Omeo . Image courtesy of Department of Environment and Primary Industries, Victoria. More photos
Those who don’t know history…
On Black Friday 1939, on a day of high wind and savage 45 degree heat (110 Fahrenheit) many separate fires joined forces in Victoria to make mass conflagrations, one of which burned most of the western flanks of the Snowy Mountains all the way to New South Wales. In the end the conflagration burned through two million hectares, 3,700 buildings, 69 mills and killed 71 people. Five towns were completely destroyed — never to be rebuilt. At the time, the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide was 310ppm and 90% of all human emissions were yet to be made. Climate Change has nothing to do with it.
In the end, they were horribly unprepared, the forests were horribly overgrown and the weather was horribly extreme.
Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough.
The Stretton Royal Commission into the Black Friday fires found that it “almost all fires are caused by man”, and recommended among many other things, the “common bush practice of controlled burning to reduce risks”. The Commission (as well as the fires) had far reaching effects: spawning roads, firebreaks, dams, aerial patrols. A radio network was set up that was considered better then than what the police and military had (think… that was 1939). The Forests Commission more than doubled the area it was managing.
The report makes for interesting reading: the populace were struck with apathy, letting things become overgrown too close to town. The Board of Works believed planned burns were a bad idea and let the forest manage itself naturally. The people and industry were careless, lighting fires for all kinds of reasons, flagrantly flouting laws they disagreed with or felt were silly and unenforceable. The Minister kept half the funds of the Forestry Commission, and lots of people told a version of the truth that best served their own interests. How nothing changes.
Various Departments competed and fought among themselves and Stretton wanted ” to expose and scotch the foolish enmities which mar the management of the forests by public departments, who, being our servants, have become so much our masters that in some respects they lose sight of our interests in the promotion of their mutual animosities.
Thanks to David B for sending in these excerpts. I’ve read quite a bit of the report though, no doubt there are plenty more gems to be found. There is some reassurance there knowing that government was just as inept, corrupt and incompetent then. Though we have less excuse…
VICTORIA REPORT OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION TO INQUIRE INTO
The Causes of and Measures Taken to Prevent the Bush Fires of January, 1939,
and to Protect Life and Property AND
The Measures to be Taken to Prevent Bush Fires in Victoria
and to Protect Life and Property in the Event of Future Bush Fires.
“There had been no fires to equal these in destructiveness or intensity in the history of settlement in this State, except perhaps the fires of 1851, which, too, came at summer culmination of a long drought.
“Balls of crackling fire sped at a great pace in advance of the fires consuming with a roaring explosive noise….”
“The speed of the fires was appalling. They leaped from mountain peak to mountain peak, or far out into the lower country, lighting the forests 6 or 7 miles in advance of the main fires. Blown by a wind of great force, they roared as they travelled. Balls of crackling fire sped at a great pace in advance of the fires, consuming with a roaring, explosive noise, all that they touched. Houses of brick were seen and heard to leap into a roar of flame before the fires had reached them. Some men of science hold the view that the fires generated and were preceded by inflammable gases which became alight. Great pieces of burning bark were carried by the wind to set in raging flame regions not yet reached by the fires. Such was the force of the wind i hat, in many places, hundreds of trees of great size were blown clear of the earth, tons of soil, with embedded masses of rock, still adhering to the roots ; for mile upon mile the former forest monarchs were laid in confusion, burnt, torn from the earth, and piled one upon another as matches strewn by a giant hand.”
“On that day it appeared that the whole State was alight.
At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Men carrying hurricane lamps, worked to make safe their families and belongings Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished. Throughout the land there was daytime darkness,. At one mill, desperate but futile efforts were made to clear of inflammable scrub the borders of the mill and mill settlement. All but one person, at that mill, were burned to death, many of them while trying to burrow to imagined safety in the sawdust heap. Horses were found, still harnessed, in their stalls, dead, their limbs fantastically contorted. The full story of the killing of this small community is one of unpreparedness, because of apathy and ignorance and perhaps of something worse. Steel girders and machinery were twisted by heat as if they had been of fine wire. Sleepers of heavy durable timber, set in the soil, their upper surfaces flush with the ground, were burnt through. Other heavy woodwork disappeared, leaving no trace. Where the fire was most intense the soil was burnt and destroyed to such a depth that it may be many years before it shall have been restored by the slow chemistry of Nature. Acres upon acres of the soil itself can be retained only by the effort of man in a fight against natural erosive forces.”
“Millions of acres of fine forest, of almost incalculable value, were destroyed or badly damaged. Townships were obliterated in a few minutes Mills, houses, bridges, tramways, machinery, were burned to the ground; men, cattle, horses, sheep, were devoured by the fires or asphyxiated by the scorching debilitated air. Generally, the numerous fires which during December, in many parts of Victoria, had been burning separately, as they do in any summer, either ” under control ” as it is falsely and dangerously called, or entirely untended, reached the climax of their intensity and joined forces in a devastating confluence of flame on Friday, the 13th of January. On that day it appeared that the whole State was alight.”
“These fires were lit by the hand of man.”
The prelude — creeks ran dry and the litter was bone dry
So to help them out I’ve graphed UAH satellite temperature record which shows that last year was the 4th hottest year since 1979 when the UAH satellite data set begins.
