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Comment by SlowRobotAhead | Hacker News Reader

Here I would have thought the sheer number of people arrested across the country for intentionally starting fires would have been enough to silence anyone claiming this was climate change.

Newscorp estimating 10% of the arsonists are under 10 years old.

Edit: Ah, we’re taking trends over actual arrests. OK. My mistake.

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Arson has been stable for 24 months to September 2019, it's a shame the data capture stops there. It's made up to deflect.

https://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Documents/RCS-Quarterly/NSW_Re...

crime / 2018 / 2019 / Trend

Arson / 5,692 / 4,934 / Stable

>Arson has been stable for 24 months

Trends regarding arson in general may or may not correlate with a specific arson niche.

I agree. It's also really hard data to find.

A faction of our media is running with it as cold hard fact anyway that a new wave of arson is completely the cause of our current crisis.

Just in case someone actually still doesn't realise - this is a bullshit claim. (that arson is relevant in this situation) There are fires every year and they will happen. Climate change doesn't start fires. What it does is extends the fire season and makes forest management harder, which provides more fuel when the fire is burning.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/24-australians-arrested...

Seems like calling it bullshit is a little too all knowing for me. I’m going to go ahead with a scientific approach and not jump to conclusions.

Edit: let’s not pretend this type of thing would be unheard of https://m.dw.com/en/australia-police-arrest-man-accused-of-s... https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/11/world-wildlife-federati...

The number is correct. The relevance is bullshit. Australia will have fires every year, arson or not. It needs to keep them under control either way - which is related to climate and forest management. If arson can create out of control fires, so can lightning.

I don't have any figure or analysis, but I would actually expect arson to be worse, since lightning strikes are more or less random whereas a skilled arsonist can theoretically start the fire in the right place (upwind, etc.)

> relevance is bullshit

Citation?

I'm not sure what you're looking for here. Fires are out of control. Have you got someone proving that fire caused by lightning could be controlled easier than fire started by arson?

Basically if you claim they're relevant, it's on you to find an explanation how/why. Not on everyone else to disprove every possible theory. Otherwise we're stuck in gish gallop.

Well clearly this is made worse by climate change! But...

You keep saying that you KNOW the arson arrests are “bullshit” when taking about this.

How are you making that claim? How do you know these fires are unrelated to two dozen arrests made? Please cite that.

You can't prove a negative. If they're connected and people have proof and it's relevant, they'd present it. And again, arson-related arrests are real and I'm not disputing them.

This would not even be an interesting topic if it wasn't pushed so strongly on social media with a lot of bias. (Wasn't as interesting a decade ago when it was a firefighter starting fires) So let's do a reasonable thing and drop that whole thing until someone comes up with a credible proof, not a theory abused by bots and media.

But every year people start fires. Just Google "<year> bushfire firebug arrested"

This is just grabbing the first news story from each one:

2014: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-21/youths-arrested-for-l...

2015: https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/australia/three-teenage-fir...

2016: https://www.naracoorteherald.com.au/story/4238341/cfa-firebu...

2017: https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/4828025/updated-acc...

2018: https://www.pressreader.com/australia/shepparton-news/201802...

Some of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfire were deliberately lit too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires#Arson

Arson isn't new. The difference now is the scale of the fires and how hard they have been to fight because of that scale.

Newscorp should definitely not be your source for anything climate related.

It's well documented that the Murdoch's (of Newscorp ownership) are part of IPA thinktank [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Public_Affairs] push to portray climate change as imaginary. IPA drives Murdoch properties, right wing and conservative talking heads and seemingly 99% of the 'oh the greenies did (that thing that was enacted by the government in power)' conversations.

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