There’s been a lot of noise coming from “climate science” regarding the fires in Australia. Recently, in an act of desperation, Facebook flagged one of my Facebook posts from Breitbart about the Australian fires as being false:
The Breitbart article said:
But the desperate academic clods over at “Climatefeedback” would have none of it, promptly flagging the article as false.
Note the pea and the thimble here.
They scope of the fires was related to arson, pure and simple. Lightning also contributed. These are indisputable facts. CO2 molecules didn’t run around starting fires. The best they could claim is that the fires started by arson and lightning might have spread faster due to a dry fuel load.
Climatefeedback didn’t actually dispute that the fires weren’t started by Arsonists or lightning, they just chose to flag it so they could inject the climate change narrative:
But here’s the thing, and there’s no getting around this. In the key take-away they cite the year as the “driest on record” while also mentioning “dry and windy weather patterns”. As anybody knows, a weather event is not climate, and a year’s worth of weather is not climate.
It’s an epic fail by the supposed climate experts at Climatefeedback. If the tables were turned, and an article was citing a year of cold weather, and a cold weather event, they’d dismiss it with the wave of hand saying “weather is not climate”.
Unless of course, weather events support “the cause”.
Then there’s the data from Australia’s BoM. Rainfall over the past 60 years has been wetter.
From Dr. Roy Spencer:
To drive home the point that any given year should not be used as evidence of a long-term trend, Australia precipitation provides an excellent example. The following plot is like the temperature plot above (Fig. 2), but now for precipitation as reported by the BOM (data here).
While it is certainly true that 2019 was the driest year in Australia since 1900, likely caused by extended La Nina conditions in the Pacific, they can’t pin it on climate change caused drought, because climate is a 30 year average, and because we’ve been told repeatedly that “weather is not climate“.
Then there’s this summary from Dr. Roy Spencer:
Summary Points
1) Global wildfire activity has decreased in recent decades, making any localized increase (or decrease) in wildfire activity difficult to attribute to ‘global climate change’.
2) Like California, Australia is prone to bushfires every year during the dry season. Ample fuel and dry weather exists for devastating fires each year, even without excessive heat or drought, as illustrated by the record number of hectares burned (over 100 million) during 1974-75 when above-average precipitation and below-average temperatures existed.
3) Australian average temperatures in 2019 were well above what global warming theory can explain, illustrating the importance of natural year-to-year variability in weather patterns (e.g. drought and excessively high temperatures).
4) Australia precipitation was at a record low in 2019, but climate models predict no long-term trend in Australia precipitation, while the observed trend has been upward, not downward. This again highlights the importance of natural climate variability to fire weather conditions, as opposed to human-induced climate change.
5) While reductions in prescribed burning have probably contributed to the irregular increase in the number of years with large bush fires, a five-fold increase in population in the last 100 years has greatly increased potential ignition sources, both accidental and purposeful.
In summary, [IMO] Climatefeedback is either ignorant, incompetent, or flat-out lied to support the narrative that “climate change” has it’s fingerprint on everything. As I’ve said repeatedly, it has become the universal boogeyman.
Meanwhile:
Alas, to be politically correct in attributing cause in the future, Josh has created this handy quiz (updated):
Scientists have a fix. Humans must turn the atmosphere 100% CO2 to stop fires from starting.
You left out in 70 years time … your still at a Freddy Krueger BBQ until then.
The fact is, increased atmospheric CO2 did play a part in these fires.
The increase in vegetation growth thanks to increased atmospheric CO2 doubtless added to the fuel load which the greens resist being cleared.
Sorry if someone has already pointed that out, I didn’t have time to read all the comments.
HotScot: how many other factors affect vegetation growth – for example rainfall patterns and amounts, hours of sunlight, ambient temperatures, soil type, geographic location, length of growing season? Do some types of vegetation grow better than others in certain regions? How can you state with such confidence that ‘the fact is, incresed atmospheric CO2 did play a part in these fires’ given so many variables?
Carbon500, I think that HotScot was just saying that any additional CO2 we have in the atmosphere has fed the trees, shrubs and vegetation generally like they do with hothouses. Thereby increasing the level of fuels.
He wasn’t otherwise blaming CO2 for the fires, as in CC.
Megs: here’s what bothers me. It’s the gross over-simplification inherent in the idea that CO2 is solely responsible for the alleged enhanced growth of vegetation. My work over the years was in biology and biochemistry. The complexity and varaibility to be found in the natural world is incredible. Where for example is the work showing species variability as to optimal CO2 requirements? What localised variations are seen in CO2 levels after say, a thunderstorm? – CO2 is a water soluble gas, after all. The textbooks claim that CO2 is uniformly distributed – well, maybe at the stations where atmospheric gases are sampled it is so, but everywhere on the planet? I doubt it. There’s the fear of runaway warming – the warmer it gets, the more CO2 comes out of the oceans, and so it gets warmer, along with more water vapour in the atmosphere supplementing the heating, If so, why hasn’t runaway warming happened over countless millenia?
