. if we kept the peat power stations running and wanted winter fuel, hundreds if not thousands would be in the Midlands cutting turf manually rather than the machine harvesting that occurs at present. Native gas supplies would be used only for essential power/industry - our heating would be switched off (it would be bad - but tolerable for most in the Irish climate).
Particularly with the past threats of nuclear catastrophe, I would expect the US to have plans for a special emergency mode - I suppose with it being a bigger place, not everywhere will be attended to, but I doubt loss of control would be absolute or even the majority of regions.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:3, Informative)
you're deluded, most of the results of modern physics are in fact statistical. Every new particle "found" in the last few decades was in fact just a statistical clustering of results that conformed within statistical margin to model being tested. And our physics most certainly does NOT describe all that is known. For example, we don't have a gravity model that can be verified. We don't know if the Standard Model will hold at higher energies. We don't know how many dimensions the universe has. We don't know why high temperature superconductors work. And the list goes on and on.....
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:3, Informative)
Also, for all of us who doubt all the global warming CO2 spoonfeeding, that would like do have some DIY experience; do these steps;
Did you know that there were about twice as many sunspots in the last decades of the previous century as in the early 1900s? And three times as many as in 1830?
Okay, I followed your steps (well, actually I followed some similar steps a while ago) and the result was this [wikipedia.org]. Historically things don't look to bad, but the last 50 years or so show a distinct divergence in sunspot activity and temperature trends. That divergence happens to line up nicely with CO2 trends. Your claims of clear correlation in sunspot activity with recent warming just don't hold up upon inspection of the data. Yes there are clear correlations between sunspot activity and global temperature; that should come as no surprise: of course changes in solar activity affect climate. Those correlations do not in any way account for the current observed rise in temperatures however.
The python code to generate the plot (pulling the latest data directly from online sources) is included on the linked page, so if you want to play, have at it.