The Volunteer Firefighters Association (VFFA), the body representing the Voice of Volunteer Rural Firefighters in NSW, refutes the claim by green alarmists that climate change is the cause of the recent bushfires in New South Wales.
The VFFA is angered by comments from the green lobby groups that tackling climate change was more important than prescribed burning of forest fuels to reduce bushfire risk. The real blame rests with the greens and their ideology as they continue to oppose and undermine efforts to conduct hazard reduction in the cooler months and to prevent private landowners from clearing their lands to reduce bushfire risk.
The bushfires in Australia are hardly unprecedented. There have been far worse bushfires stretching back to the earliest days of European settlement in Australia, including the Black Saturday Victoria 2009, NSW Bushfires 1994, Ash Wednesday Victoria 1983, Blue Mountains NSW 1968, Black Tuesday Hobart 1967 and Black Friday Victoria 1939, according to Peter Cannon, President of the VFFA.
Read the VFFA press release here.
Listen to scientist David Packham explain that the wildfires have nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with fuel-loads.
Read about Australia’s firebug problem.
… “A 2015 satellite analysis of 113,000 fires from 1997-2009 confirmed what we had known for some time – 40 per cent of fires are deliberately lit, another 47 per cent accidental. This generally matches previous data published a decade earlier that about half of all fires were suspected or deliberate arson, and 37 per cent accidental. Combined, they reach the same conclusion: 87 per cent are man-made… ” — The Sydney Morning Herald, Nov 19, 2019
There are, on average, 62,000 fires in Australia every year. Populated areas and satellite studies tell us that lightning is responsible for only 13 per cent. The rest, 54,000 are man-made. I wonder what is the CO2 load from those man-made fires. Climate alarmists should be all over that! “How dare you!”
Here is an amusing twitter debate on the Australian bushfires. Hothead alarmists on the thread seem more motivated by opinions without any facts to back it up, just spouting off alarmist dogma. There is quite a bit of good data presented, pretty much debunking climate hysteria relating to the Australian bushfires.
This photo in the thread says a lot. Read the protest placards. Protesters in East Gippsland in the state of Victoria stopped a hazard-reduction burn that they said was “killing baby birds alive.” “I’m more worried about climate change,” one protesting grandmother told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. As a result, the hazard reduction was reduced to 3 percent of the area planned. Two months later, East Gippsland was burned out. I think this is a pretty good example of irony.
ABC Gippsland which originally ran the story about the protesters, deleted the article from its website after it gained notoriety on social media.
There is now tremendous blow-back in Australia as people begin to fully understand that climate change is not the cause of the bushfires. At least two decades of “green” environmental policy severely cutting backburns designed to remove fuel (i.e. wood and brush) is the true culprit. That and arson.
update 090120: Australian climate scientist Jennifer Marohasy discusses how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has deleted actual recorded temperatures, massaging with fake temperature data, and consistently fudging the data (i.e. “cooled the past”) to validate the global warming narrative. Its ClimateGate all over again (see reference below).