Perhaps in 2020 the Australian Bureau of Meteorology will set their own record, and explain for the first time how and why they adjust their data continuously and post hoc. The Australian surface data is all changed with a mystical secret technique that cools historic thermometers in paddocks, warms them in cities, and can’t be explained to anyone outside the sacred BOM guild (see the marvel of homogenization). They also might explain why they insist on ignoring the superior satellite data and try to measure a vast continent with flawed surface stations placed next to airport tarmacs, car parks, asphalt, incinerators, skyscrapers, super highways, and basically in sites and that are often not compliant with the BOM’s own standards and using super fast electronic sensors in a way that is not WMO compliant either. Let’s not forget they also get data from boxes that are a quarter of the original size, that move all the time, and that many modern records are just meaningless electronic one second “moments” that could never have been recorded in 1910 (or even in 1980). With so many scientific bombs, the marvel is that 2019 wasn’t even “warmer”.
The hottest year in Australia was 2017, then 1998, then 2016 and then 2019
According to the BOM the year 1998 was +0.96 °C above the 1961-1990 average and last year was nearly 0.6 degrees warmer that that. But according to the NASA Satellites, this year was a tenth of a degree cooler than 1998. The gap between satellite measured 1998 and BOM measured 1998, as compared to their 2019 measurements, is now almost as large the entire warming trend for the last century.
UAH Satellite data
YEAR
Australia
ave temp Degrees C
1
2017
0.71
2
1998
0.70
3
2016
0.59
4
2019
0.58
5
2018
0.51
No doubt the honest scientists at the BOM will issue a correction to all their incomplete press releases any day now, unless of course, they are trying to scare more money out of Australian taxpayers, in which case they probably don’t want Australians to know how different the satellite measures are.
DATA: Update Jan 9th 2019 from http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
UPDATE: Vishnu reminds us that Roy Spencer says a 0.6C difference between UAH and the BOM surface temperatures can occur in especially dry years during summer (though he found the opposite effect happens in winter, and we are discussing whole annual averages here). But both 1998 and 2019 were both very dry years, so we’d expect both years to diverge in the same direction which they do not.
Thanks especially to Geoff, with help from Ken, Ian, Ed, Chris, Warwick, Lance and Tony.
To find out the real history of the Australian climate start here:
Rapidly the word about the astonishing rate of arson and man-made accidents* is spreading, but it doesn’t help “the cause” (which for left-leaning journo’s appears to be getting left-leaning politicians elected).
So The Guardian and the ABC are now compiling stories with conspiracy theories about how a thousand or so tweets with a pedantic error mistaking legal action for arrests somehow demonstrates a mysterious disinformation campaign (it’s pro-ject-ion.) The main mystery here is how a prof in Qld can mind read through twitter — Dr Graham tells us “The motivation underlying this often tends to not be changing people’s opinions about the bushfire itself and how it’s happening, but to sow discord and magnify already existing tensions in polarised political issues.”
Maybe people are just angry at the wanton, pointless and avoidable destruction, yeah?
The Love Media are downplaying the arrests in a situation where catching, charging and convicting people must be near impossible, so 24 arrests already for arson this season is remarkable. What’s more important to the nation, preventing arson, saving wilderness, or proof-reading-type errors on social media?
Firstly: Most of these fires are man-made but it’s arson and accidental* not climate change:
In NSW alone 24 people have been charged, with legal action happening against 180 in total ( that’s just in NSW)
6 Jan 2020. NSW Police: Since Friday 8 November 2019, legal action – which ranges from cautions through to criminal charges – has been taken against 183 people – including 40 juveniles – for 205 bushfire-related offences.
24 people have been charged over alleged deliberately-lit bushfires
53 people have had legal actions for allegedly failing to comply with a total fire ban, and
47 people have had legal actions for allegedly discarding a lighted cigarette or match on land.
Janet Stanley, Associate Professor at Melbourne University’s Sustainable Society Institute, The Conversation.
Experts estimate about 85% of bushfires are caused by humans. A person may accidentally or carelessly start a fire, such as leaving a campfire unattended or using machinery which creates sparks. Or a person could maliciously light a fire.
But official fires are just the tip of the iceberg: the actual number of bushfires in Australia is thought to be about five times that recorded. Virtually none of these unrecorded fires are investigated.
A Western Australian study from 2012 estimates 43% of fires in WA are deliberate arson, 22% of fires are due to lightning, 13% are accidental, 2% are escaped from hazard reduction, and 20% are unknown.
Secondly: the misinformation misinformation campaign
The ABC and The Guardian readers are being taken for a ride:
Australia’s bushfire emergency is being exploited on social media, as misinformation is spread through cyberspace via hundreds of thousands of posts.
Bushfire discussion on social media is attracting a high number of “bot-like and troll-like accounts”
Some of the misinformation includes the idea left-wing “ecoterrorists” are behind some fires
The lies are highly sharable, which means they can spread faster than the truth
They don’t mention that four people from a Brazilian green NGO have been arrested in relation to starting fires in the Amazon. We don’t know if they were guilty, or what the evidence is. They deny it, and we hope they get a fair trial. Regardless, the ABC etc are already trying to brand “the idea” of eco-terrorism as misinformation and a conspiracy. Who’s in denial that there might be a motivation in the means-to-an-ends crowd who are hyped up by propaganda about the end-days of climate change ?
The ABC found some of the suspicious accounts were amplifying unproven suggestions arson had been the overwhelming cause of Australia’s disastrous bushfire season.
Suspicious accounts like those of professors? The only details of this study may be here on Znet that I can find.
Online posts exaggerating the role of arson are being used to undermine the link between bushfires and climate change
Bot and troll accounts are involved in a “disinformation campaign” exaggerating the role of arson in Australia’s bushfire disaster, social media analysis suggests. The bushfires burning across the nation have been accompanied by repeated suggestions of an arson epidemic or “arson emergency”.
