Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
1–10 of 215 posts
Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
#2If you live in Australia, what is this doing in terms of changing what people think and do about climate change? Is it motivating personal changes in diet, traveling and election voting choices?
If this nightmare scenario isn't enough to push people into taking action, what will?
Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
#3Let’s see how is this going to influence Australia’s opinion on their coal powered cheap electricity.
Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
#4I asked a firefighter when is the fire considered safe once it appears to have stopped burning? The answer surprised me a bit. You need to have a 100m strip around the fire where someone has raked or inspected inside every tree, under every cow pat, bit of grass to make sure nothing is smouldering in that area. This is a huge job as for the fire I enquired about (Cudlee Creek SA), the perimeter is 180km and a fair bit of this is in rugged terrain. So a ton of work.
Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
#5As a long term Australian, this is categorically the worst fire season Australia has experienced.
Summer in Australia always comes with one or two big fires in at-risk rural areas over the months from December to February.
Queensland and New South Wales were burning heavily by early December. And now Victoria and South Australia have joined in as well and we're still only just into the second month of three. It's unprecedented.
The one thing that may provide back handed comfort is that so much has burnt that it will be a few years before enough 'fuel' is regrown for fires of this scale to be possible again.
I'm wondering the unknowable tipping point at which the cost of rebuilding from bushfires outweighs the costs of de-carbonising the economy. Part of the problem with that is who / where the costs are borne / spread amongst.
Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
#6If you live in Australia, what is this doing in terms of changing what people think and do about climate change? Is it motivating personal changes in diet, traveling and election voting choices? If this nightmare scenario isn't enough to push people into taking action, what will?
Nothing. A fire is not evidence of climate change any more than an absence of fire is evidence against.
Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
#7Let’s see how is this going to influence Australia’s opinion on their coal powered cheap electricity.
What are you comparing Australia's electricity to to call it cheap?
Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
#8I asked a firefighter when is the fire considered safe once it appears to have stopped burning? The answer surprised me a bit. You need to have a 100m strip around the fire where someone has raked or inspected inside every tree, under every cow pat, bit of grass to make sure nothing is smouldering in that area. This is a huge job as for the fire I enquired about (Cudlee Creek SA), the perimeter is 180km and a fair bi…
Honestly I'm surprised that's sufficient. To my knowledge you can even have root fires burning underground for months. And I expect embers can travel in the wind far longer distances than 100m. It's pretty impressive to me they can do it with 100m of inspection, let alone how difficult that already is.
Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
#9Let’s see how is this going to influence Australia’s opinion on their coal powered cheap electricity.
Very interested to see the 'colour maps' for the next Federal election.
Most rural areas were blue for the last election.
(Blue represents the conservative Liberal Government, whilst Red is the opposition, Labor party. The Liberals are quite 'denialist', or at least obstructionist, when it comes to progress on alternative energy. Neither party are particularly inspiring to the Australia populace at the moment though).
Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia
#10If you live in Australia, what is this doing in terms of changing what people think and do about climate change? Is it motivating personal changes in diet, traveling and election voting choices? If this nightmare scenario isn't enough to push people into taking action, what will?
The elections have already happened in May, and people have rejected the Labor party who was pushing for climate change reforms.
I suspect if the elections were to happen now, things might be different. Lots of people have directly or indirectly (thanks to heavy smog) suffered from the wildfires, moreso than previous summers.