Paul Driessen at WUWT suggests Australia remove its forests

Wildflowers & snowgum

The weird get weirder. A bloke called Paul Driessen, whose job includes telling lies about climate change and bringing back smog to the USA, has come up with a wild idea and it's been posted at WUWT. This time he's really gone bananas. What he's saying is that Australia should get rid of all its trees, or those of the eucalypt species which is pretty much the same thing, and that would stop fires. In other words, he's suggesting we get rid of almost all our forests. That's one solution to stopping fires, though not original.

Don't believe me? Here's what he wrote:

In both California and Australia, people bemoan the loss of eucalyptus trees in fires. But many don’t want them removed or even thinned out.

It's climate change on top of drought, heat and wind, not arson, that's behind Australia's fires

Know what? If I see another know-nothing denier try to claim "it's not climate change it's arson" or "backburning" or "not enough prescribed burns" or "it's not happening", I'll scream.

I was going to deal quickly with "it's arson", then move onto prescribed or controlled burns. However, I'll now devote this article just to the arson furphy, because the false meme is appearing all over the place, even being insinuated in mainstream media. Some people are suggesting it's an organised disinformation campaign. I don't know about that, but it is being fanned by the usual crowd of deniers, including many from the USA and other places outside Australia. [Edit: I've added a tweet below, which expresses my disdain for the people spreading this meme.]

The people spreading lies about arson are dangerous, arguably worse than any arsonist.

The "it's arson" disinformers are downplaying the extreme hazard of fire and the huge risks of going into fire-prone areas when fire conditions are extreme or catastrophic (Code Red).

— Sou at HotWhopper (@Sou_HotWhopper) January 9, 2020

Let me be clear. Arson is not the reason for the catastrophic fires this summer. There has always been arson but never a fire season as bad as this one. These major fires are there because the bush is so dry and because it's been so hot. Fires need ample fuel, wind and an ignition. The fuel is ample, because even though there's not been much growth in vegetation because of the drought, what's there is dry and easily ignited. There've been enough windy days to fan the flames and spread the fires further. And there's been ignition, obviously. Mostly (in the case of the major fires), the ignition has been lightning.

Australia is burning

Fires in East and Far East Gippsland and the high country exploded on Monday. We were warned.

Some people who I thought would have known better were sceptical of the warning from Emergency Services to leave Far East Gippsland. After all, it's a huge area, was jam-packed with holiday-makers, and it's on the coast (water puts out fire, right?). They may have neglected to factor in a number of things:

Fires - follow your plan but expect the unexpected

From Mount Beauty Dec 2006

The fires across Australia this year are horrific. Because the smoke is inundating the biggest capital city (not good), people are taking notice (which is good). The fires this season are probably vying for the worst ever experienced in this country. There will be worse to come with more global warming, so it's important to be prepared.

I expect there are a lot of people who've never had an up close and personal experience with fires or smoke, so I figured I'd put some thoughts down from my own experience. I'm not a fire expert but I've been through a few huge fires in my time, including three big ones this century. (If you've got better or different advice, based on your knowledge and experience, don't hesitate to say in the comments below.)

Another misleading WUWT headline, this one about wildfire

This is about another misleading headline at WUWT (archived here). Anthony Watts wrote about a paper in a special edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B about wildfire. His headline was "New study shows no wildfire increases due to global warming, slight decline in recent decades noted". Anthony took it on himself to add the part about global warming. That wasn't in either the press release or the abstract, and I doubt it was in the paper itself, which is paywalled.

Extreme December weather

December was not without extreme weather in many parts of the world. This past week has seen floods in South and North America, the UK and Ireland, worsening drought in southern Africa, wildfire in Australia and southern California, and unseasonally warm weather across the USA and Canada.

Worst floods in 50 years in South America

The BBC headline is "Flooding 'worst in 50 years', as 150,000 flee in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay".  Rivers have broken banks after days of heavy rains.

Source: BBC

The worst affected is Paraguay, where more than 90,000 people were forced to leave their homes, many of them poor people living on the banks of the River Paraguay. This underscores the fact that it is the least wealthy who are most vulnerable to weather-related disasters.

Wildfires in North America

Global warming isn't just about heat waves, floods and drought. Combine heat with dry conditions and you'll get more fires. A lot of people in North America are complaining about smoke. Here are some maps showing the current wildfires in Alaska and Canada (h/t Greg Laden).

First Alaska, from Weather Underground, showing the active fires and the smoke:

Source: Wunderground

It snowed in Hawaii ....plus what you didn't read at WUWT

It's quiet on the denier front. There hasn't been much at WUWT lately. Today we see that there is snow on a mountain top in Hawaii.  I suppose that's news.

There was a lot happening to the weather that wasn't at WUWT this week.

Cyclone HudHud - which devastated parts of the eastern seaboard in India, killing 24 people as it hit the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. The death toll was lower because tens to hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated. The recovery is underway, but will take months for some operations to get back to normal. The effects were felt way up in Nepal, where 27 or more people died and up to 100 went missing after almost a metre of snow fell, accompanied by avalanches. It's reported that the bird the cyclone was named after after suffered a lot at its hand.

