Essay by Eric Worrall
Aussie Agricultural productivity is soaring – but apparently good seasons and a failure to manage fire risk are a climate disaster.
Rain one minute, heatwave the next. How climate ‘whiplash’ drives unpredictable fire weather
Published: January 12, 2026 6.08am AEDT
David Bowman
Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, University of TasmaniaAfter a weekend of extreme heat and windy conditions, more than 30 blazes were still burning in Victoria and New South Wales as of Sunday evening, including major fires in the Otways, near the town of Alexandra in central Victoria, and on the NSW-Victoria border near Corryong.
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What role does climate change play in supercharging extreme weather conditions, such as these? The evidence shows it not only turns up the thermostat, it also makes the climate system more erratic.
One emerging aspect of such climate change is “hydroclimatic whiplash” – sudden and often frequent transitions between very dry and very wet conditions. It can feel like the climate system is toggling between lots of different states: floods one minute, bushfires the next.
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The forecast for this fire season was not as calamitous as it is proving to be. That’s not a criticism – we have to expect the unexpected. Rather than using the term climate change, which implies a steady and predictable shift, I now prefer the term “climate instability”.
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The key point is there are going to be lots more fires. We can’t resent the administrative and financial effort it will take to make our landscapes safer.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/rain-one-minute-heatwave-the-next-how-climate-whiplash-drives-unpredictable-fire-weather-273104
I am so fed up with greens impeding forestry management, then trying to claim the resulting fire disaster is because of climate change.
It has been a good few years.
This Summer I barely had to turn on the garden watering system. Every day this Summer has been either blazing hot or wet, plenty of water in the ground, and lots of sunlight to drive growth.
Given such benign growing conditions, why wasn’t more effort made to do controlled burns during the wet periods of the “whiplash”?
Of course we already know the likely answer to that question.
The evidence of the harm greens cause by opposing sensible forestry management often strangely seems to disappear when everything inevitably goes up in smoke.
Academics trying to describe an unexpected outbreak of benign growing conditions as “climate whiplash” in my opinion just adds to the confusion, and helps deflect attention away from the people who in my opinion are the real culprits behind Australia’s fire disasters – irresponsible green activists who are preventing Australian forestry departments from mitigating fire risk.
In my opinion the blood of bushfire victims is on the hands of Australian greens who chain themselves to trees whenever some forestry worker tries to do their job. Fire risks are controllable. What we need is politicians with the guts to control fanatical green activists who prize the lives of a few possums over the safety of Australia’s children. But I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
“Climate Whiplash”?
Have all the other names gotten old and threadbare?
Maybe we should help them by suggesting other names for what’s not happening?
“Climate Mutation”? (That one may have already been taken.)
“Climate Mutilation”?
“Climate Titanic”?
“Climate going Trump”? (Have to blame him for something.)
“Climate Collision”? (Guess I still have the Titanic on my mind.)
“Climitageggon”?
Goes right along with him being a “Pyrogeographer”.
Get off on Climate Climax.
Weather no longer exists – it’s all climate now.
Very nice Eric. Two things. Number one the fact that the crisis must go by different names as time goes on is proof to me that the primary concern, too much CO2 causes catastrophic runaway global warming was just made up. Number two the greens are a real pain in the ass but they are not the problem. It is corrupt power hungry government that is the problem. Without the power of government the greens are nothing but a sideshow.
“the greens are nothing but a” clown show.
deleted – wrong thread
Amusingly, this could probably apply to 97% of Nick’s comments 😅
If he’d be honest he’d have posted
” Wrong Website “
“Climate Whiplash”, the latest psyops propaganda slogan from idiots who don’t know the difference between weather and climate. Extreme variability in weather is a perfectly normal feature of Earth’s climate system that has been weaponized by media to stoke fear.
Is THAT what Nick stokes? I thought it was just ignorance and envy.
Agreed, Climate change is so de regur! it’s not scary enough, whiplash sounds nastier. But here’s the thing, people can’t remain scared by this trope for long, and once they regain rationality, they are going to finally question the Green climate mantra and the stupidity of the `CO2 is pollution’ dogma that has been ruining this country for decades!
