
Climate Change Did Influence Australia’s Unprecedented Bushfires - pseudolus
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-climate-change-did-influence-australias-unprecedented-bushfires/
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aaron695
> Yes, Climate Change Did Influence Australia’s Unprecedented Bushfires
> (scientificamerican.com)

THIS is a good example of why people don't trust scientists or global warming.

The narky Yes, is based on a pre-print, this isn't even published, I assume
not peer reviewed yet. Good to see even the journals no long believe in peer
review which they base their authority on.

The first paragraph has NOTHING to do with the study, but lets toss it in with
no scientific backing.

> Such an extreme fire season is at least 30 percent more likely because of
> global warming

And 30% more means the 3 in a 100 year event now happens 4 times every 100
years. Which is not great but not scary either. It's still something we 100%
have to mange and deal with, which we can.

Scientific American needs to scare people to get their clicks, and they are
misrepresenting numbers to do that. This is not how to do real science.

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notaspecialist
Australian trees have extremely hard seed pods and require fire to open, it's
the evolution of many species in the ecosystem (animals that live in-land are
fast moving, slower moving animals live closer to the coast or dig into the
ground). Being told for the last 10 years that you cannot clear land of bush-
fire fuel (as one citizen did, and was heavily fined with new ECO laws), a
practice done since Aboriginals taught settlers, contributed massively to last
year's fires.

The point I'm making is the new ECO laws aren't respecting the reality of
Australia's ecosystem, and bush-fires like that are the outcome.

~~~
qtplatypus
The head of the NSW Rural Fire Fighters who are responsible for fighting
bushfires and doing hazard reduction burns has stated that there have not been
any ecological laws that have prevented them from doing burns.

What has prevented from from doing burns is warmer winters that has resulted
in the window for when they can safely do burns being reduced.

I'd like to know what these new eco laws you are referring to and a citation
for the story you made reference to about the person getting fined for doing
hazard reduction on his own land.

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jamil7
Australians have continuously voted for parties who have a track record of
either dismissing or doing nothing about climate change. The currently elected
party in particular. It's extremely sad to watch all this unfold in my home
country from abroad but at the same time I'm not sure how you can argue with
what the general public are voting for.

~~~
patrickaljord
There is nothing Australia could have done on its own to curb climate change.
Even if we removed every single human and factory from the country it wouldn't
have influenced climate change one bit. Now I know "we need to start
somewhere", but this somewhere needs to be the biggest polluters not
Australia. The best thing Australia could have done is to decrease their
consumptions of goods manufactured by these big polluters by imposing heavy
tariffs maybe, although this could have triggered a local industry to build
this tariffed stuff which could have only been stopped by imposing very heavy
taxation on those local industries, I don't think any politicians would like
to commit political suicide though.

~~~
rypskar
This is only a variant of the old "that big group of peoples are much larger
than our group, so they need to change first". The others are always larger,
so easy to accuse. Total for a country is maybe not the best metric to use.
Per person emissions shows much more than total for a group of peoples called
a country. Of course the largest polluter both by country and per person need
to change the most, but the total pollution is the total of what you, me, and
everyone else pollute

~~~
reitzensteinm
Yes, and it's scary how often this broken thinking pops up here.

Here's a quick quiz: China decides to split in two. Can each half now by
rights pollute twice as much as it was before? Does the EU count as one large
mega polluter or a bunch of small conscientious countries? Should we cap an
Indian's emissions at 1/50th of those of an Australian, or use their economic
development as an excuse to do whatever we want?

The planet doesn't care about whatever imaginary lines we draw on a map. Per
capita is all that matters and Australia is doing very poorly.

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huffmsa
Ah, it's the climate's fault. Not shitty forestry management policies by the
various government entities who are "responsible" for that kind of stuff.

Letting underbrush accumulate because you have a zero tolerance burn policy is
the problem everywhere there's been a severe fire.

We thought we'd improved a million year old system, but all we did was make it
a tail end event.

~~~
freddie_mercury
> Letting underbrush accumulate because you have a zero tolerance burn policy
> is the problem everywhere there's been a severe fire.

Australia doesn't have a zero tolerance burn policy. New South Wales alone
burned ("bushfire hazard reduction") 187,041 hectares in the 2018-19 financial
year[1].

Your comment comes across as an American who doesn't actually know anything
about Australia.

[1]:
[https://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/12989...](https://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/129892/NSW-
RFS-Annual-Report-2018-19-web.pdf)

~~~
huffmsa
I'll comb through that document and find it myself if you don't have it
offhand, but do you know what section I'll find information about controlled /
planned burns? And / or underbrush removal policies?

Strike that, found it after rereading your post

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ajdegol
Our group did a ScienceBrief showing climate change increases the risk of
wildfires ([https://sciencebrief.org/topics/climate-change-
science/wildf...](https://sciencebrief.org/topics/climate-change-
science/wildfires))

~~~
koheripbal
Everywhere, or in Australia specifically?

~~~
ajdegol
The review was global and included Australia. It is linked from above. :)

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meowface
>Yes, Climate Change Did Influence Australia’s Unprecedented Bushfires

>Such an extreme fire season is at least 30 percent more likely because of
global warming, a new analysis finds

What? What am I missing here?

~~~
koheripbal
Yeah, it's still statistically impossible to attribute individual events to
Climate Change with any amount of confidence.

Climate change is about global averages. It makes satisfying headlines to
blame climate change, but it's poor science.

~~~
meowface
It's this sort of thing that makes climate change deniers even more emboldened
in the conviction that they're right and that it's all a politically motivated
hoax or whatever. It's extremely irresponsible. Especially because the
headline directly contradicts the subheadline right below it.

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seemslegit
Not disagreeing with the conclusion but given that climate change itself is
real what would it even take for the contrary to be true ? Or for any other
natural phenomena/disaster, hell if the covid19 virus reproduces/mutates
better on average at warmer temperatures even its impact can be attributed to
climate change.

~~~
simonh
I'm not entirely clear what point you are making, or what question you are
asking.

A conclusion may 'seem obvious' to some people while still being doubted by
others. Careful analysis of the evidence allowing us to put credible and
defensible numbers to the influence of climate change is important work. This
research isn't making a vague claim along the lines of warmer temperatures
'maybe' amplifying the effect of a disease, it's quantitative study putting
real numbers on a measurable effect.

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zpeti
2020

1\. Find extreme weather event 2\. Blame it on climate change 3\. Write
article about it 4\. Profit

~~~
SiempreViernes
There is not much profit though, you'd get much more if you said it wasn't
related.

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pcdoodle
When did we ever have Climate!Change?

Get this crap off HN.

