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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Yup, and the malfeasance that is Fire Rescue Victoria, with so many problems in its implementation that acts of parliament were required, and then the politicians pushed through an amended version that had had no consultation with either the Country Fire Authority or Metro Fire Brigade.

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

Ironic, in that last I heard, several big matches were being canceled due to the weather...

In summary, you are saying that controlled burns were reduced and they would have helped, it's just that the protests against them weren't significant?

Also seems like the Australian media supported the protestors:

http://joannenova.com.au/2020/01/abc-deleting-facebook-posts...

That’s a claim you should not read uncritically, given where it is published — the site is a “climate skeptic” page, and the claim it is trying to advance is that the national broadcaster is being manipulated, or at the centre of a vast left-wing conspiracy, that has inexplicably ruined the country, despite having apparently not convinced its audience to vote for a left-wing party.

Here’s the thing: the reportage of the protest was on a local-news Facebook page maintained by the national broadcaster and was not reported more widely at the time (September 2019). You can find the post cached, it doesn’t read as being in favour or opposition to the protest. But it did contain the names and faces of the (two) protesters.

The planned burn zone is in the one of the current fire-affected areas - although probably not the massive ones you’ve been reading about, 500 miles away.

The article posted asks whether the area of the planned burn “has now been completed by Mother Nature” alongside screen grabs of the cached article, and you can see the tenor of the comments section what sorts of feelings that provokes.

It’s pretty reasonable to assume that the post was deleted to protect two protesters from harassment.

Protecting the protesters could certainly be one of the reasons to take it down. But that shows they are sympathetic to their cause, when really they did a horrible thing.

I don’t think that makes the article less on point.

Hang on, what "horrible thing" did they do?

Controlled burns were reduced because controlled burns weren't viable in many areas. This had nothing to do with any activists, but everything to do with the fact that there wasn't a viable time to do these burns in many areas.

EDIT: I just read the link you provided. Do you honestly not see how unreliable that source is? They are basically an anti ABC hate farm. Do some independent fact checks and get back to me.

Everything is fine. This is just fire mismanagement and is in no way indicative of a climate crisis. /s

It can be both

Elsewhere in the discussion sometime posted a link to an article debunking that common misconception from a number of angles.

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