Archives par mot-clé : Wildfires

better to know...?, climate-debate, unclassified

FIRE

by J. Curry, Sep 15, 2020 in WUWT

Subtitle: our failure to live in harmony with nature.

I’m taking a breather today from nonstop hurricane stuff. Well, ‘breather’ may not be quite the right word.

As I’m writing this, I’m looking out into the smoke from the California fires that are blowing into Reno (not to mention much of the rest of the U.S.).  Schools in Reno are supposed to be open (they have a good COVID protocol), but have been closed more than half the time for the past month owing to bad air quality from the fires.

The mantra from global warming activists that manmade global warming is causing the fires, and therefore fossil fuels must be eliminated,  is rather tiresome, not to mention misses the most important factors.  More importantly, even if global warming is having some fractional impact on the wildfires, reducing fossil fuels would fractionally impact the fires but only a time scale of many decades hence.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

California Has Always Had Fires, Environmental Alarmism Makes Them Worse Than Necessary

by M. Schellenberger,  Sep 10, 2020 in Forbes

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“California was a very smoky place historically,” says Malcolm North of the US Forest Survey.“Even though we’re seeing area burned that is off-the-charts, it’s still probably less than what used to be burned before Europeans arrived.”

Many reporters note that more area has burned this year in California than at any other point in “the modern period,” but that period began in 1950. For the last half of the 20th Century, the annual area burned in California was just 250,000 acres a year, whereas the best-available science suggests 4.4 and 12 million acres burned in California annually before the arrival of Europeans.

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See also: California Has Always Had Fires, Environmentalism Makes Them Worse
climate-debate

Al Gore Uses Heatwaves, Wildfires To Fuel Global Warming Angst

by V. Richardson, Sep 9, 2020 ClimateChangeDispatch

A burst of wild September weather brought a “climate crisis” warning Tuesday from Al Gore as Californians struggled with heat and wildfires, Atlantic storm trackers raced through the alphabet and Coloradans traded their flip-flops for snow boots.

California firefighters fought to contain 23 active fires that charred a record 2.3 million acres as the state headed into the peak of its fire season fueled by a heatwave. On Sunday, the Los Angeles County town of Woodland Hills set a record at 121 degrees.

“It reached a record high of 121 degrees F in LA county over the weekend,” Mr. Gore tweeted Tuesday. “Extreme heat is fueling a longer, more intense, and more destructive wildfire season in CA. This is what an unabated climate crisis looks like.”

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In a warming climate, temperatures become more stable, not less, because the differences between the poles and the equator become smaller, Mr. Taylor said.

“Assuming for the sake of argument that a large temperature swing is a crisis like climate alarmists assert, global warming will make such temperature swings less likely and severe,” he said. “So this is happening despite our recent modest warming, not because of it.”

better to know...?, climate-debate

California’s Creek Fire Creates Its Own Pyrocumulonimbus Cloud

by NASA, September 9, 2020 in WUWT

On Friday September 4, 2020 at about 6:44 PM PDT the Creek Fire began in the Big Creek drainage area between Shaver Lake, Big Creek and Huntington Lake, Calif. NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite captured these images of the fire on Sep. 05 through Sep. 07, 2020. From the series of images the spread of the fire can be seen in the outward movement of the red hot spots, although the huge cloud on the 6th obscures all readings due to its size.

The huge, dense cloud created on Sep. 05 and seen in the Suomi NPP image was a pyrocumulonimbus cloud (pyroCb) and the resulting smoke plume that grew upward was spotted and confirmed on Sep. 06, 2020. A pyrocumulonimbus cloud is also called a cumulonimbus flammagenitus. The origins of the latter word are from the Latin meaning “flame” and “created from.” This perfectly describes a cloud that is caused by a natural source of heat such as a wildfire or volcano. Rising warm air from the fire can carry water vapor up into the atmosphere causing clouds. Any type of convective cloud can be created. In this case, the cumulonimbus, or thunderhead cloud, was created. Precipitation and lightning can also occur with these types of clouds creating a risk that the fire will expand due to increased wind from precipitation downdraft or by creating new fires due to lightning strikes. These are all things that fire managers must keep in mind while continuing to try to fight the fire.