HudHud Credit: NASA

Eleven major fires in California but Anthony Watts at WUWT sez "it's not happening"!

While there are currently eleven major fires raging in California, eleven in Oregon and four in Washington state, Anthony Watts decides to go to "it's not happening" (archived here).

With more than half of his home state in extreme drought and in the midst of the fire season, it takes an extreme denialist to try to argue that climate change isn't real. And it takes a person of dubious morals to try to convince his readers that "it's not happening".

Here is a chart with US fire data from the National Interagency Fire Centre. As always, click to enlarge.

Data source: National Interagency Fire Centre

The data go back to 1960. However there is a warning about data prior to 1983.

Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures above prior to 1983 shouldn't be compared to later data.

So with that in mind, I've only plotted the data from 1983 to 2013. The period probably isn't long enough to draw solid conclusions, but it's suggestive of a trend to bigger fires and perhaps a small increase in the overall number of fires. (Note the very low count in the first year or two, which would distort the linear trend for the number of fires making it appear steeper.) This is against a background of much improved fire suppression technology, communication etc. So if all else was equal, I'd have expected that the area burnt would lessen. It hasn't. If anything it's increased over the years.

WUWT misleads deniers: downplays climate change affecting wildfires

Larry Hamlin is an occasional guest denier at WUWT. He's just another WUWT nutter, though his articles hide that fact behind his smooth words. He suits WUWT because he tells the pack what they want to hear. This time he's downplaying the fact that wildfires will become a worse risk as the world heats up (archived here), under a headline:

AP misleads the public, again, saying man made global warming worsens wildfires.

Larry appeals to the scaredy cats

Larry doesn't like it when he gets scared. He knows the denialiti don't like being scared either. That's how he's framed his disinformation.  He even opens his article with the words:

The climate fear media ...

He uses the word "alarmist" five times - making out that there's really nothing to worry about in regard to wildfires. He uses the word "fear" four times. His closing paragraph he continues his "scaredy cat" framing writing:

The climate fear propaganda media have again misled the public with unwarranted alarmist headlines alleging claims which do not reflect what this study of large western U.S. wildfires actually presented. The alarmist media twisted and misrepresented the studies information in an effort to  try and frighten the public into supporting its scientifically unsupported climate fear political ideology. 

What Larry is disputing this time, for a change, is not the scientific research - though he arguably misrepresents that as well. No, it's an article written by Seth Borenstein about the research into wildfires in the USA. The article itself was based largely on the US National Climate Assessment as well as three recent papers. In a departure from the norm at WUWT, Larry links to one of the papers and writes about it as if it's the only one. Seth Borenstein wrote:

In the past three months, at least three different studies and reports have warned that wildfires are getting bigger, that man-made climate change is to blame, and it's only going to get worse with more fires starting earlier in the year. While scientists are reluctant to blame global warming for any specific fire, they have been warning for years about how it will lead to more fires and earlier fire seasons.

Larry doesn't agree and writes:

While the climate alarmist press loudly proclaim that “man made climate change is to blame” for these findings the actual study is much more circumspect about what the contributors are that could be impacting the results.

Even in the abstract to this study other factors are identified that the authors believe contribute to these results including the impacts of invasive species and consequences of past fire management practices in addition to changes in climate and in particular increasing drought severity. 

Yes, there are other factors that contribute to wildfires as Larry points out, not just climate change. Nevertheless, one of the main factors that's most concerning as global warming kicks in is higher temperatures combined with drier vegetation.  Here is the abstract to the paper to which Larry refers:

Over the western U.S. and in a majority of ecoregions, we found significant, increasing trends in the number of large fires and/or total large fire area per year. Trends were most significant for southern and mountain ecoregions, coinciding with trends toward increased drought severity. For all ecoregions combined, the number of large fires increased at a rate of seven fires per year, while total fire area increased at a rate of 355 km2 per year. Continuing changes in climate, invasive species, and consequences of past fire management, added to the impacts of larger, more frequent fires, will drive further disruptions to fire regimes of the western U.S. and other fire-prone regions of the world.

One of the factors cited is "continuing changes in climate". It's not the only factor by a long shot, but it will become increasingly important as time goes by.

Dumb deniers

Sometimes you are reminded of just how dumb deniers can be. Many of them would never have been exposed to wildfire. Most would live in cities and all they'd see is smoke when it blows their way. What do they think happens when lightning or an arsonist strikes, or when sparks from an angle grinder, train or powerline ignite vegetation? Do they think that even on days where there are catastrophic fire conditions, there won't be any greater risk from fire than the same thing happening when it's cooler and wetter?