With a million tweets on climate change and fires, why is this tiny hashtag so important? Maybe some of these are fakes, but how many fakes are shouting about a #ClimateEmergency? Who knows, and don’t ask. Nothing to see here comrade.
The Queensland University of Technology senior lecturer on social network analysis Dr Timothy Graham examined content published on the #arsonemergency hashtag on Twitter, assessing 1,340 tweets, 1,203 of which were unique, published by 315 accounts.
His preliminary analysis found there is likely a “current disinformation campaign” on Twitter’s #arsonemergency hashtag due to the “suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts”.
He similarly found a large number of suspicious accounts posting on the #australiafire and #bushfireaustralia hashtags.
Lord help us. Now he realizes there is hyped up polarisation?
“Australia suddenly appears to be getting swamped by mis/disinformation as a result of this environmental catastrophe, and we are suffering the consequences in terms of hyped up polarisation and an increased difficulty and inability for citizens to discern truth,” Graham told the Guardian.
The Prof finds there’s “likely” a disinformation campaign in a thousand tweets and that means the nation is “swamped”? Tell me again who’s hyping and polarizing the news? The Guardian practically IS a misinformation campaign.
Information is our friend. The poor sods reading The Guardian and The ABC will go out loaded with nothing-burger conspiracies and indignant outrage and get squashed in any real forum.
Color me skeptical, because their headline looks a bit sloppy. I would like links to police news releases or more reliable numbers.
In Queensland, police have arrested 101 people accused of starting bushfires, 69 juveniles and 32 adults.
Five people were arrested for allegedly setting bushland alight in Tasmania – and a further 10 in South Australia.
Meanwhile in Victoria, where locals have experienced some of the most catastrophic conditions the nation has ever seen, 43 people were charged with firebug offences.
H/t to Travis. Thank you. And Dave B and Panda.
* Arson is not the same as an accident — a word that has just been added in two spots to make the point clear. There must be malicious intent. h/t DryLiberal.
REFERENCE:
More information on that study: https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bots-and-trolls-promote-conspiracy-theories-about-australian-bushfires/
The Daily Mail breathlessly recycles Ross Garnaut’s 2008 Climate Change report which predicted every kind of disaster. They don’t mention that nearly every fire report since time began predicted extreme widespread uncontrollable fires from unmanaged fuel loads. But those experts have cause and effect. Garnaut has magic spells from climate models.
He apparently mentioned the first effects wouldn’t be seen til 2020, and here we are, “week one”. Spooky!
This is more and more like analyzing Climate Astrology.
Instead of vaporising a million trees we could have made money, saved lives, homes, property and millions of animals.
Local environmental groups rejoiced that the Eden Woodchip Mill burnt down, then deleted the comment. But ponder, after a man-made inferno, how much better off would the nation have been if we’d chopped down that forest and sold it instead.
“YESSS!!! Some really good news! The Eden Chip Mill is burning down. ” –– Environment East Gippsland EEG
Joy of joys. Even the woodchip pile is on fire? Credit to Jill Redwood from Goongerah who made the first post about the Eden Chip mill burning
Ask a koala: Is it better to chop half the trees down, or incinerate the whole forest?
The bully media are carefully editing every bit of news through the ScoMo-Bad filter
Nothing he does is going to be well received by the ABC and cohort of Big-Government-freeloaders or artsy journo’s who want to run the country from the shouty sidelines.
We hope he can rise above, because there is no pleasing them, and to try is to fail. It is to play right into their hands.
Like Trump, he has to make an asset out of the overt and ridiculous bias. Mock it, and make fun of it. Preempt their criticisms, beat them at their game by informing the people of how each decision will be received and by using every method of communication outside the mainstream media that he can. Trump does live venues and uses twitter. ScoMo has to find his own path.
When criticized for advertising during the crisis, just point out that Australians are scared right now, justifiably. A message of massive and unprecedented action by the government helps to calm and reassure the people. Many in the media amplify the fear. His advertising is the calm hand of government countering the 24/7 reality-TV-show-frenzy.
Scott Morrison is finding himself in the same position as Tony Abbott.
Big sections of the media want him gone, and it’s ugly.
Nothing he does will be good enough. Every step, every word, every act, will be ridiculed, contemptible, broadcast in the most critical light, and the anti-ScoMo narrative will build steam, relentlessly.
He visits fire-ravaged communities, he’s a shameless self-promoter. He stays away, he’s a useless leader.
He gets accused of doing nothing, so he puts out a social media video explaining what the government is doing, and he’s derided globally as tone-deaf and inensitive for “advertising.”
He goes on a holiday with his family which he cuts short, so he’s done the worst thing imaginable. Meanwhile, the QLD Premier is on a cruise and the NSW Emergency Services Minister is in Europe — not a peep about them.
If Australia were wiped off the face of the earth for 100 years, not a jot of difference would be made to the climate, but he has blood on his hands because his climate change policies of the past 12 months aren’t radical enough. …
Tony Abbott had the same problem, until they finally finished him. He wound up stumbling over every single word that came out of his mouth, such were his efforts to guard against their misrepresentation and abuse.
…
I’ve noticed ScoMo is struggling with his words at times, and that’s new. He’s filtering, second-guessing, adapting. …
Sadly in this kind of conversation apologies are worthless. The rules of civility are gone — a huge loss. There is no salvation, no moving forward or learning. All apologies are a weapon to be used against those who caved in to the bullies. They feed the bullies, and get repeated as a reminder that someone admitted some fault. No human is perfect but self-interested commentators will demand their enemies are, while ignoring the same flaws in “friends”. More than anything, the dependent-left are hoping, willing, salivating at the thought of a ScoMo fail. They want to magnify any flaw or failure into on unforgivable error that can be hung like a ball and chain. Right now they desperately need this to distract the public from the epic pathetic failure of the left with their God-like desire to control and protect the environment which has worked out so catastrophically.