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unclassified

No Fuel, No Fire

by Mike Jonas, August 25, 2020 in WUWT

With wildfires devastating California, it may be worth while seeing if lessons can be learned from Australia. Connections between American and Australian firefighters go back many years, with each helping the other from time to time. There were devastating bushfires in Australia last summer, and, tragically, three Americans who had come to help were killed when their water tanker plane crashed. It’s now Australia’s turn to help California, and let us all hope there is a better outcome.

Gum trees burnt in the bushfires in The Blue Mountains in Australia

Submissions to Enquiries

Australia’s federal enquiry into the bushfires is not due to report until 28 October 2020 but the NSW [New South Wales] state enquiry report was published today. There were nearly 2,000 public submissions. Before I go into the report’s recommendations, it may be worth looking at a couple of the public submissions in order to understand the extreme level of public frustration with green tape and the way that the fire hazard has been allowed to grow ever larger over the years.

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climate-debate

PBS Blames Hurricanes, Wildfires On Climate Change, Defying UN ‘Consensus’

by H.S. Burnett, August 20, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

PBS News Hour attacked climate science this weekend, publishing alarmist claims about hurricanes and wildfires that defy findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In an interview between PBS reporter Hari Sreenivasan and Andrew Freedman, editor of Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, the two journalists blamed global warming for severe wildfires and hurricanes.

According to the IPCC, however, there is little or no evidence indicating global warming is impacting hurricanes or drought.

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Figure 1: Total wildfire acreage burned by year in the United States, 1926 to 2019. Data from NIFC. Graph by meteorologist Anthony Watts

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climate-debate

Stop Blaming Climate Change For California’s Fires–Michael Schellenberger

by P. Homewood, August 26, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

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It’s Not About The Climate

Nobody denies climate change is occurring and playing a role in warmer temperatures and heatwaves. Keeley notes that, since 1960, the variation in spring and summer temperatures explain 50% of the variation in fire frequency and intensity from one year to the next.

But the half-century since 1960 is the same period in which the U.S. government promoted, mostly out of ignorance, the suppression of regular fires which most forests need to allow for new growth.

For much of the 20th Century, U.S. agencies and private landowners suppressed fires as a matter of policy. The results were disastrous: the accumulation of wood fuel resulting in fires that burn so hot they sometimes kill the forest, turning it into shrubland.

The US government started to allow forests in national parks to burn more in the 1960s, and allowed a wider set of forests on public lands to burn starting in the 1990s.

“When I hear climate change discussed it’s suggested that it’s a major reason and it’s not,” Scott Stevens of the University of California, Berkeley, told me.

Redwood forests before Europeans arrived burned every 6 to 25 years. The evidence comes from fire scars on barks and the bases of massive ancient trees, hollowed out by fire, like the one depicted in The New York Times photograph.

“There was severe heat before the lightning that dried-out [wood] fuel,” noted Stevens. “But in Big Basin [redwood park], where fire burned every seven to ten years, there is a high-density of fuel build-up, especially in the forests.”

climate-debate

Wildfires, Blackouts And High Gas Prices: Californians Fight Familiar Foes Amid Pandemic

by C. Rotter, August 20, 2020 in TheDailyCaller/WUWT

  • Wildfires are scorching California amid a massive heatwave, which is prompting citizens to consume more energy in hopes of staying cool. The increase in consumption resulted in rolling blackouts, as energy regulators managed an over-taxed energy grid. 
  • The wildfires and blackouts are also coming amid a severe economic downturn caused in part by government-imposed lockdowns designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
  • At the same time, a recent fuel tax increase is forcing Californians to pay more at the gas pump. California now has the highest gas prices in the country, data show. 

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 See also Californian Wildfires–Due To Climate Change?

unclassified

During The Last Glacial Maximum Fires Were 10 Times More Common And Summer Temps 3-4°C Warmer Than Today

by K. Richard, August 3, 2020 in NoTricksZone

A new study finds that 26 to 19 thousand years ago, with CO2 concentrations as low as 180 ppm, fire activity was an order of magnitude more prevalent than today near the southern tip of Africa – mostly because summer temperatures were 3-4°C warmer.

We usually assume the last glacial maximum – the peak of the last ice age – was signficantly colder than it is today.

