Australia’s Devastating Bush Fires, Drought, Heatwaves: LA Times Article Gloom N Doom Global Warming Bias at its Best

Australia’s recent drought, devastating fires, and scorching heat waves are being blamed on global warming in today’s Los Angeles Times, “What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia“.

From the LA Times:

“They call Australia the Lucky Country, with good reason. Generations of hardy castoffs tamed the world’s driest inhabited continent, created a robust economy and cultivated an image of irresistibly resilient people who can’t be held down. Australia exports itself as a place of captivating landscapes, brilliant sunshine, glittering beaches and an enviable lifestyle.

Look again. Climate scientists say Australia — beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves — epitomizes the “accelerated climate crisis” that global warming models have forecast.

With few skeptics among them, Australians appear to be coming to an awakening: Adapt to a rapidly shifting climate, and soon. Scientists here warn that the experience of this island continent is an early cautionary tale for the rest of the world.”

Is it truly a “cautionary tale for the rest of the world”, of devastating wild fires, droughts, and searing heat waves “never to have been witnessed before” and which are now due to global warming? This is a cautionary tale, but not in the way the writer intended.

The Times writer referenced the “Generations of hardy castoffs tamed the world’s driest inhabited continent”. Was this true? Had the hardy castoffs done the impossible and “tamed” the world’s driest inhabited continent?

First up, a short course in Australia’s geography:

“The continent is one of the oldest land masses – continental bedrock exposed by erosion is more than 3,000 million years old – and is the flattest of the continents because it lies near the centre of a tectonic plate. The average elevation is less than 300 metres, compared with the world’s mean of about 700 metres. The Australian Alps in the south east contain Australia’s highest ground, the highest point being Mount Kosciusko (2,228 metres).

More than one-fifth of its land area is desert, more than two-thirds being classified as arid or semi-arid, unsuitable for settlement. The coldest regions are in the highlands and tablelands of Tasmania and the south-eastern corner of the mainland. The hottest temperature recorded was 53°C (127°F)at Cloncurry in Queensland in 1889.”

Next up, a short course on Australia’s climate, courtesy of the Australian government’s Bureau of Meteorology website:

“Australia has one of the most variable rainfall climates in the world. Over the long term we have about three good years and three bad years out of ten. These fluctuations have many causes, but the strongest is the climate phenomenon called the Southern Oscillation. This is a major air pressure shift between the Asian and east Pacific regions – its best-known extreme is El Niño.”

More from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology:

“For Australian conditions, drought frequency is crucial. Research indicates that severe drought affects some part of Australia about once every 18 years. This does not indicate that severe drought regularly and predictably recurs every 18 years; intervals between severe droughts have varied from four to 38 years. We have long historical rainfall records to give a clearer picture of what is ‘normal’ for an area, and how much variation might be expected.”

This little bit of information, that severe droughts occur about once every 18 years but that they also “vary” from four to 38 years, seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Prior to advent of global warming, a recent phenomenon which has called for measures which would impact every facet of our lives, including drastic hikes in electrical bills to offset the proposed Cap and Trade Act, Australia’s climate was based on the “climate phenomenon called the Southern Oscillation”
known as El Nino.

From NOAA:

“El Niño is an oscillation of the ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific having important consequences for weather around the globe.

Among these consequences are increased rainfall across the southern tier of the US and in Peru, which has caused destructive flooding, and drought in the West Pacific, sometimes associated with devastating brush fires in Australia. Observations of conditions in the tropical Pacific are considered essential for the prediction of short term (a few months to 1 year) climate variations. To provide necessary data, NOAA operates a network of buoys which measure temperature, currents and winds in the equatorial band. These buoys daily transmit data which are available to researchers and forecasters around the world in real time.”

This particular drought in Australia, part of the “dramatic and empirical evidence” cited by the Times, has been ongoing since 2002, which would mean a period of seven years. Was this drought “extraordinary” and “empirical” in terms of other previous droughts in Australian history?

From the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology:

Over much of the country, droughts can extend over several years, relieved only by brief, transitory rains. Indeed, probably the most damaging type of drought is when one or two very dry years follow several years of generally below-average rainfall. The “Federation drought” of the late 1890s through 1902 is an example, as is the more recent 1991-95 drought in Queensland, northern New South Wales and parts of central Australia. Over still longer time-scales, Australia’s rainfall history features several periods of a decade or longer that seem to have been distinctly “drought prone”. For instance, the mid to late 1920s and the 1930s were a period of generally low rainfall over most of the country, continuing through most of the 1940s over the eastern states. A similar dry spell occurred in the 1960s over central and eastern Australia. During these low rainfall periods, not every year is dry; it is just that rainfall in most years is below the long-term average, and there are often runs of years with recurrent drought. Thus in the late 1930s-40s major droughts occurred over eastern Australia in 1937-38, 1940-41, and 1943-45.