They also need to distract from the pagan nonsense that is The Labor Party and Green policy. Australia needs two strong parties and at the moment one is pretending that fires will be controlled with a carbon tax, tofu for dinner and a solar panel on every roof. It’s witchcraft and voodoo based on Fake Science, and innumerate bumper-sticker simplicity. The Global Dumbness hides in a hole guarded by the billion dollar bullies who shout distract and hand-wave at irrelevant misdemeanors hoping to draw attention away from the gaping well of stupid that modern politics is based on.
We must turn their uncivil conversation tactics back on them. Not feed them. Never give them an inch.
No man alone can beat the billion dollar bullies
ScoMo needs support, like Tony Abbott did and didn’t get enough of. And to that end, any commentators who read this, or others and want to share and spread ideas, please do, but please also,share the sources, give the credit.Respect copyright and original content, and play your part in supporting the network that fights for freedom and one-law-for-all, and real science. We can only do this together. Some cut n paste blogs and commentators put themselves above the team. We need the network.
Scott Morrison is on a hiding to nothing when it comes to bushfires. Because he’s not theological about climate change, he can never please the green left.
It doesn’t matter that there have been bigger storms, worse droughts, more destructive floods, and even hotter fires in the past because memories are short and we’re always preoccupied with today’s drama. Because he fully subscribes to the climate cult and because he smartly sought help from the military almost as soon as the fires made it to Victoria, Premier Daniel Andrews has largely escaped criticism – even though he too was on holiday until Monday night and just three years ago, he tried to emasculate the Country Fire Authority and its volunteer firefighter base to please his union mates.
[The NSW] emergency services minister, David Elliott, the one politician who actually has the job of getting us through this calamity, has been on holidays in Europe. Now that he has returned, he should be sacked for deserting his post; he has lost all credibility with fire volunteers, and the community.
In the light of actual news happening around the world, it is a challenge for a committee of entertainment journalists to give some people who pretend to do things, a prize and make that “news”. It’s even harder for them to waltz down red carpets with wildly expensive fashion-set-pieces and pretend to care about anything other than their image. So veganism for weather control makes “sense”, if not for stopping storms, as a form of advertising.
Et Voila: It’s a big commitment after all — forgoing smoked salmon for one meal:
The Golden Globes announced Thursday that the menu for attendees at this year’s awards show will not include meat.
In a statement to The Associated Press, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which hosts the Globes, said that the decision was made to draw attention to the connection between Americans’ diets and climate change.
“If there’s a way we can, not change the world, but save the planet, maybe we can get the Golden Globes to send a signal and draw attention to the issue about climate change,” HFPA President Lorenzo Soria told the AP. “The food we eat, the way we grow the food we eat, the way we dispose of the food is one of the large contributors to the climate crisis.”
Living on the edge:
“It was a little shocking when first mentioned, because of being very close to the actual Globes and having already decided on a menu,” he said
Coming soon, a movie script about how pagan neolithic tribes believed their dinner could stop floods and fires.
Just when power is so important the interconnector went down yesterday between NSW and Victoria effectively cutting the East Coast “National” grid in half. It’s not clear if the transmission lines are damaged which will take weeks to repair or just tripped out. But there were blackouts yesterday in NSW, and coal fired power stations in Victoria that could be supplying customers were disconnected from most of NSW. Large industry was again forced to shut down temporarily. Call it “demand reduction” or call it incompetence. We’re a nation that can’t supply heavy industry with electricity. The people of Sydney have been told to turn off washing machines and dryers, spare appliances. Sure, it’s a national crisis, but what got us through the crisis was coal, and what would have stopped a price spike, and kept the industry online, was more coal.
Meanwhile electricity prices hit $14,700 for two hours in NSW, with a draw of 12,000MW. I estimate that’s theoretically up to $350 million in electricity costs that could have been used to help repair the damage instead. Some of that won’t be realized because of forward hedged prices and long term contracts, but ultimately some of the spike will be paid by consumers in NSW to shareholders of generators. Perhaps Alinta, AGL and Energy Australia will donate two hours of electricity profits to the bushfire crisis?
By definition a decentralized power grid that depends on interconnectors is not as stable in a crisis as individual state grids that are self-sufficient with a few defendable stations which are situated closer to large population centres on shorter transmission lines.
Solar Panels don’t work under a smoke haze, and millions of panels in Melbourne, Sydney and in New Zealand are going to need a good clean or suffer efficiency declines. How many man-hours will that take? Will any injuries or deaths occur from thousands of people climbing on their roof and will anyone even tally up that renewable cost?
The break in the interconnector lines is inside NSW so some power is being supplied by Victoria to “the Wagga area” in southern NSW (just to clear up confusion and thanks to WattClarity and @allanoneilaus).
The NSW grid’s links to Victoria went down late on Saturday afternoon, with Mr Kean issuing a statement urging all residents to preserve power. “The extensive bushfire activity in the Snowy Mountains and other areas of the state have had an impact on our electricity supplies,” Mr Kean said. Just before 7pm, 14,000 people had lost power in Sydney’s north and south-west, and Port Stephens.
A senior official within a government agency, who did not want to be identified, told the Herald the transmission lines from Snowy “had been taken out”, but a spokesperson for Mr Kean could not confirm the reports. Mr Kean asked consumers to make sure power-hungry pool pumps were turned off, raise air conditioner thermostats to 24 or 25 degrees, refrain from using washing machines, dishwashers or dryers, and turn off appliances and lights not in use.