But evidence has been uncovered that wild horses fed on exposed grass year-round in the Arctic, Alaska’s North Slope, about 20,000 to 17,000 years ago, when CO2 concentrations were at their lowest and yet “summer temperatures were higher here than they are today” (Kuzmina et al., 2019). Horses had a “substantial dietary volume” of dried grasses year-round, even in winter at this time, but the Arctic is presently “no place for horses” because there is too little for them to eat, and the food there is to eat is “deeply buried by snow” (Guthrie and Stoker, 1990).

In a new study (Kraaij et al., 2020) find evidence that “the number of days per annum with high or higher fire danger scores was almost an order of magnitude larger during the LGM [last glacial maximum, 19-26 ka BP]  than under contemporary conditions” near Africa’s southernmost tip, and that “daily maximum temperatures were 3-4°C higher than present in summer (and 2-4°C lower than present in winter), which would have contributed to the high severity of fire weather during LGM summers.”

Neither conclusion – that surface temperatures would be warmer or that fires would be more common – would seem to be consistent with the position that CO2 variations drive climate or heavily contribute to fire patterns.

climate-debate

Siberia on fire – every summer

by Pasi Autio, July 14, 2020 in WUWT

Northern hemisphere summer – the season when forest fires in Siberia are on the loop. And usually every single new article about the Siberian forest fires somehow links them to climate change. Therefore it is good time to see how the forest fires has changed during the years. Is there really an increasing trend of Siberia forest fires as the news suggests and what is continuously predicted based on climate models?

With an area of 13.1 million square kilometres (5,100,000 sq mi), Siberia accounts for 77% of Russia’s land area. Majority of the Siberia is sparsely inhabited wilderness with little or no roads. Therefore, what sets on fire, usually burns until rain or other natural factor ends the fire. Southern Siberia also has extensive logging.

Getting reliable fire area data based on available literature seems to be problematic. According to the literature (1) USSR-era fire area data is unreliable and was consistently and severely underreporting fires on sparsely populated areas due to incomplete reporting structure that left most of the country unmonitored (6). The situation was improved only after western satellite data was taken in use by post-USSR Russia. But considering the size of Siberia and the fact that it is very sparsely populated, it is not wonder that no reliable data can be generated without the help of satellites. But even on satellite era some smaller fires goes undetected due to cloud cover or sensor detection limits (6).

After extensive literature study, I found no actual study providing satellite-based dataset for Siberian forest fires for post-USSR era either, which is strange considering how much coverage the Siberian forest fires have got lately. There seem to be an effort going on to create such a dataset for USSR-era years, however, by digitizing old satellite images taken since 1979, but let’s discuss that later a bit more.

Annual burned area in Siberia 1997-2016

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Wildfire, Siberia: 123rf.com

Figure: Natural forest fire in Russia.

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better to know...?

Feux californiens : le climat innocenté

by Benoît Rittaud, 19 juin 2020

Dans un silence remarquable, on vient d’apprendre que les incendies qui ont ravagé la Californie en 2018 ont été causés par des défauts de maintenance dans le réseau électrique et ne devaient rien au réchauffement climatique, rapporte Benoît Rittaud, mathématicien et président de l’Association des climato-réalistes. Tribune.

Calomniez, calomniez, il en restera toujours quelque chose, dit-on. Dans notre monde où l’écologisme est un réflexe pavlovien, ce slogan s’est fait encore plus simple : dès que se produit un drame, toute explication fondée sur le « dérèglement climatique » est présumée correcte. Cette vérité immédiate a alors de bonnes chances de devenir vérité tout court, car qui ira perdre son temps à rétablir les faits après coup, tandis qu’entre-temps tant d’autres drames auront à leur tour « démontré une fois de plus la réalité de la crise ».

 

Continuer la lecture de Feux californiens : le climat innocenté →

better to know...?

