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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

Australia's bushfires are definitely climate change related, the only argument anyone can have is whether it's human-caused.

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.

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Definitely. Definitely. And what about the other bushfires they've had that were over twice as large as the ones they are currently having? Like the 74-75 bushfires that were 6 times as big as the current ones? Or the ones in 69-70 that were twice as big? or 68-69 (also twice as big)?

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.

You mean the bushfires which have to date exceeded the total area burned in 74-75 in NSW[1]? Which are noted from that article as having a decidedly different burn characteristic then 74-75 which was mostly grassland, as opposed to the forest fires we currently have, including large areas of rainforest in Queensland which has not previously been dry enough to support a bushfire?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/07/recor...

A significant factor in the 74-75 fires was extra plant growth from unusually heavy rainfall in the two years prior providing extra fuel[1]. Very different circumstances to the current situation.

[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/6C98BB75496A5AD1C...

You're actually saying that a Eucalypt forest(Kanangra-Boyd_National_Park), trees that are adapted to fire, that actually promote fire with highly combustible leaves(eucalyptus oil), whose seeds only sprout after a fire, has never been dry enough to support a bush fire. I sincerely doubt it.

> including large areas of rainforest in Queensland which has not previously been dry enough to support a bushfire?

He talked about rainforest, not Eucalyptus forest.

Climate change makes extreme weather more likely. Pointing out that extreme weather existed in the past too is not a sufficient counterargument.

On the other hand, automatically labeling everything temperature related as "caused by climate change" is not a proper argument as well.

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.

Australia is a big place, you should get a little more familiar with it when you want to think about the scope of this fire. It's not the size alone that's unprecedented (because as you point out that's obviously not true), it's the fact that it's so big, so early, and in such a weird spot. Very new for that area. If all of the east coast of the US burned and we shrugged and said, "Eh, California's were bigger in '88" it wouldn't be a meaningful comparison at all.

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 :)

I've literally been to every state in Australia. Worked in western aus (Kalgoorlie, up to Port Hedland) then up to Darwin. Spent some time in Perth, and down to Margaret River. Adelaide, Melbourne, all around Sydney and up the gold coast all the way to Cairns. Even went over to Tasmania to visit a friend. I've got really good friends who lived in Katoomba. I know the area. I'm not parroting anything.

Square kilometerage is not on its own a useful measure. There's different terrain types, that have different responses to fire.

It isn’t clear that forest management would prevent bushfires. The consensus amongst the experts and royal commissions seems to be that there is no effective prevention.

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.

The weather was getting increasingly too dry to conduct controlled-/back-burns and the burns that were set were growing more and more out-of-control. So the burns decreased and the fuel loads increased until a massive fire tore through, making this season far, far worse.

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.

Well I don’t think it is one or the other. Fuel reduction is important, but it doesn’t seem sufficient. My understanding is that controlled burning had been done close to the prescribed cap.

(Disclaimer: I don't mean to question that bushfires are related to climate change. I just mean that ideas should be verified no matter how obvious they seem to be.)

>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.

It can't be verified by "actual scientists" because if they find otherwise, they'll be expelled from their field. You can't have rigorous scientific inquiry under these circumstances, and the results are predetermined.

It would be evidence of climate change if Australia was no longer getting hit with droughts that induce wildfire conditions. We've got records of those going back to colonial times and fossil evidence going back thousands of years.

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.

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