Where is the laboratory bench experiment under convective conditions (with real CO2 and water, not a computer ‘model’), reproducible in any laboratory in the world, that gives us figures under controlled conditions as to how much warming incremental CO2 changes cause in the presence of varying defined water vapour concentrations? The oceans are buffered – how much CO2 is expelled per degree of warming relative to plain water? So many questions are unanswered, yet the doom-mongers insist that they’re right; here’s far too much proverbial forelock-tugging to scientists such as Mann, particularly by thr media. My apologies for getting on my hobby horse – I’ve gone on too much here!
Carbon 500, it’s OK. We are making some ground. Peter Ridd was able to speak out about the lies about acidic oceans affecting reef fish. I’m pretty sure we’ve refuted David Attenborough’s lies about polar bears disappearing and walruses committing suicide. No one is having to move to higher ground because of rising waters. I don’t believe that glaciers are retreating any faster than they have anyway since the last ice age, or maybe they retreat faster as they get smaller and if it doesn’t snow.
CO2 is not causing the climate to warm. The climate is cyclical with variations, as the weather is cyclical with variations. We expect seasons, in many parts of the world, except the tropics, it’s just pretty much hot and humid year round with monsoons in summer. But we expect that the weather will be cold in winter, starting to warm up in spring, hot in summer and starting to cool down in autumn. Sometimes we get variations in weather patterns from season to season. Climate variations are where long term, what was considered a variation in weather patterns, are being repeated. Then you need to consider a change in climate. Nothing that hasn’t happened before.
indicating a possible change in climactic conditions.
Unfortunately, Australia has had a bad fire season, people have died, animals, native and domestic have died, property has been destroyed and vast areas of grasslands, scrub and trees have been burned off. There is no denying the tragedy. But the only contribution man had in the cause of these fires is arson and negligence. CO2 levels had absolutely nothing to do with it. These fires are not unprecedented, they are a part of the Australian history. There are YouTube videos showing a particular National Park immediately after the 2009 bushfires, everything blackened, nothing on the ground, not a leaf on any tree. They showed the grow back over fifteen months and by that time the trees had a covering of new leaves and emerging branches and the undergrowth was almost waist high.
Nothing that hasn’t happened before. The temperatures are not unprecedented either. We’ve had recorded temperatures dating back to the mid 1800’s, that equate to the temperatures we’ve had here recently, that is unless they’ve been obliterated from the records. I have certainly experienced the same high temperatures in my lifetime. Parts of Australia experience drought, regularly. Bushfires happen every year here, some years are worse than others. Now, the only reason we are on the world stage is because of CC hysteria and social media. Of course the worst of them is MSM. Journalism has become nothing short of disgraceful. The MSM feed the hysteria and many of them have actually bought into the whole scenario. I thought that it was the job of a journalists to find out and present the facts. There is little truth in journalism anymore and it’s more about the journalists promoting their own, and popular opinion. The actual facts are irrelevant.
Because journalists have effectively gagged more than half the population, there is no balance in society anymore. If the people are only getting one story over and over then it becomes propaganda. It becomes their reality, there is no other reference point.
So you see, just to put things into perspective, the ‘truth’ about CO2 levels and their affects on CC is not really relevant at the moment. It’s not even the agenda anyway. But as long as we cannot get the truth out there and present a balanced view in science, the people remain ignorant.
See, I tend to be a little verbose too. Oh and, we need to be grateful that we can express our views on sites such as this one, particularly this one.
Megs: thanks for your comments, they make interesting reading, and I agree entirely.
I came across the link below on Paul Holmewood’s ‘Not a Lot of People Know That’ website, and it makes for fascinating browsing – where’s the dangerous climate change that we hear so much about? I’ve posted this link here before, so at the risk of being boring, I’m posting it again. It’s from the UK’s Met Office website – they’re sitting on data like this, yet there’s plenty of doom-mongering on their website – quite a contradiction.
Here it is – graphs of UK temperatures, rainfall and sunshine going back to 1910:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series
I thought your comment as follows to be very true – ‘because journalists have effectively gagged more than half the population, there is no balance in society anymore. If the people are only getting one story over and over then it becomes propaganda. It becomes their reality, there is no other reference point.’
Sadly, not many people dig deeper. As you say, we are fortunate to be able to express and exchange views on websites such as this – so thank you, Anthony!
Looking at the actual charts, if the temperature and precipitation conditions this year are due to catastrophic man-made global warming, the temperature and precipitation conditions in 2010 and 2011 had to be due to catastrophic global cooling.
I am old enough to remember the news in 2010 and 2011 (unlike Greta) and the people claiming that the Australian weather is evidence of catastrophic global warming were NOT claiming that the world was catastrophically cooling in 2010 and 2011.
1. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that change in temperature has been and will be 100% anthropogenic CO2. Australia currently produces 1.37% of anthropogenic CO2 globally so if we shut down all coal power plants, take all vehicles off the road, and stop exhaling, we will bring down the current warming trend of 0.110 C per decade (linear regression of satellite measurement since 1979) to 0.1084 C per decade. That should eradicate bushfires in Australia like throwing a cup of water in the air every day would eradicate droughts.
2. Either global warming produces more positive feedbacks due to more water vapour and more rain or it doesn’t. If droughts (dry weather) are a symptom of AGW then you can’t argue that more water vapour is also a symptom.
They scope of the fires was related to arson, pure and simple. Lightning also contributed. –> The_ scope of the fires was related to arson, pure and simple. Lightning also contributed.