The Proximal Drivers of Large Fires: A Pyrogeographic Study

by Clarke H. et al., April 3, 2020 in FrontierInEarthScience

Variations in global patterns of burning and fire regimes are relatively well measured, however, the degree of influence of the complex suite of biophysical and human drivers of fire remains controversial and incompletely understood. Such an understanding is required in order to support current fire management and to predict the future trajectory of global fire patterns in response to changes in these determinants. In this study we explore and compare the effects of four fundamental controls on fire, namely the production of biomass, its drying, the influence of weather on the spread of fire and sources of ignition. Our study area is southern Australia, where fire is currently limited by either fuel production or fuel dryness. As in most fire-prone environments, the majority of annual burned area is due to a relatively small number of large fires. We train and test an Artificial Neural Network’s ability to predict spatial patterns in the probability of large fires (>1,250 ha) in forests and grasslands as a function of proxies of the four major controls on fire activity. Fuel load is represented by predicted forested biomass and remotely sensed grass biomass, drying is represented by fraction of the time monthly potential evapotranspiration exceeds precipitation, weather is represented by the frequency of severe fire weather conditions and ignitions are represented by the average annual density of reported ignitions. The response of fire to these drivers is often non-linear. Our results suggest that fuel management will have limited capacity to alter future fire occurrence unless it yields landscape-scale changes in fuel amount, and that shifts between, rather than within, vegetation community types may be more important. We also find that increased frequency of severe fire weather could increase the likelihood of large fires in forests but decrease it in grasslands. These results have the potential to support long-term strategic planning and risk assessment by fire management agencies.

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unclassified

ESA STUDY REVEALS THE 2019 “HORRIFIC” AMAZON FIRE SEASON WAS ACTUALLY INLINE WITH THE 2001-2018 AVERAGE

by Poppaloff, March11, 2020 in Electroverse

Never has the phrase “don’t believe the hype” been so relevant.

Last year media outlet after media outlet pumped the horror of the fires in the Amazon: “The Earth is burning up – The Earth is burning up.” However, the latest study released from the ESA points to the fact that last year’s burn, although 70% up on the previous year, was in fact in line with the previous seventeen years of acreage burn figures.

“While forest fires are common in the Amazon, they vary considerably from year-to-year driven by changes in climate, as well as variations in deforestation and forest degradation,” the ESA wrote.

The 2019 fires triggered an international demand for updated information about active fires, most importantly in Brazil. However, these figures were never compared to the number of blazes over a longer time period, reads a watchers.news article.

Using information from ESA’s Fire CCI project, researchers studied fire-ravaged areas in South America in 2018 and 2019, then compared the data to the annual average from 2001 to 2018. The report indicated that the total burned area in South America was roughly 70 percent more in 2019 as compared to the same period of 2018– however, only a fraction more than the annual average over the previous 17 years:

 

Continuer la lecture de ESA STUDY REVEALS THE 2019 “HORRIFIC” AMAZON FIRE SEASON WAS ACTUALLY INLINE WITH THE 2001-2018 AVERAGE →

climate and geology

Australian fires: Climate ‘truth bomb’?

by Alan Longhurst, February 24, 2020 in WUWT

Recipe for Australia’s climate ‘truth bomb’:  dubious manipulations of the historical temperature record, ignorance of the climate dynamics of the Southern Hemisphere, and ignorance of Australia’s ecological and social history.

A correspondent of The Guardian newspaper writes that her personal ‘climate truth bomb’ hit her while she was picking ash from her glass at a wine tasting event – the Sydney Harbour bridge being dimly seen through the murk of bushfires. The truth came to her, she wrote, in the eloquent rage of Greta Thunberg and also in heat, smoke and fire.

Although anthropogenic climate change sells well, especially at The Guardian, their Sydney correspondent cannot be so ignorant about the climate of Australia or about bushfires as she pretends. Put briefly, bushfires in Australia and elsewhere have two main sources: from thunderstorms or from human activity, deliberate or otherwise – cigarette butts, sparks from brakes on railway trains, from incautious welding on farm machinery and from electric transmission lines. In California, where almost 2 million acres burned in 2018 and claimed many lives, the electricity supply company now closes down its transmission lines in windy conditions to prevent sparking and fires.

As she should have known, climate change or not, that ash in The Guardian correspondent’s wine was very probably caused by the direct action of an Australian citizen. In the current drought, 36% of fires have been judged to be accidental, 37% as suspicious, 13% as deliberate and only 6% as natural. And that pattern is not new: Australia has a serious arson problem. “In short, up to 85 bushfires begin every day because someone leaves their house and decides to start one,” said Dr. P. Reid of the Australian Center for Research in Bushfires and Arson

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climate-debate

Bjorn Lomborg Fighting Australia’s Fire Myths

by P. Homewood, January 29, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

https://www.facebook.com/bjornlomborg/photos/a.221758208967/10158703983303968/?type=3&theater

As he points out in the article:

Australia is the world’s most fire-prone continent. In 1900, 11 per cent of its surface burned annually. These days, 5 per cent of the country burns every year. By the end of the century, if we do not stop climate change, higher temperatures and an increase in aridity will likely mean a 0.7 percentage point increase in burnt area, an increase from 5.3 per cent of Australia to 6 per cent.

