Australia Fires … And Misfires

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I kept hearing so much about the Australian bushfires being the result of or driven by “climate change” or “global warming” that I thought I’d take a look at just what’s happened to the rainfall there. Here are a hundred and nineteen years of Australian rainfall.

Here’s the curious part. The earth has been undergoing a mild warming pretty steadily since 1970, about the last half-century.

But although the last couple years have been dry, the last half-century in Australia has been wetter than the previous half-century. Not dryer. Wetter. And a lot wetter.

In fact, anyone under about sixty years old has never experienced dry Australia.

Now, I mentioned this and showed this graph on Twitter, where I post as @weschenbach, and someone said something like “Well, Australia’s a big area to average. Maybe it’s wetter in the middle and less so on the coast.”

That seemed unlikely. I mean the moisture is coming in from the ocean and so the coasts are generally wetter than the outback … plus with overall more rain, the middle would have to be pretty wet.

But I’m a man for data over theory, so I went back to the same source listed above, and I got the rainfall records for New South Wales where the fires are. Here are those results.

And once again, yes, the last few years have surely been dry in NSW … but again, that’s weather. And once again, the recent half-century has been much wetter than the first half of the 20th century. Not dryer. Wetter.

Finally, forest management experts have been warning the Australian government over and over again for years that neglecting forest management and giving up on fire hazard reduction burns was piling up fuel in the bush, and that it was only a matter of time and a dry year before catastrophe struck … here’s a particularly strong warning from 2015, and it is far from the only one.

But nooo … misguided green activists wouldn’t hear of that. They protested the fire hazard reduction burns.

Hilariously, the Australian Broadcasting Commission has deleted their article on the activists’ protest because it doesn’t fit the “CLIMATE EMERGENCY!” narrative … bunch’a deceptive left-wing idiots who don’t know that the intarwebs never forget.

And when you add the incredibly high fuel load in the oily flammable eucalyptus forest to the fact that more than a dozen arsonists have been arrested for starting many of the fires, it should come as no surprise to anyone that these fires have been devastating, destructive, fatal, and horrible …

It should come as no surprise because they were warned. Clearly. Repeatedly.

Now, I live in the fire zone in California, and so I have great sympathy and compassion for those who are in the path of the fires in Australia. And our fire problem here is inter alia for the same reason—abysmal forest management practices driven by Green activists with hearts of gold and brains of oatmeal.

But those blaming it on climate change? Look, if the CO2 emissions in Australia went to zero, it might make the earth cooler by about 0.05°C by the year 2050 … call me crazy, but I don’t see Australians giving up on air travel as being a very effective fire-fighting strategy.

My best regards to everyone on a lovely clear night,

w.

Addendum: As is my custom, I politely ask that when you comment, you quote what it is you are discussing, so we can all know who and what your subject might be.