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Ten times the fuel means 100 times the intensity
Hardly anyone is talking about these numbers yet they show just how far beyond our control the pyroconvective firestorms are and why we need to be so much smarter at preventing them. They also show how irrelevant temperatures onsite are, compared to fuel load and wind speed.
Controllable fires are 3MW per meter, but we now have loads of 70MW/m
Not only are these fires obscenely, catastrophically intense, it doesn’t matter how much fire fighting equipment we buy, how many dams we empty, they are a man-made disaster, and we’ve known for years how to prevent them. (Some would say, thousands of years). The message in here is that cool controllable burns are tiny, less damaging, and far less intense. The pyroconvective monsters are totally different creatures.
Andrew Bolt interviewed fire expert David Packham in November:
Top fire expert David Packham says forget global warming. It’s the reckless failure to burn-off fuel loads that have turned parts of Australia into death traps. Near Melbourne “we’re looking down the barrel in these areas at 1000 deaths”.
His key point is that if we increase the fuel by ten, […]
A thread for those who are watching the fire crisis.
NSW Fires today Map Click to enlarge
Victorian fires, click to enlarge.
Fires flared again today in Australia, though have calmed in the last few hours. Outback NSW was wildly hot (Bourke and Ivanhoe reached 47C and 48C), but the fires are mostly in Alpine and SE coastal areas of Australia where temperatures ranged on Friday only up to maximums of 21C – 35C.
Fire conditions are bad tonight in NSW and Victoria. Cooler, but windier. Some gusts are up to 100km/hr. Rain has begun to fall in East Gippsland. Map details and links to updates are listed below. It’s obvious in the maps that massive areas of forest have already burned. The black areas on these maps are burnt, but not all to the same degree. The red areas on the NSW map look terrible but these are “potential spread areas”.
It’s not about the heat.
The fires are where the fuel loads are (and the arsonists and accidents).
9.4 out of 10 based on 88 ratings […]
What was Australia’s Environment Minister thinking?
Melissa Price succumbs to pagan witchcraft:
“There’s no doubt that there’s many people who have suffered over this summer. We talk about the Victorian bushfires; (in) my home state of Western Australia we’ve also got fires there,” [Melissa Price] told Sky News this morning. “There’s no doubt that climate change is having an impact on us. There’s no denying that.”
L
WA
Let’s look at her home state. After 67 years of fire management in the giant, hot, dry state of WA, the trend is clear — the more prescribed area we burn, the less wildfire does. In the graph below the prescribed burns declined for forty years and wildfires increased for thirty. After the Dwellingup Fire in 1961 the state ramped up the preventative burns, and reduced wildfires.
As the BushFireFront team say:
“We can’t control the weather but we can control the fuel loads“
Tough call — what do we do, redesign our energy system, pay billions, change our cars, our houses and our light globes in the hope that bush fires will be nicer, or do we just go back to doing […]
The Age in Melbourne said they were “keen” to get a piece like this from David on Tuesday, but on Wednesday decided not to go with it.
Unfortunately figures on fuel loads are rare. David used to do carbon accounting for the Australian Government, which included developing the ability to estimate forest debris in Australian forests from a combination of plant models, satellite data on vegetation, and weather data. That capability exists in the Department of Environment, in the unit that produces Australia’s carbon accounts. However the figures here are only what David has heard from other sources over the years, and do not reflect any official or government figures. – Jo
UPDATE: Skynews tells us Defence admit starting the mega Lithgow fire last Wednesday. “A massive fire burning in Lithgow and the Blue Mountains was caused by explosives training which was being carried out in the area by the department of defence.”
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Fuel Loads Not Climate Change Are Making Bushfires More Severe
Dr David Evans
The bibles of mainstream climate change are the Assessment Reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) every six years or so. The latest was issued recently, in September […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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