Links tagged “wildfires”

In terms of area of land burnt, these last few weeks may be recorded as unprecedented. This has everything to do with our mismanagement of the landscape, including the lack of hazard reduction burning especially in eucalyptus forests.

We were warned in the report from the 1939 Royal Commission by Judge Leonard Stretton, and in the more than 18 major inquiries since, forests are potentially dangerous and explosive places. Fuel loads must be kept within acceptable limits.

Blaming the recent fires on climate change is to rewrite our temperature history, something the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been doing for some time. This has involved the:

1. remodelling of measured values
2. addition of hotter locations to only the most recent years in the compilation of a national average trend
3. transition to electronic probes that are designed to record hotter for the same weather, and
4. deleting of the hottest day in the official record, which was January 3, 1909.