The 1990s saw formal Government acknowledgement that drought is part of the natural variability of the Australian climate, with drought relief for farmers and agricultural communities being restricted to times of so-called “exceptional circumstances”. In other words, the agricultural sector was expected to cope with the occasional drought, and relief would be available only for droughts of unusual length or severity.”

Far from “taming” the driest climate, the Aussie government stated in print that Australia is prone to climate extremes and that drought relief for farmers and agricultural communities “be restricted” in times of “exceptional circumstances”.

The LA Times article asserted that Australians believe that global warming is the cause of the recent spate of disastrous bush fires, with few “skeptics”. Yet the British newspaper, the Guardian, reported that fire control methods of the last few decades are what’s on the hot seat in Australia.

From the Guardian:

“There are also questions about the consequences of fire risk reduction measures practised over the last few decades: preventing regular fires means the amount of burnable wood grows year-by-year, risking even greater firestorms.

“The mismanagement of the south-eastern forests of Australia over the last 30 or 40 years by excluding prescribed burning and fuel management has lead to the highest fuel concentrations we have ever had in human occupation,” said David Packham, a bush fire researcher at Monash University, Australia. “The state has never been as dangerous as what it is now and this has been quite obvious for some time.”

The LA Times article cited the recent devastation wrought by bush fires as evidence of global warming and it’s “impact”. What they didn’t include was the well known fact that for thousands of years the Aborigine had used their own methods to deal with wildfires, efforts which were, by and large, successful. Or that that an entire eco-system, which had adapted to the scorch and burn policy of Mother Nature, was already in place.

From the British newspaper, The Guardian:

“Fire has long been a feature of the Australian bush, with the plants and animals adapted to regular, natural infernos. For thousands of years, Aborigines lived with the flames too, using them to improve forest access and increase the size of hunting grounds.”

From Effects of Australian Bush Fires: The Survival and Growth of Plant Life in Australia after Fire:

“Bush fires are common in parts of Australia each year; the effects on plant life can actually be more beneficial than detrimental in some instances.”

“Bush fires have been a part of Australian history for hundreds of years; aboriginal people used bush fires to their benefit to manage the land and as a hunting aid. However, the influx of immigrants into Australia intensified the frequency of bush fires, whether deliberately set or as a result of an accident. The devastating effect of any bush fire results in the loss of native flora and fauna which may take several years to regenerate.

The Australian bush fires of 2002/2003 burned through four million hectares of land and one scientist predicted that it would be 200 years before some of Australia’s forests would recover. However, some plants actually benefit from the result of a bush fire and have adapted numerous strategies to survive them”.

In another Guardian article, Novelist Thomas Keneally wrote about the “passionate debate” over bush fires in Australia:

“Are bushfires inevitable – or can they be managed? When they strike again, should people flee or fight the flames? The catastrophic blazes in Australia have left its inhabitants full of questions, doubts and fears.

In view of the scale of this fire’s consumption of humans, animals, houses and large and small treasures, it can seem almost obscene to mention history. But in April 1770, Captain Cook, passing a northern New South Wales headland in his barque, Endeavour, saw the voluminous smoke of a bushfire, lit by Aborigines for the purpose of flushing out animals. He called the place Smoky Cape.

Such artfully lit fires as Cook saw along the coastline have been deliberately started for millennia, and they had other purposes than mere mayhem. They were designed to startle animals out of the bush, to burn dead trees and open up savannah for marsupial proteins – kangaroo, wallaby, etc. And they were intended as well to germinate plants that only fire can germinate. An anthropologist, Rhys Jones, named this practice “firestick-farming”.”

Keneally also pointed out type of vegetation in which he and other Australians dwell, vegetation which is abundant in Australia and which contributes to the rapid spread of fire:

“Earlier, in colonial history, observers denounced the non-European bush for its perverse refusal to satisfy northern hemisphere sensibility. Now that’s exactly what we love about it. I walked through the next-door bush in the rain yesterday and saw the black cones of the banksia tree that generate ferocious heat when burned. I saw resin-filled eucalyptus trees that not only burn with a passion but can virtually explode and spew fire. I saw paperbarks covered with hanging shreds of bark-like dried, multi-layered papyrus, their bases littered with the stuff. I saw the native tea tree plump with flammable resin. But they were all neutralised by rain when I strolled there. Indeed it was raining and flooding along the New South Wales coast at the same time that the Victorians were consumed by fire. It all seemed to validate the Australian poet Les Murray’s argument that there are only two Australian seasons – drought and flood.”

In the western part of the United States we call them “controlled” or “prescribed” burns, which are carried out by the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service. The spate of massive wildfires to hit the west in the past decade has many up in arms over the forest services’ lack of controlled burns. Controlled burns which are desperately needed and which have been thwarted by environmentalists who have successfully sued the government out of the forests and national parks.

From Michelle Malkin:

“The GAO examined 762 U.S. Forest Service (USFS) proposals to thin forests and prevent fires during the past two years. According to the study, slightly more than half the proposals were not subject to third-party appeal. Of those proposals subject to appeal, third parties challenged 59 percent.

