Claim : Unprecedented Australian Bushfires

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.“
– Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.”
– Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment

“The only way to get our society to truly change is to
frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
– emeritus professor Daniel Botkin

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Climate change ambulance chasers are furiously promoting the NSW fires as “unprecedented” and evidence of global warming (aka climate change) that actually paused 15 years ago.

Last summer might have been the hottest in Australia as measured by the Bureau of Meteorology, but satellite measurements monitored by the UAH, show nothing out of the ordinary at all :

Although not a “Global” anomaly, there has also been no temperature change in the Blue Mountains since records began, with exception to the 1930’s being the hottest decade on record.

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Unprecedented Fires in NSW for this time of the year?

September : Trove holds 74,067 media records of September fires in Sydney, dating back to 1815 …

Search results for ‘Sydney Bush Fires September’ – Digitised newspapers and more – Trove

October : 79,388 media records of October fires in Sydney, including news on Tuesday 29 October 1872 that “An extensive bush fire has raged since yesterday in the suburbs near Bondi…”!

Search results for ‘Sydney Bush Fires October’ – Digitised newspapers and more – Trove

 

SERIOUS FIRES IN NEW SOUTH WALES
Sydney, 17th October 1890
Tremendous bush fires are raging at Lismore, an agricultural district situated on the north arm of the Richmond River, about 530 miles north of Sydney. Vast tracts of territory has been devastated, and the township of Clunes is in danger. The inhabitants of the last-mentioned place are out fighting the flames.

SERIOUS BUSH FIRES
SYDNEY, 16th October. 1923
As a result of the drought serious bush fires are raging in the Upper Richmond district of New South Wales, menacing large areas of timber and grass

TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION CUT OFF.
14th October 1926 
SYDNEY, This Day. Huge bush fires are reported in the northern part of the State. The whole country from the Queensland border to Tabulam,, across the Tooloo Range, is ablaze. Unconfirmed reports state that some houses were burnt. All telegraphic communication is cut off. There has been little rain for months, and the country is exceedingly dry.

DAMAGE IN NEW SOUTH WALES
SYDNEY, 15th October. 1926
Bush fires are still racing on the north coast, and, fanned by a gale, are travelling at a remarkable rate. Thousands of acres of valuable forest, country have been devastated, many homesteads destroyed, and much fine dairying country swept.

BLACK SUNDAY
A WILD STORM ENORMOUS DAMAGE IN N.S.W.
SYDNEY, 17th October. 1928 
This year summer heat has descended upon New South Wales unusually early. Already there have been several trying days, but the worst of these was last Sunday, when a high temperature of 95 degrees was accompanied by a cyclonic gale, which left behind it a trail of enormous damage.

BUSH FIRES IN N.S.W.
SYDNEY, October 15, 1944
Bush fires in New South Wales have destroyed thousands of acres of timber and pasture country. Prolonged drought conditions have caused the fires to spread rapidly. Already this month Sydney has had three days on which the temperature reached more than 90 degrees. High humidity has made conditions uncomfortable.

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The scale of the latest NSW fires ?

These fires were not bigger, earlier of deadlier than other Australian fires. Our biggest known bushfire “Black Thursday” burned out 5 million hectares in 1851, with Carbon Dioxide levels at 290 ppm. These NSW fires burned out 60,000, with CO² at 398 ppm.

The intensity of a fire has little link to global temperatures. Top fire experts such as Phil Cheney and David Packham, both former CSIRO bushfire researchers, believe far more relevant factors include fuel loads in the bush and fuel reduction management. Past rains are also highly relevant, adding to the fuel load.

… rains that professional global warming alarmists like Tim Flannery claimed in 2007 would never again come, “Even the rain that falls will not actually fill our dams and river systems”. In 2009, the rains came down in a big way adding to the unprecedented and highly volatile 2013 fuel load.

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Enough boring sceptical facts…let’s hear what an icon of the left thinks about Australia and fires :

For 40 or maybe 60 millennia, Aboriginal peoples managed fire proactively, setting alight woodland, scrubland and grassland, so that they could pass freely, so that game was driven towards them, so that fresh green herbage was available. Aboriginal languages have dozens of words for fire. As the Endeavour sailed up the eastern coast, Captain Cook noted that the skies were darkened with smoke by day and lit up by fire at night.

In the national parks of Australia, the importance of regular burning is well understood. Elsewhere the emphasis has been on prevention. Attempting to prevent fire in most of Australia is simply postponing the inevitable. Bushland that is not burnt regularly turns into a powder keg, as the fuel load inexorably increases. When dry eucalypt woodland goes up, it explodes, turning into a veritable firestorm. If no wind is blowing, it creates its own wind.

The Australian governments, state and federal, are well aware of the cost of fire to the economy. People who want to build houses in sclerophyll woodland will be told that any space between the floor of the house and the ground must be sealed, and even that they have to clear the native vegetation for a radius of as much as 50 metres from the house walls. At the same time people in the most desirable seaside suburbs will be prevented by law from clearing native vegetation. Some of the most valuable real estate in Victoria is bordered by beachfront reserves that are an endless succession of thickets choked with tinder-dry dead wood.