If scientific methodology can regain its imprimatur with the public, then we can envision an end to this political farce over climate and its resultant curtailment of proper management of our forests and our endemic bushfires. Common sense must be allowed a voice in this debate; I am over the petty politics and the endless blame game.
This looks like people who cannot accept parts of Australia has a Mediterranean climate where it gets dry enough for brush to burn every year. We had similar East Coast
transplants in California.
The question is when the chaparal is going to burn, not if. Native Americans practiced wildlands management for nearly as long as
that climate and foliage existed, and it is people who think everywhere is just like England or New York who oppose active management. BTW, Indians practiced controlled burns in that climate, too.
No, fires have never occurred in Australia. This is all God’s punishment for fossil fuels.
The author David Bowman:
While Professor Bowman does not clarify what he means by the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘climate instability’ presumably he assumes all climate change or instability is human-caused, nevertheless any sign rational realism from academia is welcome.
Absolutely nothing unpredictable about Australian summer weather.
Sometimes it will rain and not be as warm
Sometimes it will get very dry and hot.
This is CLIMATE NORMAL !!!
Victorian fires seem to be the first major fires since 2019.
This is Australia.. it happens.. and will continue to happen.
We need to be much more pro-active about protecting residential areas that are near bushland
Isolated residences in bush fire areas need to be more sensible and not have massive eucalypts towering over their house…
Have a workable fire buffer, no rubbish etc around the outside of the house………
I have seen some houses in the bush around here that I would say have almost zero chance of surviving in even a small bushfire.. not sensible.
Totally agree, why do many people in fire prone areas (which is mostly the inland fringe of the Great Dividing Range to coastal Eastern Australia) believe they will not be affected by bushfire? It is a hope and pray strategy rather than one of planning for the worst.
Having grown up on a farm in Victoria it was our annual pre-summer task to minimise fire hazards in order that my father could sleep at night knowing we had done what we could to protect life and property.
Even then we suffered a bushfire in the 1970s which destroyed stock and sheds however our house was saved due to preparation and good work on the day of the fire.
The same reason that people who live on floodplains don’t believe they’re going to be flooded: Stupidity.
Show them the height signs from previous floods, and they outright call you a liar. They’re desperate to blame anyone but themselves, and the dreaded CO2 (that they imagine they don’t cause) is a facile target for the credulous and naive.
Here in the UK the Environment Agency often advises local councils not to go ahead with planned housing schemes on flood plain areas. But the final decision is up to the council and not the Agency and all too often the council only sees the extra Council Tax that the homes will provide rather than any flood problems that may arise.
Brill Bryson didn’t call it “The Sunburned Country” for nothing. Barely into this century we drove around NSW into the Snowy Mountains with snow in their winter but still saw a few small controlled fires in the lowlands. Got treated well, guess we talked funny. Not a lot of freshwater but still saw a school of North American Gambusia. Almost hit a big dead red kangaroo coming around a bend, but was told later that tradition was that we should have pulled it of the road, Wombats maybe. Rental vehicle had roo bars but we were well trained avoiding deer in Texas, snows there too even on the coast.
Some Aussies love to live in a “home amongst the gumtrees”, but what they are doing is very similar to ringing their home with drums of petrol. Eucalypts are very prone to going up like torches when exposed to flying cinders. And eucalypts drop around 8 tonnes of litter annually per hectare, or 100×100 metres square area. Then only 29% decomposes annually. So it doesn’t take long before the bush litter builds up to amounts that when a fire starts, it’s impossible to extinguish.
Oh , and this story is linked to the CONversation…. a far-left pseudo-academic propaganda site.
What we have now is Climate Balderdash.
Climate Commierot!
Good weather is bad and caused by Climate Change. Bad weather is bad and caused by Climate Change. In short, all things are bad and caused by Climate Change.
We were promised a dry summer by the BOM. It’s been a really, really wet dry summer so far. That’s probably Climate Whiplash ™
Last I saw they were trying to redefine La Nina to fit all the rainfall…
Mild winters in Siberia are “extreme weather,” too, according to the IPCC.