Appeals were filed most often by anti-logging groups, including the Sierra Club, Alliance for Wild Rockies, and Forest Conservation Council. According to the GAO, 84 interest groups filed more than 400 appeals of Forest Service proposals. The appeals delayed efforts to treat 900,000 acres of forests and cost the federal government millions of dollars to address.

Forest Service officials estimate they spend nearly half their time, and $250 million each year, preparing for the appeals and procedural challenges launched by activists.

“The report demonstrates that the appeals needlessly delay federal efforts to prevent wildfires, and if the process is not streamlined, millions of acres will be lost this summer,” said Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico).”

According to EpicDisasters.com, the spring and summer of 2000 was an “epidemic” of wildfires in the U.S.:

“There also have been a number of fire “epidemics,” which occurred separately in several states over a spring and summer season. The worse, perhaps, occurred during the Spring and Summer of 2000, when fire spread over seven million acres in Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.”

It’s not hard to envision the same scenario being played out in Australia, where environmentalists and their ilk, tried to save the trees but burned down the forest, along with the homes of Australians, instead. The difference between the U.S. and Australia: the millions of acres under the domain of the United States national parks, forests, and Bureau of Reclamation land have far fewer residents while Australians live in cities and towns in areas surrounded by vegetation that was naturally designed to eventually burn.

The LA Times article cited the current heatwave in Australia as “proof” of global warming. The Australian Australian Bureau of Meteorology is calling it “exceptional”:

“This map of Australia shows how the land surface temperature from January 25 to February 1 compared to the average mid-summer temperatures the continent experienced between 2000-2008. Places where temperatures were warmer than average are red, places experiencing near-normal temperatures are white, and places where temperatures were cooler than average are blue. The data were collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. While southern Australia was scorching, a similarly large area of northern and central Australia was several degrees cooler than it was in the previous nine years. The cool anomaly across that region is probably linked to the above-average rainfall the area has received during this year’s wet season.”

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) called this heat wave “exceptional,” not only for the high temperatures, but for also its duration. One-day records were broken in multiple cities, with temperatures in the mid-40s. In Kyancutta, South Australia, the temperature reached 48.2 degrees Celsius (118.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Many places also set records for the number of consecutive days with record-breaking heat.”
–EarthObservatory.Nasa.gov

Yet the heatwave history in Australia has been cited as “less reported” and “sooner forgotten”:

“Also in Australia, great heatwaves such as the one in 1896 which killed 437, were less-reported and sooner-forgotten than events like Cyclone Mahina whose death toll of 410 in 1899 has not been exceeded by another cyclone since. Even the 1939, ‘Black Friday’ bushfires, which swept Victoria killing 71 people, are far more easily recalled than the accompanying heatwave which claimed 438 lives and directly contributed to the holocaust of that fateful January.”
–CSU.edu.au

Despite the fact that Australia is a continent forged by drought, that bush fires are part and parcel of the Australian landscape, and that heatwaves have appeared in past times, the LA Times article stated that “empirical” and “anecdotal” evidence supported the global warming theory, that Australia’s heatwave, drought, and bush fires were caused by global warming and the coal industry:

“Scientists are frustrated that such dramatic anecdotal and empirical evidence hasn’t sparked equally dramatic action from Australia’s government. They suspect the inaction can be partly explained by examining the nation’s relationship with coal. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and relies on it for 80% of its electricity. That helps make Australia and its 21 million people the world’s highest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases in the industrialized world.”

The Times article stated unequivocally that global warming was the cause of recent climatological events in Australia while omitting crucial pertinent facts such as:

-Drought cycles which have existed thousands of years prior to global warming,

-entire eco-systems have adapted to the cycle of drought conditions and bush fires

-the Australian government stated that their continent is prone to cycles of extreme drought lasting up to ten years,

-the current drought has only been in existence for seven years,

–heatwaves of the past were poorly recorded,

-Aborigines, who’ve been in Australia for 40,000 years, had perfected a method for taming the bush fires that ravaged the countryside,

-the new settlers “thumbed their noses” at the Aborigine’s methods resulting in the “highest fuel concentrations” in “human occupation” with “disastrous results”,

–And that far from being a “few” skeptics” regarding global warming, the big debate in Australia is over the decades old practice of allowing areas to not burn has caused the now massive destruction.

Is the LA Times article truly a “cautionary tale for the rest of the world”, of devastating wild fires, searing heat waves, and droughts, “never to have been witnessed before” and which are due to global warming? Or is it a cautionary tale about the mainstream media, armed with articles that are one-sided and filled with gloom and doom bias, once more pushing the global warming theory on the unsuspecting public?

By LBG

Image - Aborigine Hunting

Tags: Australia, bush fires, coal plants, drought, Environment, Global warming, heatwaves, LA TIMES, Los Angeles Times