Greenist Complicity in Australian Bush Fires

From Another Planet

Australia is facing another bush fire crisis, this time in New South Wales.  It's serious.  News announcers are sonorously blaming high temperatures (typical for Australia) and strong winds (also de rigueur).  But something is missing.  In order to have bush fires, there has to be another ingredient.  Fuel.  But, you will object, why state the obvious?  Clearly the bush represents fuel, non? 

Ah, yes.  But there is bush fuel and bush fuel.  And there is much more of the latter kind than there once was.  Prior to greenism taking over the hearts and minds of Australians, bush fires used to be combated by a diversified strategy--like any good war.  One key method was to keep roads or tracks into the bush maintained, allowing effective access for firefighters.  Another was to allow cattle to graze in the bush.  Another was to put the bush to the match to conduct controlled burn offs.  The objective was to reduce the wooden detritus of the bush on the ground which, if allowed to build up naturally, becomes perfect fuel for fires.  A bush tinderbox.  Active prevention reduced the risks.

All that has gone by the wayside, courtesy of greenist folly.  Piers Akerman, recently wrote the following in the Daily Telegraph:

It was also apparent that locking up forest areas in national parks automatically increased the level of fire risk.  Before the forests were locked up, logging tracks were kept open and the forest floor was largely cleared of fuel loads by the loggers and by the stock which were permitted to graze in the Crown reserves.  Locked forests saw the tracks rapidly become overgrown through disuse and with the removal of stock, the fuel load on the forest floor rapidly increased.

Despite what the green lobby claims, the fuel loading not global warming, is responsible for the intensity of bushfires. Increasing the fuel load by a factor of four, increases the fire intensity by a factor of nearly 20.

The myopic, idiotic Greens (who, lest we forget, command a lot of support on the Left, which is always trying to demonstrate its greenist credentials) lost no time in blaming the recent fires on "global warming" and slamming the Prime Minister for his anti-carbon tax policy.  Cue the Green MP, Adam Bandt who asserted with all the assurance of a profound nitwit that Tony Abbot was to blame.

Tony Abbott has been in the job just six weeks, and is the only PM to don a volunteer firefighter's yellow overalls. But already greenies are blaming him for Sydney's devastating bushfires, branding him a "climate-change criminal". 

Nothing could be more despicably opportunistic than Melbourne Greens MP Adam Bandt's tweet on Thursday, using the latest fire emergency in the NSW Blue Mountains to score a political point over the Coalition's climate-change policy.  At the time, distressing scenes were playing out as desperate mothers outside a Springwood school begged firefighters to evacuate their children as flames raced towards the ridge.  "I've just spoken to the teacher," said one woman, barely containing her panic. "The teacher has said she doesn't know how to get them out."

Maybe Bandt doesn't have a TV in his office, but at about the same time he made his cynical political interjection into this rolling human tragedy via Twitter. "Why Tony Abbott's plan means more bushfires for Australia & more pics like this of Sydney."  Cue image of blackened bush and a link to his article in The Guardian: "By repealing the carbon tax, Tony Abbott is failing to protect his people."  [Miranda Devine, writing in the Telegraph.]

Talk about the fallacy of false cause.  Such ignorance is breathtaking.  But there you go.  Never let the facts get in the way of a bankrupt ideology.  By their fruit we shall know them.

Devine goes on:  

We cannot control the weather. The only thing we have control over is how much fuel is available to those fires.  And here is where greenies are culpable. It is their continuing opposition to properly managing the fuel loads in our bush that has turned bushfires in recent times into unstoppable infernos.

They might pay lip service to hazard reduction but in a thousand ways they obstruct it.  In the Blue Mountains last week, in Tasmania, in Victoria, time and time again, we witness the destructive consequence of huge fuel loads - leaves, tree litter, undergrowth - built up over years without proper hazard reduction.  Systematic cool burns in the winter months, which are done on a cyclical basis every few years, are needed to keep fuel loads at levels which allow firefighters to control outbreaks.

"Fires run on fuel. More fuel equals more fire," says Brian Williams, captain of the Kurrajong Heights bushfire brigade for 28 years.  Limited fuel means limited fire. Hazard reduction won't eliminate fire but it keeps it at a level where we can manage it." . . .

Even for a veteran like Williams, performing a controlled burn in the cooler months has become a logistical nightmare, with multiple forms to fill out, biodiversity to monitor and myriad agencies from which to beg permission.  A process that once took six people now needs 40, with a limited window of suitable weather days.  While the NSW government has vowed to increase hazard reduction, it is nowhere near enough.

Australia's foremost bushfire scientist, former CSIRO researcher Dr Phil Cheney, says this fire season is very similar to 1968, with strong westerly winds in October after a dry winter.  The difference is that "the forests have thickened up enormously in the past 50 years" and people's attitude to fire has changed.

People used to not "whinge about a bit of smoke on their washing. It was accepted that fire was part and parcel of the environment. Now that acceptance is begrudgingly learned," Cheney says.

Cheney is no climate sceptic, however, he scoffs at the stupidity of blaming climate change for bushfires.  "We've had these big fires forever. You'd have to come from Mars not to know that. This is a flammable continent.  The changes are not weather changes - they are not fire behaviour changes. They are lifestyle changes and fuel changes. 

"People now live deep in the bush, with flammable native gardens rather than lawns and European vegetation. Burning off ground fuel used to be an Australian tradition. Now it's frowned upon.  As a result the fires we get are much more intense and close to homes."

The smoke haze still lies thick over Sydney - and worse is yet to come. 

But today, when Abbott goes out to fight fires with his local brigade, there will be no sign of Bandt.

 Greenists are from Mars.  There are no two ways about it.