From The Australian this morning:
“Air quality has plunged, Sydney is choking on smoke, buildings have been evacuated and ‘false’ smoke alarms have sounded across the city. The bushfire crisis gripping NSW is building with a “lethal” combination of high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds creating horrific conditions for firefighters battling 87 blazes burning from the south coast to the Queensland border.”
There are a lot of fires buring on and around the New South Wales coast at the moment. Regular readers will know that I wrote a series of articles a few weeks ago where I explained that the principle reason that the fires are so bad is due to the forest mismanagement around the entire country over the last 25 years. If you let that much fuel load build up then good luck when it goes up in flames because nothing short of a torrential downpour will stop it, and maybe not even then. The defining feature of Class A fires is their heat retention abilities. Slow to get going and very slow to stop.
But the envelopment of Sydney in thick smoke has caused the hardcore climate change pro-green media to rethink their strategy of blaming the fires on the imaginary and capricious weather gods. In other words, it’s one thing to hold pie in the sky attitudes as you flirt around the coffee machine, but it’s another thing entirely when soot starts to build up in your latte.
Jo Nova reports on the surprising turnaround at the mainstream media outlets in Sydney.
Buried in a save-the-koala story on ABC News tonight is an ABC journalist saying for the first time that it is “current fire management practices” that are the problem. Rani Hayman didn’t say fuel load, but she might as well have. The reference to “indigenous fire practices” makes it obvious that the ABC means more hazard reduction burns (not that they can say so). She also didn’t say “climate change” — write it in your diary. On November 14th, the same ABC journalist was only interviewing the posterboys who blamed “climate change” for the fires.
UPDATE: Holy smoke — the Sydney Morning Herald also appear to have flipped hours earlier in the morning and in a much stronger and more direct way. Regular SMH reader Dave B sends in the link and says “wow… here’s a huge surprise”. Finally a spot of real journalism. Was this story the last nail in the ABC fuel-load denial?
A quote from the SMH report:
Tim Barlass, SMH: A forestry expert has condemned bushfire prevention strategies in an open letter to the Prime Minister and premiers, saying it is entirely within their power to put an end to the situation by prescribed burning. Vic Jurskis, a fellow of the Institute of Foresters of Australia, the body representing more than 1200 forestry professionals, says Australians are being told that “fires are uncontrollable in extreme weather and there’s nothing we can possibly do”. He said the “simple solution” of preventative or prescribed burns to reduce fuel levels of leaves, dead twigs and other vegetation emerged from a House of Representatives inquiry after the 2003 Canberra fires, which destroyed 488 houses.
Mr Jurskis said: “The fires that burnt Canberra in 2003 jumped over miles and miles of bare paddocks. The problem is if you have three-dimensional, continuous fuel and extreme conditions, you can generate ember showers that travel tens of kilometres ahead of the front.
“A fire break is going to do nothing at all. You have to manage the whole landscape.”
“It is bogged down by green [environmental] and red tape which makes getting approval for a prescribed burn a very slow and complex process.
“They have introduced a system that makes it virtually impossible to manage the bush in a sustainable way. I am just one of thousands of volunteers out there who are frustrated.”
This goes somewhat against the enlightened Green attitude to fighting fires and climate change which can be summed up as, “plant lots of trees and hope they don’t burn.” Now the defining feature of leftists is that they never own up to their past mistakes and they never apologise. Those traits I can deal with; it’s the refusal to learn from their past mistakes that makes them such a continual problem.
The only hope that attitudes will change and back burning will become de rigueur again is encapsulated in the quoted words, “indigenous fire practices”. It is not acceptable for white men to have the answers to our problems, but if Dreamtime stone age log blowers say the same things then suddenly that is ancient wisdom that cannot be ignored.
On the other hand I find it rather difficult to get my hopes up. Remember, 488 houses burnt down in the national capitol Canberra in 2003 and 15 years later we have learnt nothing from that disaster. Is a bit of smoke in Sydney really going to wake up our elected and unelected officials or will they continue their defining habit of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity?
Considering the collective stupidity that the climate change scam has revealed in the general population, I very much doubt that we will see any changes. Rather, I expect our bureaucrat betters to double down on their save the world all-in. Consider the top rated comment on The Australian article I linked to at the start of this post, and keep in mind that this is from a nominally conservative publication.
“Every single politician who has opposed climate action in this country should hang their head in shame.”
We’re doomed.
This article was originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill on 10/12/2019, where Adam Piggott publishes regularly and brilliantly. You can purchase Adam’s books here.