Here is an excerpt from a recent paper on wildfire in the USA. It is from scientists with the US Forest Service and the University of California, Jay D. Miller and Hugh Safford:

Our results suggest that the positive trend in percentage of high severity in YPMC in our study area is due to two factors: 1) an increase in the percentage of high severity in large fires, and 2) the absence of years without any large fires after 1993. The second factor is important because we found that large fires had a significantly greater percentage of high severity in YPMC forests than did small fires. More years with large fires and increasing areas of high severity over the 1984 to 2010 period are consistent with observed increases in the number of large fires across the western US that have increasing percentages of high severity with increasing annual areas burned, and predictions of more large fires due to climate change (Westerling et al. 2006, Lenihan et al. 2008, Westerling and Bryant 2008, Littell et al. 2009, Lutz et al. 2009).

I'm not sure what they mean by their first point, which reads as if the cause causes the cause. However their work suggests that there is an increasing trend in high severity fires in some regions, which is consistent with what is expected as global warming kicks in.

Fires in south eastern Australia

There are some parallels between south-eastern Australia and California. Both would be considered among the regions most at risk of devastating wildfires. In a 2007 paper looking at fire danger in south eastern Australia as climate change progresses, scientists found that:

The number of ‘extreme’ fire danger days generally increases 5-25% by 2020 for the low scenarios and 15-65% for the high scenarios (Table E1). By 2050, the increases are generally 10-50% for the low scenarios and 100-300% for the high scenarios.

The authors also looked at "very extreme" and "catastrophic" fire danger days and found that under high scenarios, by 2050 there'll be a four to five-fold increase in frequency at many sites. In regard to "catastrophic" fire danger days, the authors found that "Only 12 of the 26 sites have recorded ‘catastrophic’ fire danger days since 1973." By 2050, some sites will have "catastrophic" days every three years or less.

I'd say the 2003 Canberra fires and definitely the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria were both "catastrophic" conditions.

Even more worrying (if the scaredy cat deniers paid it any attention), the authors warned that the fire season is going to get longer:

Taken together, the model results suggest that fire seasons will start earlier and end slightly later, while being generally more intense throughout their length. This effect is most pronounced by 2050, although it should be apparent by 2020. 

This is what happens when there are too many fires all at the same time and resources are stretched too thinly. Local firefighters were fighting a fire two valleys away and couldn't get back in time to contain this one.

Are high severity fires getting worse in the Sierra Nevada?

In contrast to the above two studies, there is this paper by Chad T. Hanson,C and Dennis C. Odion that suggests that there has not been an increase in "proportion, area or patch size" of high severity fire in the Sierra Nevada conifer eco-region.  These findings don't necessarily conflict with the paper by Miller and Safford, which found differences between the occurrence of high severity fires in different regions and different mixes of vegetation. My reading is that one of the main points being made by Hanson and Odion is that fire can affect ecosystems in a bad way. Another is about fire management. Some extracts:

A better understanding of spatiotemporal patterns in fire regimes is needed to predict future fire regimes and their biological effects. Mechanisms underlying the lack of an expected climate- and time since fire-related trend in high-severity fire need to be identified to help calibrate projections of future fire. The effects of climate change on high-severity fire extent may remain small compared with fire suppression. Management could shift from a focus on reducing extent or severity of fire in wildlands to protecting human communities from fire.

And from their conclusion, in which they refer to incorrect predictions of "plenty of suitable habitat" and biodiversity:

Finally, our results suggest that predictions that there will be ample, or excessive, high-severity fire, and plenty of suitable habitat for biota dependent on natural early-successional conditions created by fire (Stephens and Ruth 2005), or a diversity of vegetation age classes created by high-severity fire, may be incorrect. Post-fire early-successional habitat appears to be an important conservation priority, but it is not protected as such (Hanson and North 2008; Hutto 2006, 2008). Moreover, many natural forests have been replaced by even-aged, single species tree plantations or modified by silvicultural activities so that they will not function as post-burn habitat for some species (Hutto 2008). Increased recognition of the relative scarcity and ecological importance of burned forest habitats can improve protection of b diversity (Lindenmayer and Franklin 2002; Lindenmayer et al. 2004; Swanson et al. 2011). 

It's complicated

Like with most things, there are different factors that contribute to fire severity and area burnt, as well as to post-fire "recovery". For example, in my home state of Victoria, priority is given to protecting towns and buildings (and commercial forests). That means that when fires burn in national parks they can be left to burn not just because they are in such inaccessible terrain but because native forests are not currently valued (by the powers that be) as highly as privately-owned property. The effort is put into containing the fires so they don't spread to areas inhabited by people - with greater or no success depending often on the fire conditions. (Catastrophic conditions make it virtually impossible to contain wildfires.) The scars on our native forest landscape devastated by very severe fires in the past decade bear testament.

Here is a paper by Gill, Stephens and Cary that discusses some of the problems and policy implications of wildfire management. It covers issues such as prescribed burning (fuel management), property protection, as well as the impact of fires and wildfire management on air and water quality, biodiversity, social and economic assets and more.

From the WUWT comments

Not many WUWT readers are interested in wildfires. Like I suggested, probably few of them have experienced any up close and personal.  Here are some of the comments to Larry's "scaredy cat" article.


