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Comment by throwaway3CC9 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing. A fire is not evidence of climate change any more than an absence of fire is evidence against.

Australia has been in a drought for the past decade which is caused by the changing climate.

Yes, if you isolate this fire season then the fires themselves will look as no evidence of climate change. But the fact the everything is as dry as fuck when its not supposed to be dry as fuck...

In northern Queensland we have rain forests. The fringes of those rain forests are burning, because they're dry as fuck.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/extent-of-fire-damage...

Can you please open your mind?

I’m still confused. Nothing else can explain a period of dryness? I feel like it’s convenient to blame global warming without considering other ideas.

Please note, I say this as a huge climate change activist. But this feels similar to blaming hurricanes on climate change to me.

It is rarely possible to rule out that "something else" is the cause of a phenomenum. But the connection between rising temperatures and an exceptional dryness is quite obvious. So absent a very strong different explanation for the current dryness, climate change sounds like an important contributor if not the single cause.

Well hurricanes are also made stronger by the fact that CO2 traps more heat in lower layers and thus makes the upper atmosphere colder, leading to a higher differential with lower layers. So there you go, please inform your activism accordingly.

Large areas have burned in the Queensland fires which are rainforests and usually too wet to burn. A combination of unprecedented drought and record high temperatures over the past few years have dried these areas out sufficiently to sustain huge fires.

But that’s just local observation and means nothing in terms of climate change, right?

Edit: Clearly unrelated. https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-02/2019-was-australia...

In God We Trust, All Others Must Have Data - W. Edwards Deming (Statistician)

I dislike it when people make statement without data which leads to politic. You have provided an article which contain data that support climate change may cause this fire.

I wish more people are like you.

(my opinion, obviously)

That's as true as it is misleading. The changing climate definitely has an effect on the scale and intensity, but not the existence. Rating the scale is an essentially impossible task because the factors go back years (length and scale of drought, climate effects on that).

Agreed - a single fire doesn't mean squat. Fires breaking out all over like an alien invasion mean the climate has already changed: https://myfirewatch.landgate.wa.gov.au

And yet the severity and timing of them can be evidence.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the sheer number of them, how early they are occurring has got to account for something, no?

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