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?"
Re:Global warming isn't really cutting in yet (Score:4, Interesting)
More fundamentally, no one drought can be directly attributed to global warming, just as the current cold winter in NA can be considered as casting doubt on global warming.
Over time, global warming may make droughts such as the one that exacerbated the current AU fire situation more common. During the change, the vegetation left over from the wetter period before global warming will result in some spectacular fires, but it will only be in hindsight that we can say fires were a result of the change.
Re:Why don't the Austrailians build differently? (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the houses in the affected areas were as much as 100 years old. They were built when timber was the only material available. Later houses tended to be built the same way either because of tradition, or people wanting to build houses which fitted in with the historic designs.
I work with a guy who has a two story oiled timber house. On the day of the fire he was away from home with his family. When he finally got back a couple of days later he was surprised to find it still there. Another person I work with lost his home (and old farm house) in the fire and barely escaped. They actually drove one way into the fire, turned around and took the last clear road out of the area.
As for vegetation around houses home owners have been blaming local council regulations which prevent them from cutting down trees. One family were fined for removing a tree and later credited that act with saving their house.
Re:Oops (Score:2, Interesting)
Your acting like climate science is a positive science, where we can do experiments and do direct event correlation.
We can't. We don't know -at all- what is causing climate behavior. All we have are statistical models ... and 80% of that model is the following brilliant rule :
"the weather doesn't change" (= about 80% of any climate model)
And while I may agree that statistically this is, without any argument, correct, it is not a solid basis for predicting the weather a long time from now (or even more than a week).
In addition to that, the sun's been acting up rather badly (google "sunspot cycle 24"). Now when a 2960 billion petawatt fusion reactor does something unexpected, the consequences are ... severe. 1% difference in output and we'll have the mother of all ice ages next year. Right now we have about 4% difference (the sun's corona is 4% cooler - in absolute value, than the value climate models currently use, nobody knows why, or when it will change). If that doesn't change fast, no amount of co2 in the athmosphere is going to save us from the mother of all winters coming up real soon. And if it does change, it will -once again- render all climate predictions invalid.
Re:Why don't the Austrailians build differently? (Score:5, Interesting)
"As for vegetation around houses home owners have been blaming local council regulations which prevent them from cutting down trees. One family were fined for removing a tree and later credited that act with saving their house."
You may be interested in the councils side of that story, the minutes can be found here [vic.gov.au] (pdf warning). I don't know what happend to the four acres of trees Mr Shehan cut down but from my days working on an old growth sawmill a back of the envelope calculation says that many trees would have yeilded ~5000 tons of processed timber and several thousand tons of woodchips.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:historical perspective (Score:1, Interesting)
if you think i'm trolling or full shit i suggest you take a good hard google on the subject and you'll see i'm right. that and i've lived with them all my life so i know exactly what they get up to.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:5, Interesting)
Climate change isn't the theory. It is the effect. The theory is that greenhouse gases raise the temperature of the atmosphere of a planet. This has been well tested with small scale experiments and large scale observations (such as observing the atmospheric composition and temperatures of Mars and Venus). There are a lot of details that go into climate change, but the general idea is very common sense:
Step 1: Shine some light in the visible spectrum on an object through a gas that doesn't absorb a huge amount of energy at most of those wavelengths (for example, from any random object that you might see that has a 5780 K blackbody temperature).
Step 2: Choose an appropriate gas (like CO2 or methane) that will absorb a lot of energy from the blackbody emissions of that object (Stefan's Law).
Step 3: Watch the temperature of that gas rise.
Do you get the gist? It isn't rocket science. If you add a shitload of CO2 to the atmosphere, the temperature of the surface of the planet is going to rise.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:1, Interesting)
The argument:
Global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect which is caused by greenhouse gases which are released from burning oil.
The problems:
1. Ignores the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect: water vapor.
The water vapour in the atmosphere is dependent on the temperature of the atmosphere. Its effect is well understood. And no, water vapour isn't ignored like you would have us believe. But I doubt you've ever read the IPCC reports to validate that specific conspiracy theory.
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!!!
The formation of life is a complex topic, but it really isn't relevant as this is a straw man argument. There are three carbon cycles: organic, inorganic, and geological. You argue as if CO2 can only go between plants, oil, and the atmosphere. In reality the majority carbon is removed from the atmosphere through organic and inorganic processes in the oceans, is precipitated in the form of limestone on the bottom of the oceans, and is dragged along by plate tectonics (where it can be reemitted after subduction by volcanoes or pushed to the surface and weathered away). This process takes tens or hundreds of millions of years. Only a very tiny percentage of the CO2 of this planet ever made it into oil or coal (which is from a different process). If one were to follow your theory and think that it would be just fine to put CO2 into the air just because it was there before, then there would be no problem with releasing the 50,000,000 Gigatonnes of carbon stored in limestone (in contrast with the 5000 Gigatonnes in all of the known fossil fuel reserves and the 5,000,000 Gigatonne weight of the entire Earth's atmosphere).