Unfortunately, many reports on Australia’s fires have exploited the carnage to push a specific agenda, resting on three ideas: that bushfires are worse than ever, that this is caused by global warming, and that the only solution is for political leaders to make even bigger carbon-cut promises.

Globally, bushfires burn less land than it used to. Since 1900, global burnt area has reduced by more than one-third because of agriculture, fire suppression and forest management. In the satellite era, NASA and other groups document significant decreases.

Surprisingly, this decrease is even true for Australia. Satellites show that from 1997 to 2018 the burnt area declined by one-third. Australia’s current fire season has seen less area burned than in previous years. Up to January 26, bushfires burned 19.4 million hectares in Australia — about half the average burn over the similar timeframe of 37 million hectares in the satellite record. (Actually the satellites show 46 million hectares burnt, but 9 million hectares are likely from prescribed burns.)

When the media suggests Australia’s fires are “unprecedented in scale”, it is wrong. Australia’s burnt area declined by more than a third from 1900 to 2000, and has declined across the satellite period. This fire season, at the time of writing, 2.5 per cent of Australia’s area has burned compared with the past 10 years’ 4.8 per cent average by this point.

What is different this year is that fires have been mostly in NSW and Victoria. These are important states with a little more than half the country’s population — and many of its media outlets.

But suggesting fires are caused by global warming rests on cherrypicking these two regions with more fire and ignoring the remaining 87 per cent of Australia’s landmass, where burned area has declined.

I certainly would take issue with the claim aridity will increase, as we know that rainfall has generally been greater since the 1970s than before.

Lomborg goes on to make the points I have made regularly, that there are many practical ways to reduce the risk of severe fires, and that even if Australia went totally net zero, it would have no effect whatsoever on their climate.

Well worth a read though.

climate-debate

Learning The Lessons From The Waroona Bushfires

by P. Homewood, January 22, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

It has surely now been established beyond any possible doubt the major role that poor fire hazard management has played in the severity of recent Australian bushfires, despite disinformation campaigns from the BBC/Guardian/Met Office.

Back in 2016, a Special Inquiry was held following the catastrophic Waroona bushfire, just south of Perth that year. Their report not only reemphasised the crucial role of controlled burning, but also gives an insight into the evolution of such practices in recent decades:

Below is the key segment of the report. [The data relates to Western Australia, and P&W refers to the Department of Parks and Wildlife].

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better to know...?

Les Feux en Australie : la réalité des faits et rien d’autre…

by Yannick Colleu, 17 janvier 2020 in ScienceClimatEnergie

Les feux de brousse en Australie font la une des journaux écrits et audiovisuels. Ces annonces sont reprises par les réseaux sociaux.
La vérité médiatique est maintenant bien établie, ces feux sont l’œuvre du dérèglement climatique. Ces catastrophes humaine et écologique présagent, selon les réseaux dits sociaux, la fin du Monde annoncée par les « experts » du GIEC.

A ma connaissance pas un seul journaliste ne semble s’être penché sur le sujet. Du moins aucune autre conclusion, quant aux causes de cette catastrophe, n’a été, à ma connaissance, publiée sinon pour pointer le changement climatique comme seul et unique coupable.

Pourtant la réponse est moins évidente.

Il est de notoriété publique que l’Australie est un pays coutumier des sécheresses et des températures extrêmes. En outre c’est un pays quasi désertique de 7,7 millions de km² peuplé d’à peine 25 millions d’habitants principalement implantés dans les grandes villes de la côte Est et dans la principale métropole de l’Ouest.

Après les gigantesques feux de brousse de janvier à mars 1961 en Australie occidentale les réflexions sur les actions de prévention conduisaient à préconiser l’usage de feux déclenchés/contrôlés pour maîtriser la végétation à l’approche de la saison sèche. Cette technique permet en effet de créer des coupe-feux et de limiter la matière inflammable qui nourrit les brasiers.

