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You can see examples of the kinda of disinformation right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012427

Blaming arsonists, blaming "fire load" and lack of forest manangement, etc. Go listen to the rural fire chiefs: climate change is preventing management, is lengthening the season, making outbreaks more intense and causing them to spread further than before.

Meanwhile the climate denying policies of their politicians leads them to cutting service funding, preventing activism, promoting coal mining and use.

This isn't the time to be an armchair fire expert. Australia is burning and climate change is the primary factor in the seriousness of the situation.

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In the US we are still dealing with the legacy of bad fire management that dates back a century. It's certainly likely that what we needed to do then and what we need to do now are two different things, but the fact is we've been handling things badly for a very long time.

Blaming it all on management practices is probably not particularly productive. But neither is giving them a pass.

And isn't it still true that funding was cut for these programs or is that more disinformation? We can argue about whether any amount of funding would have prevented these fires but the lack of it is certainly making things worse, right?

The projected rise in funding was cut, and then largely reinstated. There are also some other complications around funding which allows both sides to claim it was/wasn't cut do to firefighter entitlements. But broadly, there was not only no cut, it was increased in line with previous years.

Effectively though, the gov has had no strategy either to fund or manage increased risks associated with climate change, because their unofficial line on climate change is 'it's not here, this isn't happening'.

The whole reason for the public find raising for volunteer firefighters kicking off, was that the PM refused to give them any additional funding (up until a few weeks ago). Despite the increased length of the fire season. They were using their own trucks, chainsaws etc even having to buy their own P2 masks from bunnings. Now of course the gov is providing P2 masks to half the state.

So yes, while funding was not cut, it has not increased in line with the increased risk, as to do so would acknowledge the climate change elephant.

I don't have answers, because I'm not an Australian bush fire expert.

We need to get past the idea that we can reason this out with faux-rational arguments on message boards.

And do what? Trust the experts? Which experts? Who puts them in the decision process? Often it's the political class.

Let the political class make all of our decisions for us without any armchair quarterbacking and see where that gets you. If we don't poke our noses into things then they see a mandate to do whatever they decide they have a mandate to do. Nobody's complaining so things are going great.

Democracy without participation is dangerously unstable.

And how do you square that with reality here, where the subject matter experts disagree with the political class, and the armchair crowd appears to be siding with the politicians.

(I'd suggest that armchair quarterbacks are very much the vanguard of the political class, and not some sort of check on power we might like to believe)

I would agree that the armchair class are usually not sophisticated enough to avoid becoming someone's pawns. It's easier to swallow when you're a pawn for reformists.

I don’t think it’s wrong to blame forest management in part, the problem is the clear motivated reasoning to exclusively put forward any other reason which allows the commenter to exclude climate change as a major driver.

It is genuinely bizarre to see the arson talking point being laid on so thick coming off the back of a year with the lowest rainfall and highest temperatures on record.

Places that were burned off in hazard reduction burns a few months ago are burning again. Forest management meant nothing to this fire, it was consuming stuff that was already burned. Blackened dead trees were erupting into flame. The dirt was on fire. There’s no managing around that.

What our head fire fighters were saying was simply that they needed more money for equipment and training more volunteers.

The last really bad fire to go through Canberra was in 2003[1],[3].[4]. This fire had the first documented case of a fire tornado in Australia. It was calculated to have horizontal winds of 250 km/h (160 mph) and vertical air speed of 150 km/h (93 mph), spawned by its own wind rotation from a pyrocumulonimbus cloud and causing the flashover of 120 hectares (300 acres) in 0.04 seconds.

The reason that fire was so damaging, was due to poor fuel management and a reluctantance to aggressively fight the fire. These were the conclusions of the McLeod Inquiry and a Parliamentary Committee. Which had specific quotes like

"it is disturbing that a lightening strike on 8th January can develop into such a destructive blaze and destroy so much over a week later when you consider the knowledge and resources available for its control[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Canberra_bushfires

[2] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

[3] https://www.habitatadvocate.com.au/?tag=mcintyres-hut-fire

[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-17/firestorm-fallout-who...

The 2003 Canberra bush fire has many similarities to the current season. It occurred during a drought. It occurred in terrain that is difficult to access. I strongly suspect that the same issues have occurred this fire season. All you have to do is watch the gif of the movement of the fire to see how rapidly it went from benign to nightmare. However, the scale of destruction has increased significantly since then. There is no doubt that climate change has made fire seasons longer, fires more destructive, and more random.

The truth is never as easy or as simple as people make out. It is probably highly likely that a number of factors have resulted in the current circumstances. This should not be construed as an excuse to not take more action on climate change. It also means that taking action to reduce carbon emissions won't solve this.

Successful action requires making this a bipartisan issue. Unfortunately, the actions taken to date. To use the fires as a wedge are likely to result in that not occurring.

Rural fire chiefs might be saying such things to secure funding from indoctrinated green technocrats.

Or you could be propogating a conspiracy theory. Hard to say without cited evidence.

Propagating? Can you find evidence of anyone who has had this theory before me?

Their beds are burning

*may be the primary factor

If root cause analysis isn't conclusive, you don't just not implement corrective actions... You act on the most likely contributing causes with no undue delay.

Why? What could possibly be bad about just accepting this as the cause instead of running around trying to add an asterisk to everything?

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