Joel O'Bryan says:

May 19, 2014 at 10:53 pm
Grant proposals to study natural climate variability impacts on western wildfire potentials won’t get a high panel score with John Holdren whispering into the NSF’s ear. Grant proposals to study Western Wildfire potentials as a response to projected Climate Change are much more likely to get a better score. If you were a academic researcher needing tenure and a grant, which would you chose? The incentives are obvious with the current political climate.
political
Time for ^climate change.

Leigh says:

May 19, 2014 at 11:40 pm
Funny that.
We’re getting the same BS studys here in Australia.
The warmies are just changing places and dates on their studys.
Otherwise its word for word on the studys done here.
Some wag earlier this year had a thought bubble that there was this giant invisible cloud of CO/2. That works its around the world increasing the ferocity of bushfires where ever it settles over.
Seems like its moved from Australia to America.
I heard it had turned up in Italy not long ago or was that Greece.
It really is becoming quite tedious.
Lets talk about the global warming that froze America…..

aussiepete says:

May 20, 2014 at 4:40 am
What are the trends in deliberately/accidentally lit fires, numbers of campers and miles of power lines over the last few years? Vandalism generally and graffiti in particular has exploded in recent years, therefore, is it not reasonable to assume that it would be the same with arson ? I do not have a degree so i guess i’m not qualified to ask these questions or even have these thoughts.Nonetheless my instincts tell me that an increase of 0.8 of a degree will not lead to spontaneous combustion.

Aussiepete might be interested in reading about fires that get started in haystacks!

MattS doesn't know much about the climate and vegetation differences across the USA and says:

May 20, 2014 at 6:33 am
Why is this such a big problem in the western states and not the rest of the US?
Because the federal government owns and manages most of the land in the western states, but has relatively little land in the mid-west and eastern states.

elmer reverts to an "algore is fat" type comment and says:

May 20, 2014 at 10:17 am
The fact that these fires were set on purpose and that the doomsayers use these fires to push their global warming propaganda kinda makes me wonder, where was Al Gore when these fires were set?

LogosWrench says something unintelligible:

May 20, 2014 at 10:28 am
The wildfires are man made and I believe they a few people in custody but it aint for CO2.

Chad Wozniak says that all forests should be razed and covered in concrete, or similar:

May 20, 2014 at 11:03 am
The increase in wildfires is attributable very specifically to environmentalist extremism, which has interfered with prudent forest management practices (such as thinning underbrush and removing dead trees) and with natural fire cycles which are much less destructive than the fires resulting from environmentalist practices.

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Dennison, P. E., S. C. Brewer, J. D. Arnold, and M. A. Moritz (2014), Large wildfire trends in the western United States, 1984–2011, Geophys. Res. Lett., 41, 2928–2933, doi:10.1002/2014GL059576.

Miller, Jay D., and Hugh Safford. "Trends in wildfire severity: 1984 to 2010 in the Sierra Nevada, Modoc Plateau, and southern Cascades, California, USA." Fire Ecology 8, no. 3 (2012). doi: 10.4996/fireecology.0803041

Bushfire weather in Southeast Australia: recent trends and projected climate change impacts. Melbourne, Australia: Bushfire CRC, 2007.

Hanson, Chad T., and Dennis C. Odion. "Is fire severity increasing in the Sierra Nevada, California, USA?." International Journal of Wildland Fire (2013). http://www.californiachaparral.org/images/Hanson_and_Odion_Fire_Severity_in_Sierra_Nev_2014.pdf

Gill, A. Malcolm, Scott L. Stephens, and Geoffrey J. Cary. "The worldwide “wildfire” problem." Ecological applications 23, no. 2 (2013): 438-454. http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/stephens-lab/Publications/Gill%20et%20al.%202013.pdf

A miscellaneous collation: fires, ice and cycles...

There is little to report from denier bloggers this past couple of days. (In Anthony Watts' latest, he's running a competition to see who is the most offensive - "alarmists" or "fake sceptics" - archived here.)

In any case, I've been suffering what I can only describe as heat fatigue (not quite the same as heat exhaustion).  Thankfully a cool change came through yesterday afternoon.  (Last night I slept for nearly 12 hours straight.)

Bushfires rage in Australia

Firefighters who were busy battling blazes across south eastern Australia weren't so fortunate and wouldn't have got much sleep.  They were too busy fighting major fires on the outskirts of Melbourne, in the Latrobe Valley, in far east Gippsland and the southern Flinders Ranges in South Australia as well as elsewhere.  Twenty homes were thought to have been destroyed in Victoria yesterday.

It's been another hot summer down here, with more than our share of days over 40 degrees in south-eastern Australia and up north too.  The fires have been bad, but not as bad as other years.  Below is a comparison of mid-January last year with fires across Australia today:

Some of the people commenting at WUWT seem to think that the world is heading for an ice age, because it's the most snow the USA has seen in 20 years or something.  However there's no hint down under of any ice age cometh-ing.