Cette politique préventive a longtemps porté ses fruits, réduisant considérablement les incendies et surtout leur propagation. Néanmoins les chantres de la lutte contre le réchauffement et le CO2 ont poussé le gouvernement australien à changer de politique il y a une dizaine d’années (par exemple ici et ici).

La politique actuelle ne privilégie plus l’anticipation du risque d’incendie mais préconise de laisser les incendies se propager et de ne défendre autant faire se peut que les habitations et les vies humaines.
De fait la végétation n’est plus façonnée par l’homme pour limiter les risques de propagation et celle-ci offre dès lors un combustible abondant au moindre foyer qui se développe.

Le graphique ci-dessous fournit par l’association Bushfire Front Inc (BFF) de l’État d’Australie occidentale révèle l’impact que cet abandon d’une politique de prévention sur les feux de brousse sur la période 1950-2017.

En vert : surface de feux déclenchés.
En rouge : surface de feux de brousse

 

Source : https://www.bushfirefront.org.au/prescribed-burning/why-prescribed-burning/
Légende : La zone d’incendie contrôlé (réduction de ‘carburant’) est indiquée en vert et la zone des feux de brousse (feux de forêt) en rouge. Les pics causés par désastreuse saison des incendies de 1961 et les grands feux de brousse de ces dernières années sont clairement visibles.

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climate-debate

Climate Change, Lies And The Lancet

by P. Homewood, January 7, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The Lancet has published its latest annual report on health and climate change, which inevitably orders us to stop using fossil fuels or the kids will get it!

It is the usual load of overhyped rubbish of the sort we have seen in previous years.

The executive summary contains a number of questionable claims and statements which seriously undermine the report’s integrity and reliability.

For a start, it claims that ‘a child born today will experience a world that is more than four degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average.’

Really? A temperature rise of three degrees in 50 years or so? Even the highly discredited climate models don’t regard this as realistic. For the Lancet to state this as a bald-faced fact calls into question the objectivity of its contents.

It then proceeds to list all sorts of ways in which health is already being impacted by climate change, including disease transmission, air pollution, extreme weather (which apparently will affect women more – yes, that’s got me and all!), wildfires, heatwaves and goodness knows what else.

Yet, tucked away in Figure 5 is the dirty little secret that mortality rates from climate-related causes have been plummeting since 1990.

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climate-debate

It has been hotter, fires have burnt larger areas

by J. Marohasy, January 4, 2020 in WUWT

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Last summer, and this summer, has been hot in Australia. But the summer of 1938-1939 was probably hotter — and back then more ferocious bushfires burnt larger areas. In rural Victoria, the summer of 1938-1939 was on average at least two degrees hotter than anything measured with equivalent equipment since, as shown in Figure 1.

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Figure 1. Mean maximum summer (December, January February) temperatures as measured at Rutherglen in rural Victoria by The Australian Bureau of Meteorology for the period when mercury thermometers were used. Data unadjusted/not homogenised.

The summer of 1938-1939 was probably the hottest ever in recorded history for the states of New South Wales and Victoria. It is difficult to know for sure because the Bureau has since changed how temperatures are measured at many locations and has not provided any indication of how current electronic probes are recording relative to the earlier mercury thermometers.

Further, since 2011, the Bureau is not averaging measurements from these probes so the hottest recorded daily temperature is now a one-second spot reading from an electronic devise with a sheath of unknown thickness. In the United States similar equipment is used and the readings are averaged over five (5) minutes and then the measurement recorded.

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See also: Australia Drought, The Indian Ocean Dipole & Sudden Stratospheric Warming

See also: Australia Bushfires – Is Blaming Greens a Conspiracy Theory?

See also : 24 People Charged For Setting Fires In New South Wales; Arrest Toll Hits 183

See also  : RISING LIKE A PHOENIX — AUSTRALIA’S FORESTS RENEW THEMSELVES

better to know...?, climate-debate

Australian Wildfire Latest

by P. Homewood, January 3, 2020 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

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According to the Telegraph, the current fires have affected 5.9m hectares, or 59,000 km2. While they claim this is three times the size of Wales, we need to remember that Australia is more than 30 times the size of the UK. 59,000 km2 represents 0.77% of Australia’s area, which in UK terms would be about 1800 km2, equivalent to three times the size of the New Forest.

