The Real Cause of Many Australian Bushfires

Nearly 200 People Arrested Across Australia 

Deliberately or Negligently Starting Bushfires

Yet media & celebrities continue to blame “climate change.”

Paul Joseph Watson
Summit News


Authorities in Australia have arrested close to 200 people for deliberately starting the bushfires that have devastated the country, yet the media and celebrities continue to blame “climate change” for the disaster.  The fires have caused at least 18 deaths, destroyed thousands of homes, millions of hectares of land and killed hundreds of millions of animals.

A total of 183 people have been arrested by police in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania for lighting bushfires over the last few months, figures obtained by news agency AAP show.  In New South Wales, 24 people were arrested for arson, risking prison sentences of up to 25 years.

In Queensland, police concluded that 103 of the fires had been deliberately lit, with 98 people, 67 of them juveniles, having been identified as the culprits. 

“The link between arsonists and the deadly fires that devastate Australia every summer is well known and well documented, with the rate of deliberately lit fires escalating rapidly during the school holiday period,” reports Breitbart’s Simon Kent.

Around 85 per cent of bushfires are caused by humans either deliberately or accidentally starting them, according to Dr Paul Read, co-director of the National Centre for Research in Bushfire and Arson.

Australian Bush Fires A Man-Made Catastrophe

Too Much Fuel Causes Extreme Bush Fires, Not Climate Change

Jo Nova

What was Australia’s Environment Minister thinking?

Melissa Price succumbs to pagan witchcraft: 

“There’s no doubt that there’s many people who have suffered over this summer. We talk about the Victorian bushfires; (in) my home state of Western Australia we’ve also got fires there,” [Melissa Price] told Sky News this morning. “There’s no doubt that climate change is having an impact on us. There’s no denying that.”

Western Australia, State Map.


Let’s look at her home state. After 67 years of fire management in the giant, hot, dry state of WA, the trend is clear — the more prescribed area we burn, the less wildfire does.  In the graph below the prescribed burns declined for forty years and wildfires increased for thirty. After the Dwellingup Fire in 1961 the state ramped up the preventative burns, and reduced wildfires.

Same-Old, Same-Old

Aussie Bush Fires (Again)

Every year when there are bush fires in Australia, the Greens sound off like a predictable dull metronome.  Whilst we are sure you don't need to be reminded of their mindless mantras, we will provide a brief excerpt:

Greens leader Christine Milne has pointed to the fires in South Australia and Victoria to argue the Federal Government should do more to prepare for climate change. As firefighters battle blazes in the two states - and fears mount that dozens of homes have been lost - Senator Milne said the Government was failing to recognise the costs of global warming.  "Every year we are going to face these extreme weather events, which are going to cost lives and infrastructure, and enough is enough," she said.  "The Abbott Government has to stop climate denial and help to get the country prepared to adapt to the more extreme conditions."

It's a reasonable assertion that Australian bush fires are not caused by climate change, since they have been happening for time immemorial.  (Unless, of course, "climate change" is just another term for weather, in which case, "climate change" is inevitable and natural and trying to stop it is eerily Canutish.)

As one blogger has pointed out, surprisingly enough, bush fires occur when there are high temperatures, high winds, and fuel. "Amazing", as the Gruffalo said.

Letter From Australia (About Climate Clowns)

Australia's Ablaze with Climate Clowns

Tim Blair
The Daily Telegraph
October 28, 2013 12:00AM

 AUSTRALIA is a deeply puzzling land, especially to foreign media types. Even basic geography is sometimes a cause of bewilderment. For example, in 2011 Britain's Daily Mail tried to depict the extent of that year's Queensland floods with a helpful map of eastern Australia. This isn't a particularly difficult cartographic assignment, but the Mail managed to get it wrong, inventing the brand new state of Capricornia to Queensland's north.
 
The current NSW fires have prompted similar blunders. Last week the US television network NBC ran a graphic intended to show the range of the fires. They turned out to be far more extensive than anyone in Australia was aware.

NBC may have sourced their information from a Geoscience Australia monitoring site that lists hazard reduction burns and other non-threatening fires along with the massive conflagrations throughout NSW. The result was a graphic showing almost the entire northwest of Australia covered with flames. Darwin hasn't seen the likes of this since the Japanese bombing in World War II. Poor Capricornia copped it again as well. So did arid desert areas, which apparently now feature rare combustible dirt.

Elementary geographic and factual errors are one thing. It gets worse when ignorant outsiders lecture us about our own country.

Letter From Australia (About Deadly Greenist Policies)

Why Greenies Only Make Me See Red

Miranda Devine
The Daily Telegraph
October 23, 2013 12:00AM

BILL Leak, acclaimed cartoonist, lives in one of the loveliest places in Australia: Killcare, on the Central Coast. 

  But one of the consequences of living in the middle of the Australian bush is fire.  And in pretty seachange and treechange communities, you're likely to find yourself in a greenie council dominated by refugees from the city who haven't a clue about the real dangers of living among trees.

So it is that at the start of a dangerous bushfire season, Leak finds himself with a backyard full of trees and flammable material that he is forbidden to clear by Gosford Council on threat of fines as high as $1.1 million.
"Here I am, living on the edge of bushland that could burst into flame at any time, and I'm not allowed to clear the land in my own backyard of trees that, in the event of a fire, will bring the fire straight into my home," he says.

Council flora preservation policies warn that the removal of any native tree over 3m can attract hefty fines.
This "puts homes like mine in grave danger: the refusal of local councils to allow home owners to remove trees that can extend the bushland right up to our own back doors," Leak says.  "The only possible explanation for this is the council is hell-bent on securing Green votes. I'll accept, albeit unwillingly, the indulgence of Greens fantasies up to a point but if and when they cost me my house I think I'll have to say, 'A line has been crossed'."

