The big decision Australia faces — We could try to stop all arsonists, lightning, wind, droughts and cool the entire world, or we could reduce the fuel. Which will it be?
In Australia, the situation is comi-tragic. As potential record-breaking heatwave heads eastwards across the country our fire-fighters are reduced to emergency backburning— an act of sheer desperation on the verge of panic in these conditions. The fires they light in the hope of stopping firestorms are causing firestorms — with flames 70 meters high — even burning down one of the RFS captains homes. This is fuel reduction six months too late. One twelve year old drove a car to escape a fire. 2,000 firefighters are battling 108 blazes. A coal mine and a power station are in the path in NSW. The Mount Piper Power Station generates about 10 per cent of NSW’s electricity and is 3km from a fire front. At the coal mine unprocessed coal lies on the surface. How much fun can you have?
Temperatures of 44C (111f) and 46C (114f) are forecast for the outskirts of Sydney on Friday and Saturday.
The East Coast is a cauldron of fuel, millions of hectares of dense match-sticks waiting-to-go. Meanwhile Greens are complaining about the smoke haze and pollution that their policies created and chanting about “climate change” with all the indulgent self righteousness and scientific reasoning of injured four-year-old fortune-tellers.
The grown-ups see things differently. Roger Underwood is a former General Manager of CALM in WA (Dept of Conservation and Land Management), a regional and district manager, a research manager and bushfire specialist. Roger Underwood has 60 years experience in Australian bushfire management. He is one of the leading experts behind Bushfirefront, and this graph (below) that I keep showing. For 18 years they’ve been warning “reduce fuel”, “reduce fuel”, “reduce fuel”.
As he says: Fire need three things — oxygen, fuel and a spark. The only thing we can control is the fuel.
The big decision Australia faces — We could try to stop all arsonists, lightning, wind, droughts and cool the entire world, or we can reduce the fuel. Which will it be? The intellectual giants running the national conversation are still not sure which way to go.
In Western Australia after the major fires of 1961 a massive and dedicated fuel reduction program stopped wildfires for twenty years. Then as the prescribed burn area fell, the wildfire emergencies returned. Its obvious, unarguable, and agrees with everything else we know. It’s still to complicated for the ABC.
A one degree temperature rise does not create a firestorm
The difference between 39C and 40C is not the difference between normal and catastrophic fires.
Modern witchdoctors wave their windmill-totems and want us to stop fires with solar panels and batteries — so possibly in one hundred years we might get shorter droughts, slower winds, less lightning, and temperatures that might be a meaningless 1 degree cooler (in their wildest dreams and with no possible numerical justification even through their own broken, failing models and as assessed by their favourite mass foreign committee of 26,000 experts).
Even if we sacrificed our economy and way of life and somehow achieved what they wanted the nation would be a powder-keg for the next hundred years, and then after they “succeeded” it would still be a powder keg.
Watch this space… pray for people, koalas and forests. Trainwreck in action in Australia…
— Jo
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Climate change versus bushfires: killer flaws in an unhelpful and dangerous argument
by Roger Underwood
A group of former “fire chiefs” are blaming the current bushfires across Australia on climate change, and demanding that Prime Minister Morrison takes urgent action to fix the climate. This, they claim, will fix the bushfire threat.
This position is not just unhelpful, it is dangerous. Even if we could change the climate (cooler summers, saturating winter rains, light breezes, no more droughts), it would not influence the current weather patterns or stop the fierce bushfire coming up the driveway this afternoon. Even if we knew exactly how to change the climate, anything we do in Australia will have to be replicated globally (especially in China and India) to make any difference, and even if these climate-changing measures were applied globally tomorrow, the desired new climate might not cut in for many years.
The “climate-change-is-causing-bushfires” position has two killer flaws.
- First, it takes no account of fuels; and second
- It prescribes no practical actions that will help with the immediate bushfire threat.
Ignoring fuel is an error of astonishing magnitude and seriously undermines the credibility of the “fire chiefs”. It is almost as if they never studied elementary bushfire science. In Bushfire 101 we learned about The Fire Triangle. This illustrates a fundamental reality: a bushfire (in fact any fire) can only occur if three things are co-present: oxygen (in the air), fuel (to burn) and heat (a source of ignition to get the fire started).