Feel free to treat this as an open thread and comment about anything at all relating to climate.  Here are a couple of articles to get you going.

How Greenland's ice sheets are melting

First from ScienceDaily.com: Greenland ice sheets are melting from above and below - more measurements are sorely needed. An excerpt:

The paper describes the mechanisms causing the melting of the ice sheet, particularly at its margin, where the glaciers extend into the ocean. This so-called "submarine melting" has increased as the ocean and atmosphere have warmed over the past two decades.

"What a lot of research around Greenland and the fjords has shown is that if the North Atlantic Ocean warms, then these warm waters will rapidly reach the fjords and hence the margins of Greenland's glaciers," says Straneo.

But scientists today know that the situation is more complex than just "a warmer ocean melts ice."

A warmer atmosphere is resulting in increased surface melting above the ice sheet, and this runoff too enhances submarine melting. Surface melt water falls through cracks in the glacier creating a freshwater river that rushes out into the ocean at the base of the glacier, sometimes 600 meters (1,800 feet) below sea level. This river mixes rapidly with the dense, salty seawater, contributing to the heat transfer from the ocean to the ice, resulting in even more submarine melting beneath the sea surface.

Accelerated trade winds over the Pacific

Matthew England from the University of New South Wales and colleagues have a paper in Nature Climate Change, which suggests that stronger than normal trade winds across the Pacific have meant that global surface temperatures haven't risen as much as they might have in recent years.  From the ABC News:

It was found the winds were churning the Pacific like a washing machine, bringing the deeper colder water to the surface and pushing the warmer water below.

"The phase we're in of accelerated trade winds particularly lasts a couple of decades," Professor England said.

"We're about 12 to 13 years in to the most accelerated part of the wind field. "It's important to point out there's a cycle we expect to reverse and when they do reverse back to their normal levels we'd expect global warming to kick in and start to rise."

Professor England rejects the argument from sceptics that the slowdown suggests global warming is not as bad as first thought and that the climate models are not working.

"We want the community to have confidence in the climate models," he said. "They are very good but in this instance the wind acceleration has been that strong and that much stronger than what the models projected."

Cycles in the South

For the cycle afficionados, David W. J. Thompson and Elizabeth A. Barnes have found periodic behaviour in large-scale Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation.  From the latest issue of Science (paywalled):

Periodic behavior in the climate system has important implications not only for weather prediction but also for understanding and interpreting the physical processes that drive climate variability.

Here we demonstrate that the large-scale Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation exhibits marked periodicity on time scales of approximately 20 to 30 days. The periodicity is tied to the Southern Hemisphere baroclinic annular mode and emerges in hemispheric-scale averages of the eddy fluxes of heat, the eddy kinetic energy, and precipitation. Observational and theoretical analyses suggest that the oscillation results from feedbacks between the extratropical baroclinicity, the wave fluxes of heat, and radiative damping.

The oscillation plays a potentially profound role in driving large-scale climate variability throughout much of the mid-latitude Southern Hemisphere.

---

Fiammetta Straneo, Patrick Heimbach. North Atlantic warming and the retreat of Greenland's outlet glaciers. Nature, 2013; 504 (7478): 36 DOI: 10.1038/nature12854

Matthew H England et al. Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus. Nature Climate Change, February 9, 2014; doi:10.1038/nclimate2106

David W. J. Thompson and Elizabeth A. Barnes, Periodic Variability in the Large-Scale Southern Hemisphere Atmospheric Circulation; Science 7 February 2014: Vol. 343 no. 6171 pp. 641-645 DOI: 10.1126/science.1247660

Early start to the fire season in Australia

Update: Hundreds of homes may have been destroyed today.  Some areas had people trapped with no water and no firefighters.  Conditions have been among the worst ever experienced in NSW with very strong winds fanning the fires and very dry conditions.

#nswfires #bushfire #GodBlessFirefighters Middle of Spring!?! Enough already!! pic.twitter.com/32yhaIoL5y
— Jo (@BeringWells) October 17, 2013

Thank you to the thousands of firefighters who have so bravely fought fires in difficult conds. #NSWRFS #nswfires pic.twitter.com/stDcOP0hIA
— NSW RFS (@NSWRFS) October 17, 2013

---

Australia has had an early start to the fire season.  In September, when spring had barely started, fires started raging in NSW.

My heartfelt sympathy to everyone who has lost property or been threatened by fire these past few weeks.  This is not something one would wish on their worst enemy.  All Australians are very grateful to all the brave men and women fighting these fires and everyone who is supporting the firefighters in their efforts.

This is where the fires are burning at the moment, from the NSW Rural Fire Service.  Fires are scattered over 1,200 km (approx 750 miles) up NSW, almost from the Victorian border to Queensland.

Source: NSW RFS

Sydney is baking in heat more akin to the height of summer

This week has seen more fire disasters as reported by Peter Hannam in the Sydney Morning Herald.  On Sunday dozens of people lost their cars when a fire destroyed a car park at Olympic Park Aquatic Centre in Homebush (home of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games).