AEMO was also working with large load electricity customers to reduce their electricity consumption where possible.
Two potlines were turned off at the Tomago aluminium smelter – the plant near Newcastle typically accounts for about 10 per cent of NSW demand – to help balance supply and demand. “AEMO estimates we saved 200-300 megawatts of demand” through the public appeals, Mr Kean said. “There was no surplus – every single megawatt counted.” Power supplies have resumed between NSW and Victoria although transmission capacity may not be at full capacity for some time, Mr Kean said.
Engineer Ian Waters sent an open letter to Scott Morrison yesterday afternoon:
Prime Minister you are probably aware of the dramas today with the substations in the snowy mountains – burnt out – and affecting imports of electricity from Victoria? I have attached below what is going on with the grid. Basically we are limited to only 486 Mw of brown coal fired electricity from Victoria – through interconnectors that are supposed to be capable of 1,600Mw. The bushfires have created havoc around the Snowy system and shut down much of the capacity.
You may not be aware Prime Minister – but our local Shoalhaven pumped hydro system is also shut down until further notice because of the massive risk of the Currawan fire to the station. Knowing the condition of the country around there Prime Minister I can understand the fear of every employee and Manager there – even if the Currawan fire didn’t exist you would be bloody nervous!
Prime Minister the Latrobe Valley right now is OK for fires and every Company who runs a Brown Coal fired station down there (except of course AGL with their normal and totally expected bearing failure after commissioning!) are pouring the MW out, Mt Piper is going well, Bayswater and Eraring are performing wonderfully well in challenging conditions and basically Australia is running on coal.
I’ll keep this very simple Scott Morrison – it is a sackable offence for a Prime Minister to continue with the madness of snowy hydro 2.0 knowing the vulnerability of equipment in that region – not to mention the losses, wastage and massive capital cost blow-out.
It is also a sackable offence for a Prime Minister to allow AGL to shut Liddell and – to deliberately run it down as they are now – to guarantee its’ shutdown.
A nation watches the fires. The Australian Navy has rescued around 1,100 people and 250 pets. Thousands of other have fled. Thousands more on the SE corner of Australia have been chopping down trees, cleaning properties, waiting in queues for fuel and food. Today is forecast to be as bad as New Years Eve when 380 houses burnt down. Temperatures will be above 40 C — up to 45C inland in places like Wagga Wagga. (Right now, perhaps there’s a BOM site glitch but temperatures from Nowra south range from 30 -45?) Humidity levels will be very low. But a cooler change is coming late. Things should be much better on Sunday. Best wishes for everyone on the front line.
Suddenly, many people are taking “hazard reduction”. If only it weren’t too late.
Meanwhile the Labor Party still hope to reduce bushfires with an international carbon market. Good luck with that. A carbon market is form of carbon tax that sends money overseas and will make their friends at the UN and Goldman Sachs happy, but probably won’t impress the workers the Labor party used to serve. The only way it will stop fires is if people clearfell old growth forest to plant palm trees or corn for biofuel, to to make way for a solar “farm”. Otherwise, carbon storage = fuel for fires.
South coast residents are seething at the NSW government and councils for failing to take adequate precautions in hazard reduction burning. Numbugga locals Stephen and Janet Lennon said authorities failed to learn the lessons from a bushfire in the forests last August.
“They fly helicopters over there and drop (water) bombs (over state-owned forests) but 90 per cent of the time they don’t even work. And then they cast it as if they have done a burn-off, which doesn’t help,” Mr Lennon said.
“You are not even allowed to cut down trees on your property.”
Scott Morrison has flagged an overhaul of hazard reduction operations in national parks and laws dictating where land can be cleared and houses built, while acknowledging climate change and the drought had extended Australia’s disastrous fire season.
Addressing a press conference for the first time since fires in NSW and Victoria ravaged the coast this week, the Prime Minister again held the line on his government’s climate change policies but said the national security committee of cabinet would meet on Monday to consider a short- and longer-term response.
Policy is not changing: the Labor party says we should fight fires with a carbon market (tax)
Anthony Albanese said the bushfires were a “national emergency” and called for a market-based mechanism to help combat climate change.
Scott Morrison must be delighted. How many Chinese carbon credits would have stopped those arsonists?
Back in August the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC said the areas in red were “above normal fire risk” in what will be remembered as quite some understatement. To be fair, they couldn’t know what rain or temperatures would come.
Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre forecast map Australia
Rejoice Australia. The Star of Mann has crosseth The line of Capricorn. The great Prof has flown 10,000 miles to tell us “Australia is on fire”. Something only thirty million people knew already, including every Australian and the five million New Zealanders who can smell the smoke too.
According to Michael Mann, his plane causes bushfires, and he had to fly all the way to a nation on fire to tell them that.
Australia, your country is burning – dangerous climate change is here with you now
Sadly, everything he knows about the Australian climate comes from a Midnight oil song:
When we mine for coal, like the controversial planned Adani coalmine, which would more than double Australia’s coal-based carbon emissions, we are literally mining away at our blue skies. The Adani coalmine could rightly be renamed the Blue Sky mine.
The songs of Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil I first enjoyed decades ago have taken on a whole new meaning for me now. They seem disturbingly prescient in light of what we are witnessing unfold in Australia.
Some even uttered the words “climate change” without any prompting.
“Without prompting?” Hardly. They’ve had thirty years of prompting — in school, at uni, on the nightly news, in coloring in contests, cereal packets and pop songs. The marvel is that Australians are still capable of doing some science, despite the ABC’s and The Guardian’s best efforts.
