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Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia

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Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia

#101

Post by Gustomaximus »

sumedh wrote: post #100
yen223 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and people have rejected the Labor party who was pushing for climate change reforms. Labor were also saying that taxes will increase, I think that is the major factor for their loss.

LNP were also pushing hard that taxes will increase under labour with their big push on the 'Labor will introduce death tax' which was highly unethical and misleading.

Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia

#102

Post by gwillz »

Scarblac wrote: post #68
Tehdasi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite, there will be less fuel, but not less trees. The bushland of Australia has had regular fires baked into it's ecosystem, so the plant species all have coping mechanisms to deal with fire. A good example is are the Banksia varieties that rely on a bushfire to germinate.

Yes, but apparently there are now also lots of forests burning that have never burned before and where the trees aren't adapted for it.

In addition to that, some fires are burning so hot and so regularly that the trees and seeds completely die. They haven't got the breathing time to recover.

Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia

#103

Post by gwillz »

chris1993 wrote: post #36
carl_sandland wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Canberra, it feels like I'm living in a space station on a toxic planet; I haven't seen blue skies in a month. See this chart ( https://air-quality.com/place/australia/australian-capital-t... ) which has air pollution literally OFF their chart ranges. Hearing the drivel spewing from our PM and other politicians; It's always the same pandering responses with no real strategic change. It's beyond frustrating. W…

One of the issues is that the 'window' for fuel load management/back burning is shrinking because the bush fire season is starting earlier. We had out of control fires from September, which is unheard of, and concerns that they were started by back burning operations.

In contrast, we had snow in our alpine regions into December. The weather is completely nutty recently.

Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia

#105

Post by h0l0cube »

Scarblac wrote: post #68
Tehdasi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite, there will be less fuel, but not less trees. The bushland of Australia has had regular fires baked into it's ecosystem, so the plant species all have coping mechanisms to deal with fire. A good example is are the Banksia varieties that rely on a bushfire to germinate.

Yes, but apparently there are now also lots of forests burning that have never burned before and where the trees aren't adapted for it.

These are typically areas where eucalypts have died off after centuries, allowing other species to fill the gap. Now that the fires have come through, the eucalypts will come back to fill the gaps and will quickly out-compete any other plants with superior height and canopy. They will get their next chance, a few centuries hence.

Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia

#107

Post by Intermernet »

tempsy wrote: post #95

I heard that earlier efforts in the year to do controlled burns were protested against by activists and thus paused and could’ve contributed to the extent of the fires now.

This is misinformation happily spread by the Australian media, who are hand in hand with the fossil fuel and forestry lobbiests. The Australian green party has supported hazard reduction burning for many years. The activists you mention have had pretty much zero influence on what hazard reduction has been done. The current government cut the budget for the fire service so drastically that they lost about 60% of the qualified staff who were in charge of planning hazard reduction burns. We have areas the size of Tasmania that are the responsibility of 1 hazard reduction expert. The areas that are burning are not areas that the activists you mentioned were active. Some of the fires in September and October were likely caused by hazard reduction burning.

Basically, hazard reduction burning is a viable technique when the fire season lasts 3 or 4 months. This fire season is looking like it will last for 6 to 7 months, which leaves very little time to plan and execute hazard reduction.

You are probably not taking into account the size of the areas that require hazard reduction management, and the low (now even lower) number of people who are responsible for it.

In short, environmental activists (and, mostly, arsonists) are a bogeyman created by people trying to divert attention away from the real problems.

The main real problems are:

Due to forestry the water cycle on the western side of the great dividing range (and other mountains in Australia) has been disrupted and areas that usually receive rain have had declining rain or no rain in the past decade.

Global patterns such as El Nino have been disrupted leading to less precipitation and one of the worst droughts in Australian history.

Average temperatures across the continent have been setting new records for the past decade, with 2019 being the hottest year on record, and about 3 weeks ago we had the hottest day on record Australia wide.

Serious budget cuts to the organisations who are responsible for hazard reduction in fire prone areas.

It's basically the perfect storm of climate change and government ineptitude.

But, according to our glorious leader, we should not worry, stay calm and watch the cricket.

Seriously, you couldn't make this shit up if you tried.

Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia

#108

Post by jkrltifk »

jrziviani wrote: post #104

Why aren't Europe, Greta, Hollywood artists screaming their head off just like they did at Brazil/Amazon Forest on June?

Hive it a bit of time. For the Amazon fires, local activists were DMing influencers. This is how coverage started on Instagram, and then the media picked it up.

Now I already see instagram influencers asking about this, in about a week top accounts will post toom

Re: Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia

#110

Post by Merrill »

voltagex_ wrote: post #81
fs2 wrote: post #72

It's sad to see how these fires are automatically linked to climate change. Until the mid 2000's Australia burned down small patches of forests to prevent large disasters like these we have now. But that changed when burning down forests (mind you to prevent larger forest fires in the future) were deemed too bad for the environment. So now the policies and fire prevention techniques changed (for the worse) and exactl…

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/12/is-th...

>Bradstock says research “overwhelmingly” demonstrates that creating a 40- to 50-metre fuel break around a house can give it a much greater chance of surviving fires.
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