Today's fires aren't restricted to the back blocks either, there are fires burning around Australia's largest city, Sydney.  From Peter Hannam:

The strength of Thursday's winds caught authorities on the hop, with the fire danger only rated "severe" rather than "extreme", as had been forecast for the previous Sunday's heat spike.

Bankstown, for instance, recorded 95 km/h winds, the strongest there for at least 10 years, said Ben McBurney, a meteorologist with Weatherzone.

"The bureau didn't expect wind speeds to go quite as high as they did," he said.
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Humidity across the basin also fell as low as 10 per cent. "That's probably what led to these fires getting out of control," said McBurney.

Many areas saw their fire danger ratings rocket to "catastrophic", including for Richmond and Sydney Airport. Camden also had a "catastrophic" rating, the highest in 11 years.

While strong winds remained a concern, the arrival of cooler conditions late on Thursday gave firefighters in some areas a break. But relief may be temporary as a lack of rain and rising temperatures over the weekend will see high fire dangers return.

Friday's maximum will drop back to the long-run October average of 22 degrees and will seem almost cool after Sydneysiders have been baking in heat more akin to the height of summer than mid-spring.

Climate change will see fire conditions worsen

Peter Hannam is one of the journalists in Australia who reports it as it is.  In the same article he writes:

David Jones, head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said climate change will see fire conditions worsen for much of Australia over the longer run.

While weather patterns vary from year to year, southern Australia is already seeing springs and summer becoming hotter. As a result, there is a "trend towards more severe fire weather conditions across Australia.”

"We know from about March-April to around June, things have been drying out across southern Australia," he said.

"The fact there is less soil moisture increases the fire risk both towards the end of the fire season but also the subsequent fire season," Dr Jones said. "You have a lesser opportunity to really wet up the vegetation.”

“Global warming exacerbates a number of factors associated with fire," he said, adding that humidity is expected to decline over much of the continent particular in summer.

Read the full article here

Too dangerous for prescribed burns

The thing is, as climate change kicks in it becomes more difficult to do any hazard reduction burns as has happened in NSW.

You can read more articles by Peter Hannam in the environment section here and in the business section here.

Unreasonably "Reasonable" - Uncertainty is No Monster - Live with It or Die by It

Or ... Why Judith Curry is Wrong

A major bushfire is heading straight for your home, getting bigger and faster and fiercer by the minute, fueled by wind and dry vegetation. The fire front is about 900 meters away. You can hear the roar, it's creating its own wind. You can see the glow through the thick pall of smoke that's covered the sky. The daylight is a weird colour, orange-pink - almost peach-coloured. You can't breathe properly, it smells of burning leaves. You can see the embers falling ahead of the fire. You can hear the loud bangs as trees explode in the heat and flames. You know from past fires something of what to expect, including the unexpected.

Your sister from a city a thousand miles away phones you and says, "It's not certain the fire will hit you, is it?"  Sis has always had a Pollyanna streak.  She is afraid for us and is seeking reassurance.

The weather bureau reports a 30% probability of a change in wind direction but not until some time later in the day, with a 10% probability of light rain.

Which of these responses would you regard as 'sensible'?

1. Dump tonnes of kerosene in the fire's path, leaving a trail of kerosene leading straight to your back door?
2. Don't take any action at all.  Wait until you have more information?
3. Send out helicopters, fire trucks with fire retardant to try to contain the blaze and pack up your car with family members, pets and whatever you can grab and get the hell out of there?

Too many people argue for the first response.  Keep adding fuel to the fire.  Keep pouring CO2 into the atmosphere.  Wait until it's 100% certain that the wind won't change in time and stop the fire's momentum.  Continuing to add fuel to the fire is the way to go until we can better 'scope' the uncertainty, they will argue.

A few people will argue for number two.  Don't add any more fuel to the fire but otherwise don't do anything until you know more.  Close all coal-fired power stations immediately.  Shut down the oil refineries.  But don't go building wind turbines or electric vehicles.  Don't plan for higher sea levels. Don't go changing building codes.  Don't shore up water storage for future droughts.

Others will argue for the third option.  Change the source of energy away from fossil fuels and adapt to what climate change will bring.  Minus the "getting the hell out of there".  (People who live in the bush will have their fire plan ready each summer, their valuables and pet cages at hand, their fire retardant clothes in their emergency kit along with a mask and water, and their fire escape route planned out.)  

What do you think about that?  What path would you recommend?

Nowhere else to go

Where I live there's a new classification of Code Red = Catastrophic fire warning.  Code Red is beyond Extreme.  When this is announced people are supposed to leave the area (not mandatory).  Problem is, there's usually nowhere within 500 km that isn't in the Catastrophic fire zone.  Just like with global warming.  We've only got one earth.

Seeking reassurance

Many climate science deniers appear to reject the evidence because they react like Sis did.  They want reassurance.  So much so that they seek it out.  They lap up disinformation and hoard it like gold.  They avoid or dismiss unpalatable facts as "alarmist".  They can't cope with 'alarm'.  Studies suggest the conservative brain is more responsive to fear.  Although this confers some advantages it can also impede reason, resulting in poor judgement and 'wrong' decisions.