Hypothesis lost: Your air conditioner causes bushfires?
This is science with error bars so wide they overlap til there’s no science left in between.
The prophet can see “climate change” with his superhuman eyes:
The brown skies I observed in the Blue Mountains this week are a product of human-caused climate change. Take record heat, combine it with unprecedented drought in already dry regions and you get unprecedented bushfires like the ones engulfing the Blue Mountains and spreading across the continent. It’s not complicated.
In Simple-Mann-land, heat and drought make fires. Sure, and that’s why the Sahara is the Fireball of Africa, right? Or maybe it’s just a marketing meme designed to scare the kiddies? Fire = hot, therefore “climate change”. In reality, fires need fuel more than hot weather. The worst fires in Australia are not at Oodnadatta where we have lots of heat and permanent drought, they’re in the South-east corner where there is lots of neglected forest. How could a “Prof” forget the most important factor? Looks like he is nearly as bad at science as that legendary guy who could take red noise or bus timetables and discover hockey sticks. The same man who sued someone for calling him a fraud, dragged it on for years, but couldn’t find any evidence to defend himself.
Could anyone calling themselves a prof really make statements so blandly conclusive: no caveats, no margins, missing the main point, and with no direct cause and effect link. Oh yes he can…
The warming of our planet – and the changes in climate associated with it – are due to the fossil fuels we’re burning: oil, whether at midnight or any other hour of the day, natural gas, and the biggest culprit of all, coal. That’s not complicated either.
Not complicated sayth the master guru. Yet none, not one, of the giant models predicts “simple” rainfall or drought?
If it’s so obvious, perhaps Mann can explain the part where a warmer world is a wetter world and the extra rain makes “more droughts”?
But we all know how this circular conversation pans out — Mann says that extra rain is just an average and there will be droughts in some spots and floods in others. I’ll ask him where and when those droughts and floods will happen in the 2020s, and Michael Mann will say “I don’t know, that’s weather, not climate”. And I’ll ask why a bushfire “is climate not weather”, and he’ll ignore the point and talk about extending bushfire seasons, which are not fires, but sound sorta the same. Or he’ll point to probabilities of extremes in models we know are broken, that use data we know is wildly adjusted, and he’ll call it science when it might as well be sorcery.
If there is any tiny link between coal mines and bushfires, it’s through an ocean of chaotic complexity — via changes in droughts and flood patterns thanks to jet-streams shifting, enhanced by ENSO oscillation, the Indian Dipole and the SOI. The skillless modelers can’t predict any of these. The error bars ate my science mum, and there’s nothing left here but a sales scheme of false pretenses built on magic spells, mystery assumptions, total failure, and parasitic self aggrandizement. All designed to prey on the weak-minded and gullible. Quick, someone protect “The Guardian”?
Petrochemical conspiracy — here we come:
Who needs facts when speculative conspiracies will do?
Morrison has shown himself to be beholden to coal interests and his administration is considered to have conspired with a small number of petrostates to sabotage the recent UN climate conference in Madrid (“COP25”), seen as a last ditch effort to keep planetary warming below a level (1.5C) considered by many to constitute “dangerous” planetary warming.
Fifteen years of missing data tells us everything we need to know
Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy are continuing to follow up on the death of the Great Barrier Reef. Strangely, while everyone professes to care, and cry, and Malcolm Turnbull casually tossed half a billion at it, we see the extremely radioactive oddity that no one is worried enough to bother measuring the actual supposed decline of the seventh wonder of the modern world. Fifteen years is a long time to overlook that. Many panicked press releases have gone under the bridge yet apparently AIMS (and all the others) just want to keep quoting the shrinking growth rates, but not keep track of them.
On top of that, Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy have spotted a pretty major flaw in the methodology for that much quoted study that claims growth on the reef has slowed by 15% from 1990 to 2005. If that number is right, the reef will have ground down to a 30% decline by now [in growth rate]. Disaster, disaster. Worthy of a hundred press releases and a thousand grants. So either it just hasn’t occurred to AIMS et al to keep studying the reef they say they love, or else they have quietly looked at those growth rates, found the reef isn’t dying and they shelved the results in the “don’t look now folder”.
Oh the dilemma. Which could it be?
The real test here is not about the Great Barrier Reef, which is probably fine, but about the trustworthiness of our scientific institutions.
Porites corals are typically used to estimate growth rates the Great Barrier Reef. Jen Marohasy photographed the surface of this coral when she visited Bramston Reef with Peter Ridd in August 2019. “It was so soft, like a carpet, but firm from the corallite: the limestone skeleton supporting individual coral polyps.”
Graham Lloyd in The Australian describes the situation:
The yearly [coral growth] rings are roughly 10 millimetres thick so a coral many metres across can be hundreds of years old. In a landmark study, AIMS took cores from more than 300 corals on the GBR and concluded that for the past 300 years coral growth was stable, but in 1990 there was an unprecedented and dramatic collapse of 15 per cent.
Peter Ridd explains AIMS didn’t measure the rings correctly and used young and small corals, not the original large old corals of 1990:
With Thomas Stieglitz and Eduardo da Silva, I reanalysed the AIMS data and, in our opinion, AIMS made two significant mistakes.
The first was incorrect measurement of the near-surface coral growth rings on most of the corals that were giving data from 1990 to 2005. After years of argument AIMS has begrudgingly agreed that it made this mistake. The other problem is that it used much smaller and younger corals for the 1990-2005 data compared with the mostly very large and old corals of the pre-1990 data — it changed its methodology and this is what caused the apparent drop at 1990. When we corrected this problem, the fall in growth rate disappeared.