3. Global temperatures have not been tracked long or accurate enough to make the empirical claims that have been made.
Bullshit. You don't know what you are talking about.
4. Global warming has been replaced with Climate Change, and all evidence is, by definition, in favor of Climate Change. Ie, it is now disprovable since it accurately predicts the future can hold anything.
All in all I'm glad it it makes its way into every topic...
Yes, it is a conspiracy theory. We've been trying to fool the world, and we would have been successful if it wasn't for your meddling!
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:3, Interesting)
Water vapor is near the saturation point nearly everywhere in the atmosphere. The only place where this isn't true is the polar regions, where most of the water has been frozen out of the air. It's here that CO2 will have its biggest effect. Also, exactly the last place where you want temperatures to rise.
Currently existing oil was conviently put there with the deaths of billions of billions of algae cells. Lets leave their bodies where they are.
The key phrse is not just "Climate Change", but "Anthropogenic Climate Change". In other words, the climate provably changing due to specific human activities. This not only covers the greenhouse effect of CO2, but also things like overgrazing causing desterification.
Re:Climate Change? No. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Size of Victoria: 22.8 million hectares. Size of the "planned burns" for 2008, 156,000 hectares. You do the math. My take though is that burning what has to be around 1-2% of highly flammable land is insufficient especially given that there have been a few decades (right?) when Australia fought every fire that cropped up.
Re:Why don't the Austrailians build differently? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is any of this based on fact or research or is it simply just guesswork?
One thing that stood out to me was this:
"Less than 25% of the 21% rural dwellers will have the necessities on hand for continued survival without our modern infrastructures. i.e., how do you plow a field without a tractor (no fuel)."
How do you think fields were plowed and trade carried out before we'd invented motor vehicles?
We only need tractors because we're farming to provide food for millions, most of which are those urbanites. If you no longer need to farm on the scale required to feed the now irrelevant urbanites, then why do you even need a tractor? Any urbanites that came along could be given the choice of working the land you can no longer work to produce their own food.
You also don't need a direct supply of water to survive although how many people wouldn't have a stream or river within a decent distance? but even without that kind of water supply, in the America's plants like cacti provide a good supply of water to keep you hydrated. Having butchered many myself I can assure you that sucking the liquids out of them is fairly easy, much like any fruit such as a kiwi only they're much more efficient at storing it than most other plants. Saguaro (Carnegia gigantea) in Arizona/California for example at their hydrated peak consist of around 90% water and can soak up 200 gallons. The other 10% consists of woody stems, the skin and spines. Many cacti can survive over 2 years without a drop of additional water than that already stored in them and if you chop them they'll callous over quickly. Effectively what this means is if you chopped down a large cactus, you could suck or extract a lot of liquid from it, let it callous over and it would effectively act as a self-sealing water storage device. Many desert areas that are human inhabited in the rest of the world where cacti don't grow (at least natively) have similar plants, commonly Euphorbia. Areas that aren't desert like wont have much of an issue with water supply anyway!
I see little reason why rural populations couldn't survive in almost their entirety. The biggest issue would be the urbanites that did escape and if they overwhelmed the rural populations, but in general they wouldn't necessarily lead to a decline in the rural population, if anything an increase unless they started getting reckless and killing each other for resources. It'd almost certainly be more likely the cause of human actions that would lead to mass deaths in the rural areas if anything than it would people unable to find what they need to survive there.
Taking into account humans killing each other due to scarcity of resources this happens all the time and has since man figured out how to kill each other wouldn't have much effect on long term rural populations as when they'd killed enough of each other, resources would no longer be so scarce they'd be worth fighting over.
I'm not really sure why you make the assumption that if people's water pumps failed that they'd be wholly unable to gather water themselves from a stream, from rainfall, from plants, from a well?
I think realistically what you'd see is a quick increase in rural population as people left the cities, followed by a decline as people fought for resources followed by it reaching an equilibrium that was somewhat above that of the initial rural population as rural areas can provide for far more people than currently live there - mostly because as mentioned, they feed the cities in the first place.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:4, Interesting)
The real issue is that there is currently no unambiguous method of measuring the global temperature
No, the real problem is that "global temperature" isn't a meaningful thermodynamic quantity. Global atmospheric heat content is, but no one has a clue what that is because we need to know both temperature and humidity (ie, both wet and dry bulb temperatures) to determine it.
However, global ocean heat content appears to be measurable, and appears to be rising.
Re:CO2 causes Global Warming? (Score:1, Interesting)
All of this sounds really clever and all, but where are your sources? It's all fine and dandy that you have these facts, but just like all the other nuts, if you can't prove it you are just adding fuel to the flames (bad pun, I know).
Top Jap Scientists: Warming Not Caused By Human Activity [infowars.com]