There is always uncertainty

As anyone who's done any planning will tell you, there is always uncertainty. Uncertainty is not a monster.  There is almost never only one "right answer".  When facing something like a bushfire or climate change, the "wrongest" answer is to not act at all.  Societal paralysis while climate change continues unabated.  Geological history gives us insight into what to expect, including the unexpected.  If we waited for 100% certainty about everything in the future, we'd never get out of bed in the morning.

The "wrong" answer

To not act is as deliberate a decision as acting based on information at hand.  It is the wrong response.

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Quit Shooting the Messenger!  Demand Leadership from Leaders!

This post was inspired by reactions to Judith Curry's recent written and oral testimony to a US House of Reps subcommittee.  For example:

Shifting goal post alert: The real question that must be settled before any policy actions are taken to address the postulated threat from human-induced global warming is ....(insert shifting goal posts here)

Strawman construction 1:...suggesting (to me) a much more cautious approach to emissions reduction than has been adopted in Australia and elsewhere....Of course, I regard “cautious” as not taking extensive and costly action without more convincing evidence as to the merits of such action, others might interpret it as pre-emptive large-scale precautionary reductions.

Strawman 2: ...Those who posit that there is one (a problem), which requires remedial action, have to show empirical evidence that they know what the hell they are talking about – BEFORE they request any action be taken.

And Curry herself, IMO misrepresenting scientific uncertainty, its nature, how it is scoped and quantified, and the relative importance of different aspects of science and the relevance of different aspects to government policy development - and building her own strawmen.  Even though she states clearly up front that humans are causing global warming, she later implies that scientists are wrong to assert that humans are causing global warming, which is the scientific consensus, writing instead:

Given these uncertainties, there would seem to be plenty of scope for disagreement among scientists. Nevertheless, the consensus about dangerous anthropogenic climate change is portrayed as nearly total among climate scientists. Further, the consensus has been endorsed by all of the relevant national and international science academies and scientific societies.

I have been trying to understand how there can be such a strong consensus given these uncertainties....

...When uncertainty is not well characterized and there is concern about ‘unknown unknowns,’ there is increasing danger of getting the wrong answer and optimizing for the wrong thing.

And her over-simplification of decision-making pitfalls mixed with a bright red herring.  No, Judith, neither of these hits the nail on the head:

There are two situations to avoid: i) acting on the basis of a highly confident statement about the future that turns out to be wrong; and ii) missing the possibility of an extreme, catastrophic outcome. Avoiding both of these situations requires much deeper and better assessment of uncertainties and areas of ignorance, as well as creating a broader range of future scenarios than is currently provided by climate models.

I strongly disagree with Curry.  The main situation to avoid is that of waiting till it is too late.  Waiting until options are reduced to all but a few.  Waiting until atmospheric CO2 gets so high that there are no choices left to humanity.  Waiting until climate change wreaks havoc and destabilises economies such that we can no longer afford to take action.  Or worse, waiting until there are no longer coherent societies or stable governments that can see actions through to completion.  There are a myriad of actions that can be taken now, which won't be "wrong" in any sense of the word.

Leaders, take responsibility! Certain science, uncertain policy response

The biggest sin Curry commits is that of pointing her finger at science, rather than at the leaders, the rule-makers, the legislators.  The uncertainty is in the policy response, not the science.  The science is settled more than adequately to inform policy decisions.  Legislators' efforts need to go towards determining what paths to follow, what suite of policy responses and programs to implement.  It's not the science that's uncertain in this context.

Businesses wants a consistent policy direction.  The science is settled but the policy response, where it exists, is fragmented.  The corporate sector hates a policy vacuum.  Investors look for clear guidance.  The community elects leaders to lead, not fiddle while the bush burns. 

Curry confirms that there is a raging bushfire, that we run the risk of it burning down the house.  She can see the fire bearing down.  Everyone else can see the fire raging and heading in their direction.  But instead of calling for a plan of action to deal with the very real fire, she turns around and says:- "Well, maybe that bushfire we can all see bearing down on us isn't real.  It's red and it's hot and it's got flames and lots of white and black and yellow smoke, and it's leaving burnt forests and grasslands in its wake.  Just the same, I think it needs more analysis.  We need more measurements.  We need more temperature readings, to examine the smoke, analyse the smoke particles, confirm that those flames are really flames.  Build another model. We need to make sure it really is a bushfire before we start to think about getting out of its path or putting it out!  Meanwhile, let's add more kerosene."

IMO Judith confirms her adopted role as that of 'delayer', who wants to keep the bushfire burning by pouring tonnes kerosene onto it, under the guise of "waiting for certainty" about what is already certain.

A Whopper of a Heatwave II: HotCopper Deniers

Australia's heat wave is getting some attention.  Not just here in Australia, we can't ignore it, but from elsewhere as well.  It's a real doozy.  You can read about it on MotherJones, and in the UK Guardian, The Telegraph and in many places on the blogosphere, like here and here.

