Australia's severe wildfires were predicted by the government over a decade ago

- reduced Australia's carbon emissions (not a massive deal by itself)

- built up a public repository of cash that could have been allocated to something useful, like funding the fire services

- lead by example; we will now never know if Australia's leading by example would have encouraged a wider implementation of carbon tax schemes and a reduction in carbon emissions

You are correct that it would have not by itself mitigated the natural drought cycle in Australia, however the opportunity to reduce the impact was lost - and Australia is poorer for it.

Finally, I did not suggest that a carbon tax would have stopped these fires, only that I would like to do an analysis between what the potential sum of taxes would have been versus the donation totals.

Cheers.

Are you implying that the rate and duration of dry spells have been the constant for thousands of years? If so, do you have data back this up?

If not, is it possible that we're living in exceptional weather conditions? A quick google gives me an article from the Bureau of Meteorology, an organization with a wealth of data, the requisite compute power to analyze the data, and actual expects of climate modelling:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/updates/articles/a010-southern...

> The only sensible thing Australia can do is prescribed burning and bush thinning.

Do you think that fire authorities haven't been doing this already?

If anything their capacity has been reduced by recent budget cuts from NSW Liberal Party - the core policies of the Liberal Party are smaller government, individual responsibility, and hence lower taxes across the board. The Victorian Labor party, on the other hand, increased their capability.

Unfortunately there's a number of forests that are exceptionally dry due to recent long term trends, and Australia just needs more and more resources to manage its land.

So sensible things to do are:

- provide more resources for land management - stop making the world hotter

Which we are doing. But the opportunities to do prescribed burns aren't what they once were because the climate is changing and the window for these types of activities is smaller annually. We need more than just prescribed burns.

[0] - https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/dangerous-...