What MOST people think of when they hear “extreme weather” is storms, or perhaps storms and droughts. But neither droughts nor any category of storms have worsened as CO2 levels have risen. In fact, the frequency of strong tornadoes is sharply DOWN:
https://climateataglance.com/climate-at-a-glance-tornadoes/
This paper reports a DECREASE in hurricanes and tropical cyclones, too (though I think it’s probably just a fluctuation, rather than a durable trend).
Pioneer climatologist Svante Arrhenius identified most of the major effects of CO2 emissions, more than a century ago. He was, at the time, one of the world’s most prominent scientists, having won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry five years earlier. He predicted that CO2 emissions would be highly beneficial for both mankind and the Earth’s climate. He wrote:
“By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.”
History has proven him right. Rising CO2 levels have proven very beneficial, just as he predicted.
But the IPCC is calling those more equable and better climates “weather and climate extremes.”
Normal people wouldn’t call milder winters at frigid high latitudes “weather and climate extremes,” but the IPCC does. If you don’t believe me, then ask your favorite AI:
Q: How does the IPCC define “extreme weather” in AR6? Does it include record high temperatures in winter in cold climates?
The answer is yes.
ChatGPT explains it here:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6923cf49-7c14-8009-bed7-575ef3fa4124
Perplexity agrees:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-does-the-ipcc-define-extre-uwppD9o2Q.mENswGr3zmzA#0
Grok agrees, too:
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_eabb76f0-0597-4f33-bd30-efab66bd74cc
Gemini agrees, too:
https://gemini.google.com/app/8a25ea6cbc4998df
(Mods, this could be a story tip.)
Why did Australia ignore the lessons of the 1939 Black Friday wildfires?
There was an Royal Commission inquiry which came up with forest management suggestions which seems to have been ignored by the eco nuts so there is too much inflammable undergrowth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_bushfires
They used to follow the recommendations for a few years, then decide it was “all too hard”.
The enquiry after every major bushfire makes the same recommendations, but they seem to skip the first step now to save time.
From the article: “Pyrogeography”
That’s a new one on me.
“Pyrogeography” apparently means “fires, and who to blame for them.” Or something like that. It’s not in Webster’s, but it is in Wikipedia.
The main factors affecting fires are land management and forestry practices.[2]
Contrary to the shockingly dishonest propaganda from some quarters (like the misnamed factcheck.org site), global warming has negligible impact on wildfires.
NASA satellites monitor fires from orbit, and they’ve measured a decreasing trend in fires. NASA reports that, “…MODIS [satellite instruments have measured] a decrease in the total number of square kilometers burned each year. Between 2003 and 2019, that number has dropped by roughly 25 percent.” The percentage of the globe which burns each year has been declining since 2002. In 2022, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area.
If warmer temperatures significantly worsened fire risks, then in the United States forest fires would mostly occur in the South. But most large U.S. forest fires have been in the North.
The worst forest fire in American history was in chilly Wisconsin, in October, 1871, when CO2 (estimated from ice cores) was only about 288 ppmv. That one fire consumed about 1.2 million acres, and it is believed to have killed at least 1200 people. Many of them died of hypothermia, while trying to shelter from the fire in the frigid Peshtigo River.
Here are some additional resources on U.S. fires: [1] [2 (Anthony!)] [3] [4] [5] [6a/6b]
“I am so fed up with greens impeding forestry management..”
I can concur with that but here in Wokeachusetts. The state has a million acres of forest land. On that land, they cut about 5% of growth. Not much better on private land what with the greens telling everyone that they should not cut trees to save the planet. It’s the very old battle across America between preservationists and the wise use movement. In my state, the greens won.
“… I now prefer the term “climate instability”.
I think it’s rather ‘someone’ than ‘something’ that’s tad unstable.
From GW to CGW to CAGW to CC to – – CI? Pick any 30 year ‘climate’ period you want to, the climate has never been ‘stable’.