One of the big problems is that we've had a lot of rain this past year or two - aka the 'big wet', when large areas of the continent were covered in water - to the north, south, east, west and in the centre of Australia.  2010-11 was the wettest summer on record in Victoria and in Darwin and no-one can forget the tragic loss of life in the Lockyer Valley when Queensland flooded in the same season.  Once the water evaporated, sank into the ground or flowed to the sea the plants started growing again.  (If you remember, the 'big wet' followed the 'great drought', which didn't end till 2010.)  That means lots of fuel for fire.

In 2009 more than 179 people died in a fire that started in catastrophic conditions on a day known locally as Black Saturday.  Most of us knew some of them or knew people who knew some of them.  It was a bad day that affected the whole nation.

Now it's 2013 and in this 'big heat', fires have taken hold, burning out almost entire small towns and hamlets in Tasmania and continuing to rage in our island state as well as in many parts of the mainland.  NSW had the worst fire danger conditions on record - and fires took hold and are still burning out of control.

Reaction from deniers

This blog pokes fun at the silliness that pervades a share trading site, HotCopper, from top management down.  (It's a microcosm of the world that science deniers and conspiracy theorists inhabit, seeing the conservative old white male as its target market.)  But there's nothing silly about the weather extremes in Australia over the past few years.  There have been too many tragedies.  Yet there are still a few people who simply cannot accept that our climate is changing.  While the continent has been sweltering in a record heat event, they write things like this, in response to a post about this article from The Age about the record heat (bear in mind that these are posts on a Science and Medicine forum):

You can grow things in 'Hot-Houses'... But you can NOT grow things in a Deep-Freezer. Birdman29

What a waste of bandwidth this thread is, started I notice by an alarmist, one of the group who tell us that science rules. Hanrahan, the resident troll, dismisses the freak conditions and its consequences as not worth writing about, as well as flaming the poster and denying science in the same keyboard attack.

Ever thought of simply making your point without denigrating those who don't accept your gloomy outlook? And more: Grow up, stop sulking, learn how to debate civilly. Troll Hanrahan again, king of denigration who often has sulking fits and will never learn how to 'debate'.

Do you think that it being summer could have anything to do with it? BenBradley, resident paranoid conspiracy theorist, disagrees with the Bureau of Meteorology.  He thinks this freak heat wave is normal summer weather.

The Earth's climate varies. We need to adjust. astrayalien, recent winner of the HotWhopper dumbest post award, who thinks our atmosphere cools the planet rather than keeping it warm, but nevertheless thinks we will need to adjust.  Yes we do!

People who go on about global warming because its hot outside during summer just show thier (sic) extreme ignorance re climate change. Idiots. From 'CO2 is plant food' muzzarati, who thanks god for poor, much maligned CO2.

That sums up the majority of HotCopper S&M-ers.  Not merely ignorant but wilfully ignorant and proud of it!

A Whopper of a Heat Wave (Updated again)

What happened last year

The Bureau of Meteorology has released the Annual Climate Statement 2012.  Some of the main points are:

...Australia had near-average rain and above-average temperatures during 2012, but the average annual values conceal a year of contrasts:

• La Niña brought above-average rain early in 2012
• Reduced rainfall in winter and spring was associated with a warm central Pacific Ocean and positive Indian Ocean Dipole
• Annual nationally averaged rainfall very slightly above average, with 476 mm (1961–1990 average of 465 mm).
• A warmer-than-average year, 0.11 °C above average 2003–2012 the fifth-warmest 10-year period on record.

Enter 2013 - with a whopper of a heat wave

2013 has started with a whopper of a heat wave extending over most of Australia.  And this looks like being record heat despite no El Nino.  This animation derived from the Bureau of Meteorology temperature charts shows how the heat wave moved across the country from New Year's Day to Saturday 12 January Thurs 10 January yesterday (click for larger version).  The forecast predicts it won't be stopping for a while yet, with temperatures in some parts projected to be more than 50C (122F) next Sunday:

Burning Up

Hot weather means Australia is burning again.  Particularly dangerous are the windy conditions experienced in south eastern Australia last Friday.  As reported by Watching the Deniers, the results were tragic and the ABC reports it is looking very bad again today.

Tomorrow, NSW is facing it's "worst ever fire danger day".

Here's a video about the Tassie fires from ABC 7.30 report, with incredible tales and images of people who survived by huddling in water under a jetty, including the story of a young mother from Dunally who'd just left her children with her grandparents while she went to a funeral in Hobart.

Here is today's record from Sentinel.  You can see the horrific fires in Tasmania still going plus fires all over the country.

The red flames are the most recent 12-hour satellite sweep and the yellow flames are from the previous 12 to 24 hours.

HotCopper Delusions of an Ice Age

Despite this some HotCopper deniers, like Chrysalis here, think we're on the verge of an ice age.

The stupid it burns ...