If any one of the three is missing the result is no fire.
Unfortunately, nothing can be done to remove the air and the oxygen it contains. Unhappily, nothing can be done to stop bushfires starting. They will either be lit by Mother Nature in the form of lightning strikes, or will be started by humans, either deliberately or accidentally.
But bushfire fuel can be removed, or at least the quantity of fuel around a house or in the bush can be reduced to a point where a fire will burn at a relatively low intensity , allowing firefighters to deal with it relatively comfortably.
On the other hand, if fuel is allowed to build up, as happens in long-unburned eucalypt bushland, the eventual fire will be of high intensity. If a crown fire results, generating a downwind ember storm, the fire will be impossible to control and highly damaging, no matter how many thousands of firefighters and water bombers you throw at it.
Blaming climate change for the current spate of bushfires ignores the fact that these bushfires have proven almost impossible to control once they got going. This is because they are burning in heavy fuels dried out by drought. Ignoring fuel is the ultimate cop-out. It absolves the authorities of any responsibility for the incubation of this fire epidemic, and especially it absolves the former “fire chiefs” for not doing their job over the years, allowing dangerous levels of fuel to accumulate in the nation’s bushlands.
But what of the solutions proposed by the “fire chiefs”? I have yet to see any, other than the usual suggestions to curtail CO2 emissions, shut down coal-fired power stations, no coal mines, switch to electric cars, use trains instead of aircraft, and so on. But what will these measures actually achieve? There is no agreement. And when will their impact on the climate become significant? There is no agreement on this either, other than vague statements about 2030 or 2040.
As far as I can see the “fire chiefs” have offered nothing of any practical or immediate value in terms of bushfire management.
However, I am in full agreement with the “fire chiefs” over one thing: something does need to be done to fix the bushfire crisis in Australia. A good start would be for governments and bureaucrats to acknowledge the three great truths about bushfire occurrence and severity in this country:
- Australia is naturally bushfire-prone. This is because of our hot, dry summers, periodic droughts, flammable vegetation and abundant sources of ignition.
- Bushfires cannot be prevented; but bushfire severity and bushfire damage can be minimised if an effective management approach is adopted.
- The effective approach is well-understood and field-tested: (i) you must harden-up rural and semi-rural communities to increase their resilience in the expectation of fire; (ii) you must reduce the fuels in the bush; and (iii) you need to have in place an efficient fire fighting force. It won’t work with only one of the three, you must have them all, properly integrated.
One of the biggest problems with the current situation is that the nation as a whole does not understand or agree upon these key points. There is a confusion about priorities. Thus we see “fire chiefs” focusing on climate change, environmentalists focus on protecting biodiversity, the fire services focus on firefighting, the aviation industry (supported by the media) is pushing for more and bigger water bombers. Meanwhile politicians are scrambling to please everyone … but pleasing nobody. The leadership vacuum is devastating, and nothing will change for the better until this vacuum is filled.
But while I agree with “the fire chiefs” that something needs to be done, I deplore their focus on climate change as the solution. Because it ignores the influence of fuel on bushfire severity, it is a flawed argument; and because they prescribe nothing of practical or immediate benefit, they offer nothing of value. If the government was to adopt their position, ignoring the need to make communities more resilient and ignoring bushland fuel build-up, the result would only be a worsening of the current bushfire crisis.
I conclude that what we are seeing from the “fire chiefs” is a political exercise, based on a different agenda, the ‘take-action-on-climate-change’ agenda rather than the ‘fix-the-bushfire-crisis-now’ agenda. The bushfire situation is being used as a vehicle for their political agenda. Until the “fire chiefs” start advocating a practical approach to remediating the immediate bushfire threat, they must be regarded simply as climate activists, and therefore as a distraction in the business of stopping bushfire damage. There is nothing wrong with being a climate activist, per se, but advocating policies that distract the authorities from dealing with the immediate bushfire threat can only be described as unhelpful and, indeed, irresponsible.
Roger Underwood has 60 years experience in Australian bushfire management