This is the first in a series of blog posts planned on what Peter is calling ‘The Coral Challenge’. Graham Lloyd has a companion piece, also in today’s The Australian.
Great Barrier Reef Truth May Be Inconvenient, But It Is Out There By Dr Peter Ridd
We have no data of Great Barrier Reef coral growth rates for the last 15 years. Has growth collapsed as the Australian Institute of Marine Science claims?
Is the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) being affected by climate change, the acidification of the ocean, and the pesticides, sediment and fertiliser from farms? One way to tell is to measure the coral growth rates. Our science institutions claim that coral growth rates collapsed between 1990 and 2005 due to stress from human pollution. Remarkably, despite having data of coral growth rates for the last few centuries, there is no data for the last 15 years. We don’t know how the GBR has fared since 2005.
Peter Ridd is predicating that when the data is finally analysed it will show little change in growth rates, perhaps some improvement. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), in contrast, is predicting a significant fall in coral calcification rates. Science is a method. The best test of competing theories, hypotheses and claims is with the data.
If I had time, I’d do a similar graph of the AIMS reputation, which might be the only thing matching the AIMS graph prediction right now.
But a second and almost equally valuable outcome of measuring the missing data is that it will be an acid test of the trustworthiness of our major science institutions. AIMS have dug in their heels and denied they made a major methodological mistake. Let’s do the experiment and see if they are right, or untrustworthy. Same for me. If this measurement is done, and done properly, and it shows there has been a major reduction in coral growth rates, I will be the first to accept I was wrong and that there is a disaster happening on the reef.
The coral challenge is a measurement that will have to be done sooner or later. The longer it is neglected the worse it will look to the public. Farmers who are accused of killing the reef are especially interested.
We need to make sure these new measurements are done properly and without any questions about reliability. They must be supervised by a group of scientists that are acceptable to both sides of the agricultural debate on the reef to ensure methodology and execution is impeccable.
Golly and gee…. the missing data rather says an awful lot. One of those rare times when the lack of data is more conclusive than any error bars ever could be.
89 houses were lost in Lake Conjola township but a few saved their cars in the lake. (Image pieced together from the video pan)
Meanwhile, apparently the ABC is cleaning Facebook posts up where two locals of Nowa Nowa (East Gippsland) protested a few months ago and stopped a prescribed burn. One said she was “more worried about climate change”.
Could be a clue here about how the nation got its priorities so screwed?
Back in September ABC Gippsland put a story on Facebook about how locals were protesting the spring prescribed burns which were “killing baby birds alive”. The East Gippsland locals managed to stop the hazard reduction burns. We note also that the Forest Fire Management Victoria local manager said that the burns were planned “after extensive community consultation”. Which tells us just how impossibly hard it is to get even a small (tiny) cool burn done. We’re only talking about 370 ha.
Sharp eyed Michael Ayling noticed that the ABC deleted this Facebook post below. Most of it is still captured on Google Cache, though for some reason, if you wait on the google cache page even that will disappear soon too. Luckily skeptics with no budget are here to help the ABC and Google Cache keep historic records that may help explain the mystery of how a first world nation created such a catastrophe.
It’s probably not the protesters’s fault that she thought climate change posed more threat than bushfires. She probably watches Their ABC.
*UPDATE: This is not about the protestors (or about a tiny 370 ha, which wouldn’t have changed anything yesterday). Accountability lies with decision-makers. Everyone has the right to protest and after twenty years of one sided and well funded propaganda it’s no wonder people are confused. The ABC cheered for “climate change”, and asked no hard questions. They mentioned fuel loads but didn’t put those experts on high rotation. They did repeated interviews with people who know nothing about climate change like Greg Mullins. He was free to repeat the mantra. The ABC decide what message goes out.
Wind turbines pose a threat not just to bats, birds and bedtime, but also Buicks, buildings and babies.
By some miracle luck, no one was killed. This wind turbine was installed two weeks ago…
Coming soon: insurance premiums to rise in car parks under turbines, and real estate values to fall. Children’s car seats to be reinforced with 6ft thick titanium shells.
Presumably Al Gore and the member for Warringah will dismiss the risk and plan to build one in their own backyards.
Repeat after me: Wind energy is free and there are no hidden costs from installing gigatons of infrastructure across the country to catch low-density random unreliable energy.
Peacetime maximums on Boxing Day are just not what they used to be
The ABC is afraid that Boxing day cricket may “go extinct” due to the heat. Chris Gillham at WAClimate.net graphed the December 26 test temperatures in Melbourne all the way back to 1855. Obviously, using ABC-ScienceTM (absurdio-extrapolatory et al) what we are really looking at is ominous cooling. To help the ABC, let’s adjust headlines accordingly.
“Injuries are forecast to rise as maximum temperatures fall in Melbourne on Boxing Day.”
The trend is clear in a supercomputer somewhere. If this decline continues the second polynomial will hit zero in 440 years. Cricketers won’t know what heat is.
Two things to keep in mind, apart from designing a team beanie, is that many of the temperatures in the 1800s weren’t from Stevenson screens and so are debatable. On the other hand, the urban heat island effect is strong and site maintenance is weak, so modern temperatures are debatable too. Sometime in World War I Australian sites hit a peak of being both reliable, modern, and not surrounded by hot concrete. The BOM obviously adjusts those days down.
As Chris says: The current Olympic Park weather station is less than a kilometre from the MCG, and it’s worth noting that Melbourne is an urban location not included in national temperature averages because the BoM acknowledges that city infrastructure has caused artificial UHI warming of one or two degrees.