The most disheartening aspect of the Kinglake disaster is that since its foundation in the 1880s the township has suffered regular bushfires, in 1926, in 1939, in the 1960s, in the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983; two years ago almost to the day 1,500 hectares were destroyed by fire, but nothing was learnt. The cause of these disasters is not global warming; still less is it arson. It is the failure to recognise that fire is an intrinsic feature of eucalypt bushland. It cannot be prevented but it can and should be managed. Unless there is a fundamental change of policy across all levels of government in Australia, there will be more and worse fires and more deaths.

Germaine Greer | Mark Riboldi

Salient, rational and measured words written in beautiful English by (activist, lefty, feminist) Germaine Greer ;p

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Dear climate change ambulance chasers,

Bushfire alarmism by the media, filtering down to the activist mob, serves a beneficial purpose in that it actually might save lives in terms of creating an ‘overheated’ alarmism, making people in affected areas more aware and potentially more prepared. But the alarmism must end there. The fires which were terrible, burnt out a relatively small area (in historical terms) of 60,000 hectares and were no bigger, earlier or deadlier than any other Australian fire throughout recorded history.

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UPDATE

Gerard Henderson:

According to Adam Bandt’s logic, the Greens are responsible for the devastating bushfires sweeping parts of NSW…

Bandt went on to suggest Abbott’s firefighting was a ‘’con’’ because he was ‘’helping start fires that put people’s lives in danger’’. In other words, the Prime Minister is not only a con artist but also an arsonist. Then, as if to prove when muck-racking the muck can go even lower, Bandt tweeted on Thursday, ‘’Tony Abbott’s plan means more bushfires for Australia’’.

Bandt’s attack overlooked two essential facts. First, the Coalition’s policy aim on the reduction of carbon emissions by 2020 is the same as that of the Labor Party (which the Greens were aligned to for most of the past three years).

Second, if the Greens had supported Kevin Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme in 2009 and 2010, Australia would already have a form of an emissions trading scheme in place. Bob Brown, Christine Milne and their Greens colleagues in the Senate opposed Rudd Labor’s reduction scheme and prevented it passing into legislation.

Of course, if Australia had introduced Rudd’s scheme it would have done nothing to stop the bushfires. Australia’s carbon emissions are but a tiny fraction of world output. Moreover, the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events remains uncertain.

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UPDATE

via JoanneNova

A few facts on Flannery, Climate Council, and prophecies of bushfire: no long trends for Katoomba

Flannery and the Climate Council are at it again — trying to scare money out of people with their prophecies of bushfires. They are milking the fear factor from the October fires in the Blue Mountains, telling us disaster planning means we have to get “the facts straight”.

Let’s get the facts straight on exactly how human emissions of CO2 have affected the temperature and rainfall in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. How much hotter and drier is the climate? Ninety percent of human emissions have been produced since WWII. Katoomba has the longest running temperature series I could find in the BOM records -see below. But where is that rising trend? The string of hot years in the late 1930s appears to be just as hot as the last decade.  The 1920s and 30s look a lot like the 1980 and 90s.

The facts about Katoomba annual temperatures

Source: Katoomba annual mean temperature

see also Katoomba October mean temperatures

But wait, the Climate Council tells us “Hot, dry conditions create conditions favourable for bushfires. Australia has just experienced its hottest 12 months ever recorded.” Any sane person would assume the Blue Mountains must be getting drier –  strange the Climate Council don’t provide a graph on that. Let’s look at the drying climate in Katoomba.

 Source: Katoomba annual rainfall

See also the same trends in  Blackheath annual rainfall and Lithgow annual rainfall.

In other words Katoomba has a noisy annual rainfall, there is no obvious trend, there have been dry years and wet years, and if heat and dryness make fires worse, then there is no sign that CO2 makes any difference.

In Katoomba at least, the late 30s and 40s appear to be a bit hotter, and also drier than the last few years. That was when CO2 levels were ideal. Continue Reading »

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See also :

• Fuel Loads Not Climate Change Are Making Bushfires More Severe « JoNova

Climatism related :

• RSS Shows No Warming In Australia | CACA
• Sydney Almost As Warm As 100 years Ago | CACA
• Shock News : Australia’s Climate Has Never Been Stable | CACA
• Shock News : NSW Fires Have Nothing To Do With Global Warming | CACA
• Five Of The Six Snowiest Winters Have Occurred Since David Viner Declared The End Of Snow | CACA
• So Much For Global Warming | CACA
• Claim: Humans behind record Australian heat, research shows | CACA
• No steel roof required: IPCC dials back the fear of extreme weather | CACA
• IPCC Officially Kills Off Catastrophic Climate Fears | CACA
• Sea-level rises are slowing, tidal gauge records show (Sydney) | CACA

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