The Inconvenient Facts on Australian Bushfires | Hacker News Reader

The Inconvenient Facts on Australian Bushfires

forbes.com

9 pointsporjo4 comments

While I agree with the general premise that we shouldn't rush to assign blame for individual events to climate change, the rest of the article seems to be trying to say the current fires can't be attributed to climate change as effects aren't expected until 2040. But that seems to be based upon a single study/analysis.

I can also cherry pick: "Australia. Observational data suggest that fire weather extremes are already becoming more frequent and intense (Dowdy, 2018; Head et al. , 2014)" [https://sciencebrief.org/briefs/wildfires] Noting that the _very same paragraph_ also references the Abatzoglou study.

In any case, the author seems to be frequently banging this same drum: https://www.desmogblog.com/roger-pielke-jr https://skepticalscience.com/Roger_Pielke_Jr_blog.htm

Climate change is not a discrete event, so it was a bit absurd to attribute those particular fires to climate change, like the media did. At the end of the day, fire is fuel + air + a hot enough temperature to ignite (but not weather hot; more like lightning strike or matches hot). It happens naturally (entire species of trees, including Eucalyptus, have evolved with fire), and some years the fires are bigger than the previous year (for different reasons).

If climate change affects fires in Australia, it will manifest itself in changing _other_ things. Maybe how and what things regrow after fires, how animals resettle those areas, etc. Obviously that's less sensational to sell as a story, but probably more important.

There's been some very noticable changes to the climate along the east coast of Australia (where the fires are).

Along the east coast the El Nino/La Nina cyles are becoming much, much more pronounced. Droughts are longer and more severe during the El Nino cycle, floods and rains are also stronger during the wet La Nina cycle.

While this lowers the risk of fire during the La Nina cycle, it also significantly increases it during the El Nino cycle because: 1. Drier conditions mean more fire. A lot of trees are shedding their bark, a lot more flammable material generally 2. Less backburning & fire prevention measures can be done during the La Nina cycle because conditions have become too wet to do so, meaning that fires are becoming more intense because more leaf matter and debris are building up during those years

Fire is a pretty regular part of the Australian bushland, but in the past they used to be more regular and not as severe (And very rarely get completely out of control like it has done the last couple of times)

> The effects of climate change have not yet been detected in Australian fires, but changes underway suggest that those effects will be detectable as early as the 2040s. If so we should expect, more and more intense fires, and respond accordingly.

This plain English that the author suggests is not fair, like he suggests. The author's other articles seem to want to downplay climate change fears, but the "inconvenient" facts seem to disagree with him. A fairer summary would be closer to:

> The effects of climate change have not yet been detected in the Australian Bush fires. The effects of climate change have already been confirmed to potentially cause fires in the Amazon, Mediterranean, Scandinavia, and Western North America. Australian fires are projected to be impacted by climate change in approximately 20 years.

This link has better facts IMO: https://sciencebrief.org/briefs/wildfires

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