Wild Fires Australia

[Fuzz]

3 hours ago, nKostyan said:

Oh, hell, I read the press and see that this has taken on a terrifying scale. An online community is collecting signatures to ask the government to send fire-fighting amphibious aircraft to Australia, but this is effective when there are large rivers and lakes nearby.
I hope that the fires can be stopped soon. The most important thing is to save human lives, the rest can be restored. Take care of yourself friends

Right now, with the cooler weather and rain coming in, is the best time to get those aircraft in the air and start dumping water. During the worst periods of the bushfires, the aircraft were only having an effect on the fringes of the fire fronts. It was just too hot and dangerous to get to the worst regions. The weather is quite literally a godsend for everyone fighting fires.

Oddly enough, several of the aircraft coming from overseas have been delayed due to weather conditions.

[Chibearsv]

3 hours ago, Ken Gargett said:

the rain is certainly welcome and helping but the fires are far from out. there are still a great many fires that are still out of control. the rain has not been across all areas. 

but those areas with rain now have landslide and potential flooding issues. 

I'm familiar with that cycle since my daughter lives near Malibu and deals with threat of fire and the post fire mudslides as well. Once it all ends, the good news is how fast Mother Nature recovers. So sad how much devastation and suffering there must be. I hope your friends and family are out of harms way.  It's hard to comprehend how widespread those fires are. 

[Ken Gargett]

5 hours ago, looseleaf said:

From https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/01/how-climate-change-influenced-australias-unprecedented-fires/ 

How Climate Change Exacerbated Australian and Californian Fires

Despite widespread conspiracy theories about the bushfires, emerging science continues to find links between global warming and worsening wildfires, with the issue a focus of continuing investigation. As climate scientist Kevin Trenberth explained in a recent interview with videographer Peter Sinclair, global warming directly intensifies wildfires by drying out soil and vegetation, creating more fuel to burn farther and faster. That’s particularly a problem in drought-prone regions like Australia and California.

The Millennium drought in southeastern Australia from 1997 to 2009 was the driest 13-year period on record, according to a report by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The drought was broken by Australia’s two wettest periods on record in 2010 and 2011, but then came yet another intense drought from 2017 to the present. In fact, 2018 and 2019 were Australia’s hottest and driest years on record. On December 18, the continent had its hottest day on record, with an average high temperature of 107.4 degrees F. California experienced a similar “weather whiplash,” swinging from record-breaking drought in 2012–2016 to a very wet rainy season in 2017–2018. That combination generated growth of new plants that were subsequently dried out by record heat, creating fuel for the state’s record 2018 wildfire season.

California’s drought was made worse by a persistent high-pressure system off the coast known as the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.” That high-pressure ridge diverted storm systems to California’s north, leading to years of low precipitation. Researchers have suggested that climate change may cause such blocking systems to form more frequently. A 2018 study led by UCLA’s Daniel Swain found that as temperatures continue to rise, California will see a shift to less precipitation in the spring and fall and more in the winter, lengthening the wildfire season.

The situation in Australia is again strikingly similar to that in California. Researchers have shown that global warming is expanding an atmospheric circulation pattern known as the Hadley cell. This circulation is caused by hot air at the equator rising and spreading toward the poles, where it begins to cool and descend, forming high pressure ridges. In Australia, this process creates what’s known as the subtropical ridge, which as CSIRO notes, has become more intense as a result of global warming expanding the Hadley cell circulation. A 2014 study, CSIRO’s David Post and colleagues reported that stronger high-pressure ridges have been decreasing rainfall in southeastern Australia in the autumn and winter. The significance? The lack of rainfall creates more dry fuel for fires and lengthens the bushfire season.

Based on this scientific research, the latest IPCC report found in 2014 that “fire weather is projected to increase in most of southern Australia,” with days experiencing very high and extreme fire danger increasing 5-100% by 2050. And a 2015 CSIRO report concluded, “Extreme fire weather days have increased at 24 out of 38 Australian sites from 1973-2010, due to warmer and drier conditions … [forest fire danger index] increase across southeast Australia is characterised by an extension of the fire season further into spring and autumn … partly driven by temperature increases that are attributable to climate change.”

an old mate of mine, an inflexible denier, told me last week that what australia needed to do was to settle back for several years and monitor things to see what was really causing this.

because doing nothing has been so successful so far.

also, if we give up reliance on coal, half of australians will die from hypothermia. i am not making that up. 

[Pigpen]

Just can’t imagine how tough a time it has been out there. So very very sad


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