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Now we can look at the rainfall data for Australia as a whole from BOM:

Certainly the area either side of the Queensland border shows the lowest rainfall on record, but most of the state has seen periods before with lower rainfall.

Also note that worst fires seem to be clustered towards the Victoria border, where rainfall deficiency has been less severe.

Finally it is worth revisiting the rainfall trend map. It shows that since 1900, most of the country has been getting wetter, with the exception of a small part of Queensland, and some coastal areas of Western Australia and southern Australia along with Tasmania:

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Also: Let’s tell the burning truth about bushfires and the ALP-Greens coalition

Also : How Greens Made Australia’s Bushfires Worse

Also: Bushfire scientist David Packham warns of huge blaze threat, urges increase in fuel reduction burns

Also : Australia’s Epic Fires Caused By Bad Forestry And Arson, Not Climate Change

Also : Australian wildfires were caused by humans, not climate change

Also : Australian Bushfires Much Worse In 1974/5

Also : Climatologist: Blaming Aussie Bushfires On Climate Change Is ‘Alarmist Nonsense’

Also : Who Checks The Factcheckers?

Also : Fake News: “The idea that “greenies” … would oppose measures to prevent fires … is simply false.”

Also : Forgotten Fact: 1974/75 Australian Bush Fires Were More Than 9 Times Greater Than Those Of 2019/20!

Also : The Aussie Wildfires Are About Arsonists – Not Climate Change

Also : Climate change: Australia fires will be ‘normal’ in warmer world–Matt McGrath

Also : Australia fires: Aboriginal planners say the bush ‘needs to burn’

Also : Fight fire with fire: controlled burning could have protected Australia

Also : Regional Forest Manager: Politicians are Using Climate Change to Deflect Blame for Bushfires

Also Fight Fires With Facts – Not Fake Science

climate-debate

Climate change and bushfires — More rain, the same droughts, no trend, no science

by JoNova, December 24, 2019

To Recap: In order to make really Bad Fires we need the big three: Fuel, oxygen, spark.Obviously getting rid of air and lightning is beyond the budget. The only one we can control is fuel. No fuel = no fire.   Big fuel = Fireball apocalypse that we can;t stop even with help from Canada, California, and New Zealand.

The most important weather factor is rain, not an extra 1 degree of warmth. To turn the nation into a proper fireball, we “need” a good drought.  A lack of rain is a triple whammy — it dries out the ground and the fuel — and it makes the weather hotter too. Dry years are hot years in Australia, wet years are cool years. It’s just evaporative cooling for the whole country. The sun has to dry out the soil before it can heat up the air above it.  Simple yes?  El Nino’s mean less rain (in Australia), that’s why they also mean “hot weather”.

So ask a climate scientist the right questions and you’ll find out what the ABC won’t say: That global warming means more rain, not less. Droughts haven’t got worse, and climate models are really, terribly, awfully pathetically bad at predicting rain.

Four reasons carbon emissions are irrelevant

1. Droughts are the same as they ever were.

In the 178 year record, there is no trend. All that CO2 has made no difference at all to the incidence of Australian droughts. Climate scientists have shown droughts have not increased in Australia. Click the link to see Melbourne and Adelaide. Same thing.

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climate-debate

Are Australian Wildfires Due To Climate Change?

by P. Homewood, December 24, 2019 in NotaLotofPeoppleKnowThat

Many have questioned what role climate change has played in the Australian wildfires currently wreaking havoc in NSW and across the border in Queensland.

The commonly heard cry is that it is now hotter and drier than in the past.

But what does the actual data say?

First, let’s look at rainfall. All the data and graphs  that follows are from the Australian BOM:

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better to know...?, climate-debate

How Bad Science & Horrific Journalism Misrepresent Wildfires and Climate

by Jim Steele, November 9, 2019 in WUWT

As one wildfire expert wrote, “Predicting future fire regimes is not rocket science; it is far more complicated than that.” But regardless of accuracy, most people are attracted to very simple narratives such as: more CO2 causes global warming causes more fires. Accordingly in the summer of 2019, CNN trumpeted the headline California wildfires burn 500% more land because of climate change. They claimed, “the cause of the increase is simple. Hotter temperatures cause drier land, which causes a parched atmosphere.” CNN based their claims on a scientific paper by lead authors Park Williams and John Abatzoglou titled Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California. The authors are very knowledgeable but appear to have hitched their fame and fortune to pushing a very simple claim that climate change drives bigger wildfires. As will be seen, their advocacy appears to have caused them to stray from objective scientific analyses.

