With at least 27 people killed and 18 million acres
incinerated as of last week, the worst bushfire season Australia has seen in
decades is a bad one, no doubt about it. Reproduced with permission
of the Western Australian Land Information Authority, the FireWatch map
below shows the location of individual fires as of Jan. 14, 2020.
Disclaimer: The size of the icons on the map relates to the location of the
fire and not to the size of the fire on the ground. Any opinions
expressed herein are mine and were not arrived at in consultation with the
Western Australian Land Information Authority.
The season’s fires have been intense and widespread, but not nearly as much as reported by some media that made it seem as though virtually the entire continent was ablaze. Eighteen million acres destroyed is a disaster by any measure, but that acreage represents less than 1 percent of Australia’s landmass, and less than 6% of its forests.
No
one denies the fires were made worse by dry conditions resulting from a drought
and record hot temperatures. But, as measured by the amount of forestland
destroyed, the 18 million acres for this year’s fires pale in comparison to the
290 million acres burned to the ground during the 1974 bushfire season.
That’s equivalent to the size of France, Portugal and Spain combined, and the
1974 fires occurred years before anthropogenic global warming theory suddenly
appeared out of nowhere in the 1980s. And, as measured by the respective
death tolls, the recent fires pale in comparison to the under-hyped 2009 “Black
Saturday” bushfires in Victoria, which killed 173 people. Why so much
more hysteria this time around? According to Australian-American
journalist Miranda Devine, the Black Saturday bushfire outbreak “wasn’t blown
up into a global cause-celebre promoted by the likes of Barack Obama, Greta
Thunberg and Cate Blanchett, because this time there’s a climate angle to be
exploited.”
The intentional obstruction of fire prevention burns
If
global warming alarmists are wrong in blaming this season’s bushfires on
Earth’s ever-changing climate, then what was the cause?
The answer, or at least a big part of it, is not hard to see. It’s
now summer in Australia, and intense bushfires have occurred on the continent
with regularity for thousands of years. Numerous government fire
commissions have all reached the same conclusion: that hazard
reduction is the only way to prevent bushfires from spiraling out of
control. According to Australian forester and former acting fire control
officer Ian McArthur, climate change did
not cause the current crisis:
“Long
unburnt fuels [dead trees, tall grass, undergrowth, etc.] in national parks are
the primary cause. Basic fire management states that a fire needs oxygen,
a heat source and fuel. The only one of those that can be manipulated is
fuel. The more fuel, the more intense the fire, the harder it becomes to
suppress the fire.”
In
other words, planned fire prevention burns eliminate the natural ground fuel
upon which rapidly spreading wildfires depend. In commenting on the cause
of the fires, Ms.
Devine wrote that “blaming climate change is a cynical diversion from
the criminal negligence of [Australian jurisdictions] which tried to buy green
votes by locking up vast tracts of land as national parks, yet failed to spend
the money to control ground fuel and maintain fire trails.” (Fire trails
are roads built in forests to provide emergency access to firefighting
equipment and personnel.)
As
reported by Ms. Devine, Dr.
Phil Cheney, Australia’s foremost bushfire researcher, has spent 30 years
trying to convince authorities that systematically reducing ground fuel
annually would reduce fire intensity to a manageable level. Burning
ground fuel in the cooler months was standard fire prevention practice, until
progressive bureaucrats in Australia’s state and federal governments began
vigorously opposing controlled burns in the name of “biodiversity.”
According to Frank McKee,
senior fire control officer in Boyne Valley, it’s next to impossible
to get all government departments to agree to hazard reduction burns on
state-owned land. “You have to jump through hoops so high it’s
ridiculous,” McKee said.
Under
pressure from greenies, the government of New South Wales decreed that
preventive burning is a “threatening process” that undercuts the nation’s
Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Passed in the
name of Deep Ecology, that official act made it virtually impossible to prevent
wildfires from spiraling to cataclysmic proportions, as happened with this
season’s bushfires.
Unless
natural ground fuel sources are controlled, there’s not much that can stop a
wildfire from consuming vast tracts of wooded land during hot, dry and windy
conditions. (That’s a major reason the recent wildfires in California
were so devastating: in support of “biodiversity,” a succession of Democrat
governors created an inferno-in-waiting by refusing to clear the state’s
forests of an estimated 130
million dead trees.)
The
climate activist movement in Australia fiercely opposes controlled burns, yet
receives quiet support from progressive media. The government-backed
Australian Broadcasting Corporation recently deleted a
Sept. 4 Facebook post that gave uncritical publicity to activists who
disrupted a controlled burn in East Gippsland, a part of Victoria that later
saw 2.5 million acres of lust green forestsgo up
in smoke.
The
deleted post showed a green activist displaying a protest sign that
read“Spring Burns Kill Baby Birds Alive.” That’s 100% true, but how
many more birds and other wildlife are killed due to obstruction of controlled
fire prevention burns? Such obstruction can result in massive fires that
destroy millions of acres of wildlife habitat, as happened in the forests of
East Gippsland.
Arson
Here’s
a combustible question worth contemplating: Other than green activists
obstructing controlled fire prevention burns, could there be another human
cause of the Australian wildfires? Yes. Wildfires can also be
caused by … arson. According
to CNN, police in New South Wales have charged 24 people with deliberately
starting bushfires since November, and those are just the ones who got caught.
Imagine
for a moment a small group of Aussie ecozealots -- it wouldn’t take many --
being recruited to “prove” man-made global warming theory once and for all by
surreptitiously setting an entire continent ablaze. Imagine them being
instructed to do so during hot, dry and windy conditions to ensure their
handiwork would spread like, pardon the pun, wildfire. Given the
astounding fraud and deception that underpins man-made global warming theory --Climategate
2009 is a prime example -- political arson cannot be ruled out as the
cause of most of this season’s Australian bushfires.
Why would anyone
even consider setting an entire continent ablaze? Because progressive
environmentalism, a.k.a. “climate change,” is an ends justify the means
movement that depends upon catastrophic weather events to culminate its grand
stealth agenda, which I wrote about in The
Cynical Plot behind Global Warming Hysteria .
An electrical
engineering graduate of Georgia Tech and now retired, John Eidson is a
freelance writer in Atlanta. johneidson@comcast.net
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/what_caused_the_australian_fires_global_warming_obstruction_of_fire_prevention_burns_arson.html