Obviously the urban heat island effect (UHI) will be concealing the true cooling trend. If it weren’t for all those skyscrapers and super highways, the cricket pitch would be considerably cooler. Prof Panicbunny from Melbourne Uni fears that if the Australian economy continues to collapse under weight of high energy prices, the growth in UHI will stall, potentially putting cricket players at risk of needing scarfs in summer.
Clearly, since CO2 emissions appear to be ineffective at raising temperatures, only more concrete can save cricketers.
A ray of hope — while Boxing Day is cooling, Dec 27-30 is not:
Cricketers may only need ski jackets for the first day.
This is obviously due to climate change. Climate change causes climates to stay the same.
…
No doubt this data will need some adjustment post hoc, and post hoc hoc.
Sometime in 2200AD we look forward to finding out what the temperature was in 2019.
POST NOTE: Jokes aside. All conclusions and inferences here are subject to mockery, but the graphs above are real and based on BOM data. If only ABC journalism was too.
There is no lake, no dam large enough to put out the firestorms we have created
Like some kind of cargo cult, modern inhabitants pray to the sky for enough water bombers to keep things they love safe. They fret that the season for safe burning is too short, while they leave the litter to burn at the most dangerous time possible. The quest for perfect forests, perfect air, and perfect centralized planning is the perfect recipe for a catastrophe. Utopia burns again.
This is a great article by Viv Forbes describing how radically different fire “management” was in ancient times. Management being almost like non stop arson. The main rule, apparently, was to light often and always, and never extinguish. — Jo
_______________________________________ Fighting Fires with Fire
by Viv Forbes
Firestick farming Joseph Lycett. Circa 1817. Australian National Library.
The Power of the Torch
“There can be few if any races who for so long were able to practice the delights of incendiarism.” Geoffrey Blainey “Triumph of the Nomads – A History of Ancient Australia.” Macmillan 1975.
The Fire-lighter was the most powerful tool that early humans brought to Australia.
Fires lit by aborigi
nal men and women created the landscape of Australia. They used fire to create and fertilise fresh new grass for the grazing animals that they hunted, to trap and roast grass dwelling reptiles and rodents, to fight enemies, to send smoke signals, to fell dead trees for camp fires, to ward off frosts and biting insects, and for religious and cultural ceremonies. Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with frequent burn-offs.
Early white explorers and settlers recorded the smoke and the blackened tree trunks. They admired the extensive grasslands, either treeless or with well-spaced trees, and no tangled undergrowth of dead grass, brambles, branches and weeds.
Making fire without tinder boxes or matches is laborious. So, most aboriginals tried to keep their fires alive at all times. When on the move (a common situation), selected members of the tribe were charged with carrying a fire stick and keeping it alight. In really cold weather several members may have each carried a fire stick for warmth. When the stick was in danger of going out, the carrier would usually light a tussock of dry grass or leaves and use that flame to rejuvenate the fire stick (or light a new one). As they moved on, they left a line of small fires spreading behind them. They have been observed trying to control the movement of fires but never tried to extinguish them.
Early explorers who ventured inland were amazed to find extensive grasslands and open woodland. Their reports attracted settlers to these grassy open forests and treeless plains with mobs of cattle and sheep.
Despite modern folk-lore tales about aboriginal fire management skills, anyone reading diaries from early explorers such as Abel Tasman (1642) and Captain Cook (1770) soon learned that aboriginals lit fires at any time, for many reasons, and NEVER tried to put them out. If threatened by fires lit by enemies, the most frequent response was to light their own protective fires (now called back-burning). Fire lighting was deliberate, and sometimes governed by rules, but there was no central plan. There were no fire-fighters, no 4WD tankers, no water bombers, no dozers, and no attempt to put fires out. But aboriginal fire “management” worked brilliantly. Because of the high frequency of small fires, fire intensity was low and fires could be lit safely even in hot dry summers. Any fire lit would soon run into country burnt one or two years earlier and then would run out of fuel and self-extinguish.
The futility of water bombing a million hectares
The early squatters quickly learned about the dangers and benefits of fires, and like the aboriginals, they learned to manage fire to protect their assets, grasslands and grazing animals. The settlers had more to lose than the nomads. Graziers need to protect their herds and flocks, homesteads, hay stacks, yards, fences and neighbours, as well as maintaining their grasslands by killing woody weeds and encouraging new grass. So their fire management was more refined. They soon learned to pick the right season, day, time of day, place, wind and weather before lighting a fire. And if threatened by a neighbour’s escaping fire or a lightning-strike fire, back-burning from roads and tracks was the preferred way to protect themselves.
Today we have replaced decentralised fire management by aboriginals and settlers with government-nurtured fire-storms.
First governments created fire hazards called National Parks, where fire sticks, matches, graziers and foresters were locked out and access roads were abandoned or padlocked. And Green-loving urbanites built houses right beside them, and planted trees in their yards. The open forests and grasslands were invaded by eucalypt regrowth, woody weeds, tangled undergrowth, dry grass, logs, dead leaves, twigs, bark and litter – all perfect fuel for a wild-fire holocaust.
These tinder-boxes of forest fuel became magnets for arsonists, and occasionally even disgruntled neighbours, or were lit by wind-blown embers or dry lightning. With high winds, high temperatures and heavy fuel loads some fires will race through the tree tops of oil-rich eucalypt forests.
ike Trump, he has to make an asset out of the overt and ridiculous bias. Mock it, and make fun of it. Preempt their criticisms, beat them at their game by informing the people of how each decision will be received and by using every method of communication outside the mainstream media that he can. Trump does live venues and uses twitter. ScoMo has to find his own path.
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