If Williams and Abatzoglou were not so focused on forcing a global warming connection, they would have at least raised the question, ‘why did much bigger fires happen during cooler decades?’ The 1825 New Brunswick fire burned 3,000,000 acres. In Idaho and Montana the Great Fire of 1910 burnt another 3,000,000 acres. In 1871, the Great Michigan Fire burned 2,500,000 acres. Those fires were not only 6 times larger than California’s biggest fire, they occurred in moister regions, regions that don’t experience California’s Mediterranean climate with its guaranteed months of drought each and every summer. If those huge devastating fires occurred in much cooler times, what are the other driving factors of big wildfires?

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climate-debate

Mother Nature, Not Global Warming, Behind The California Wildfires

by Chris Martz, Oct 30, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Articles, like the one from Politico above (Figure 1)¹, have been popping up left and right claiming that climate change is causing the wildfires.

Endless amounts of disinformation are being spread around on Twitter and Facebook from well-known media outlets, public figures, government officials, and even a handful of well-known scientists.

There’s no doubt that the dozen or more wildfires that have broken out in the state, including the Getty and Kincade fires, are serious.

Firefighters are doing their best to try and contain these fires before any more serious damage occurs. But, playing the blame game on climate change does nothing for public safety whatsoever.

What’s really to blame for these fires?

The Kincade Fire, in particular, was caused by a broken jumper wire of the Pacific Gas & Electric company(PG&E), though “mother nature,” as you will find out below, has enhanced the fire and others that have since broken out across the state.

October through March is the prime time of the year for wildfires to break out in the Western United States (Raphael, 2003).²

This is largely because atmospheric and surface conditions tend to be very favorable in the region for fire weather; that is a.) dry soil and vegetation, b.) low relative humidity, c.) warm temperatures, and d.) strong winds.³

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See also here and here

better to know...?, climate-debate

La forêt amazonienne n’est pas le poumon de la planète

by SCE-INFO, 30 août 2019 in ScienceClimatEnergie

La forêt amazonienne fait beaucoup parler d’elle en ce moment. Selon le journal Le Monde mais également selon de nombreux autres médias, la forêt amazonienne est ravagée par des incendies d’une ampleur inédite, et ce depuis plusieurs semaines. Sans nier les feux ni l’importance de cette forêt au niveau de sa biodiversité, nous tenons à dénoncer quelques contre-vérités qui ont circulé.

1/ La forêt amazonienne n’est pas le poumon de la planète

Scientifiquement, l’expression “poumon de la planète” pour désigner l’Amazonie est fausse et prétendre que l’Amazonie produit 20% de notre oxygène — une assertion du Président français Macron lors du récent sommet du G7 — est fausse. Tout d’abord un poumon ne produit pas d’oxygène mais en consomme… Mais passons ce détail. Ce qu’il faut retenir est ceci : le bilan entre photosynthèse et respiration pour cet écosystème est nul du point de vue de l’oxygène [1] . La forêt amazonienne ne produit donc quasi pas d’oxygène, tout comme les océans, lorsque l’on considère le bilan net (photosynthèse + respiration). Tout ceci est même rappelé sur page Wikipedia consacrée à la forêt amazonienne, ou encore sur le site web du National Geographic.

Pour ceux qui ont du mal à lire en anglais, vous pouvez également lire le site français du Huffington Post, cette page de Planet Terre écrite en juin 2000, ou cet article écrit dans Le Parisien.

Pour ceux qui se posent la question de l’origine de l’oxygène que nous respirons (21% dans l’atmosphère actuelle), voici la réponse : nous respirons essentiellement un O2 libéré par des végétaux anciens (par exemple datant du Carbonifère) devenus matière organique fossile (ce carbone n’est pas dégradé par les bactéries des sols et sédiments et donc ne consomme pas d’oxygène atmosphérique). La page de Planet Terre citée précédemment explique parfaitement ce phénomène.

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Figure 1. Nombre de feux de forêt au Brésil entre 2004 et 2019.
Source : Libération.

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