But the climatic trend for the last 2 decades has consistently topping daytime temperature records, and it's been drier and hotter earlier in the bushfire season year over year (a fact which our rural fire service was warning our federal government about in July right when they were both ignored and had their funding cut).
We are having problems because of a climate trend, and the reaction of skeptics in power has been to cut funding to the groups who can do forest management to deal with the year over year reality we now face.
Minor increases in temperature do not cause wildfire conditions. Drought, wind, fuel, and a catalyst (like an arsonist or clumsy person or lightning) are all you need for fires.
Until we start controlling the rain and playing God in the sky, I doubt we're going to be able to prevent Australia from developing dry conditions from time to time.
You're talking about one of the most fire prone places in the world that has had massive bushfires documented since 1851.
edit: @mrpopo, can't reply to you. But it looks like the largest set of bush fires ever recorded in Australia (290 million hectares) occured in a year where the temperature was below average for pretty well the entire country. Far below in some parts of the country.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/07/recor...
[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/6C98BB75496A5AD1C...
He talked about rainforest, not Eucalyptus forest.
I mean this is most likely actually related to climate change, but this should be verified/modelled before coming to conclusions. Even when it is absolutely obvious.
Quicky edit: All that said, I'm no expert either. I think we're both more or less parroting sources, so feel free to respond with new info :)
There are harm minimisation strategies, but that would largely involve telling people where to live and some major restructuring of small urban centres.
I can conceive of a very expensive prevention strategy, with a real time detection system based on satellite imagery and distributed sensors, and then finding a way to put out early fires with minimum latency, maybe with advanced drones or some other very capable and numerous aerial vehicles. But that would cost billions.
In Paradise before the Camp Fire, there hadn't been rain for 200+ days. You can't put out every fire instantly as was tried in the past because that would build up fuels to devastating wildfire amounts. Many species evolved with fire... heck, my mom's oleanders in her front yard look even healthier than before the fire a year and change ago even though they were burned to blackened crisps.
Much like smoking cigarettes, it's difficult to point to which one caused lung cancer, but surely the sum of enough of them did cause it as much as the hockey-stick CO2 and temperature increases, coral bleaching, insect/bird apocalypse and Arctic sea ice declining to an imminent blue ocean event are caused by the sum total of human activities polluting GHGs into the environment over decades.
>Australia's bushfires are definitely climate change related
Australia's bushfires are most likely related to climate change and this is probably the best hypothesis for their cause. It should be verified by actual scientists before we can say "definietly climate change" with confidence.