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:

Letter From Australia (About Pants on Fire)

Lying Like a Flatfish

Australia is particularly prone to bush fires.  One of the best methods of combating them is to "de-fuel" the fires before they light through a systemic campaign of controlled burn-offs.  The biggest opponents to this sane practice have been the Greens and their fellow travellers on the Left.  They have consistently and systematically opposed controlled de-fuelling burnoffs (usually in the winter months) for a variety of spurious reasons. 

Now, however, to add insult to injury, and in demonstration of how much the Greens despise truth and the electorate, they are claiming that they have never opposed such de-fuelling burnoffs.  This, of course, is in the face of criticism the Greens are now confronting as a result of the recent devastating bush fires in New South Wales and Tasmania. 

Miranda Devine has long researched and written on these matters.  Once again she exposes the duplicitous mindset of the Greens in Australia.

Update on Australian Bush Fire Prevention

Irresponsible Environmentalism

We have posted previously on how the loss of life in Victorian bushfires had been indirectly caused by the failure to conduct periodic and regular controlled burnoffs. Opposition from greenie groups and townies-cum-lately bushdwellers had stymied such bushfire mitigation strategies.

Miranda Devine updates us on progress being made by the appointed Royal Commission, and the political backlash that is already underway.

Fire prevention a burning issue

MIRANDA DEVINE
February 20, 2010

A year after the Black Saturday inferno, which killed 173 people, Victoria's bushfire royal commission is at last reaching the pointy end of its inquiry - the politically charged topic of prescribed burning and the effect of massive, unmanaged fuel loads on the fire's ferocity.

So yesterday, instead of relaxing in retirement, 79-year-old Athol Hodgson, Victoria's former chief fire officer, strapped on his armour to give evidence on the most important, and bitterly contentious, issue before the commission.

He is fortunate to have a sharp mind and keen memory, and the long experience of fire that makes him possibly the most knowledgeable person in the state when it comes to Victoria's prescribed burning program and its uniquely flammable bush.

He also has seared into his mind the personal nature of the threat. As a nine-year-old on his parents' dairy farm in north-east Victoria during the 1939 Black Friday fires, which killed 79 people and incinerated 2 million hectares, Hodgson woke in fright on the back veranda, where he slept with his big dog, to see flames advancing 500 metres away though the paddocks surrounding the house.

He remembers his father and eight older sisters fighting all night to beat out the fire with wet hessian bags. And the next morning, when they came home to milk the cows, he was sent to watch the embers for any signs of fire.

But, he told the commission yesterday, the lessons of 1939 have been forgotten and there has been a ''failure to provide a safe environment'' for Victorians for three decades. . . .

''And unless the government acknowledges present targets of 130,000 hectares [a year] are not based on science, but based probably on some Treasury restraint, and realises something needs to be done, we'll get more tragedies.

''It's the most important of all the issues facing the royal commission. If they don't do something about the cause of these fires, which is fuel, large numbers of people are going to die.''

He says the build-up of fuel before last February's fires was ''the worst in the history of white settlement''.

He urged the royal commission to recommend a trebling of prescribed burning to 365,000 hectares per year.

His strategy of setting a mandated target means the government will be held accountable for any future bushfire calamity due to excessive fuel build-up.

Contrary to mischievous claims by green groups, no one says prescribed burning prevents bushfires. But the evidence is incontrovertible that reducing ground fuel by controlled burning in the cooler months does reduce the speed and intensity of inevitable wildfires, and actually makes it possible to control them.

As the chief fire control officer of the Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands, Hodgson experienced first-hand the political interference in the mid '80s which eventually hobbled the prescribed burning program that had kept Victoria's flammable bush safe since the Stretton Royal Commission into the 1939 fires.

He praises Joan Kirner as the best minister he worked for, but she was as susceptible as any politician of the time to greenie and NIMBY complaints. She ordered a prescribed burn in south-east Victoria be stopped because smoke was affecting the autumn festival in the town of Bright, which, ironically, later almost was burnt out.

Another time, a prescribed burn was stopped because of fears for the long-footed potoroo. ''After that, the program collapsed - every prescribed burn that caused someone's eyes to water and a few that got out of hand became media news.''

As he told the commission: ''The pressure … placed on individuals required to ignite and manage fires was enormous. Prescribed burning is not an exact science and … always involves some risk … In the political climate prevailing through the 1990s, any outcome that made news was unacceptable, regardless of whether or not the objective of burning was met. Staff were exposed to criticism … Many doubted the support they would receive if 'their burn' became newsworthy.''

People ''doing their best on the ground said, 'Bugger this, it's not worth it'. The program collapsed [to the point that] one year only 40,000 hectares was burned for the whole state.''

The Hodgson recommendations, if adopted, will embarrass the Brumby government, which has tried to offload blame onto global warming and now fears the commission is out of control.

In an indication of how high the stakes are in an election year, Brumby's lawyer launched an extraordinary attack on the commission this month, claiming it was ''irresponsible and sensationalist, adversarial, pointless and damaging'' to suggest anything other than that authorities were ''simply overwhelmed by an extraordinary, unprecedented fire''.

Unmoved, the royal commission is taking seriously submissions on the need for more prescribed burning. This week counsel assisting, Jack Rush, QC, pointed out that no prescribed burns had been conducted around Kinglake, where 42 people died, since 1981.

Ever on guard against logic, the Wilderness Society, Victorian National Parks Association and Australian Conservation Foundation, which have a lawyer representing their interests at the commission, have mounted their usual campaign of disinformation and devious obstruction.

Their submission claims prescribed burning does little or nothing to slow fires during extreme conditions.

They fool no one except fools. And the royal commission doesn't appear to be manned by fools.