Climate change has role in Australia fires

Expert says rise in temperature and reduced rainfall across country led to severe weather

Australia has just lived through its warmest and driest year on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology's Annual Climate Statement.

The average mean temperature in 2019 was 1.52 C above average, said the bureau's head of climate monitoring, Karl Braganza, at a media briefing on Jan 8.

The national average rainfall for the year was 277 millimeters, the lowest on record.

Braganza said that while the debate on climate change continues, there is little doubt climate change has "played a big part" in the disastrous fire season, adding, "the science is quite clear on that".

"We are now seeing clear, well-defined trends in climate change over the past several decades in Australia," he said.

"We are seeing trends in maximum temperature rises, reduced rainfall throughout the country, especially in southwest Western Australia and in the southeast of the country (New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania)."

Braganza said the mix has contributed to the severe fire weather now being experienced across Australia.

Since the fires began in September in southern Queensland, some six million hectares of land has been burned around the country. In the state of New South Wales alone, the loss has been four million hectares.

The death toll from the current bushfire season was 26 people by Jan 8, compared with 173 in Victoria state's Black Saturday fires of 2009. Analysts attributed the reduced mortality to the courage of communities and firefighters, with the assistance of other states and nations, the military, new technologies, and in some cases the policies put in place as a result of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission.

Paul Read, a senior research fellow at the Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University and a co-director of the National Centre for Research in Bushfire and Arson, said: "Despite resistance from people who become enraged at the very mention of climate or Greta Thunberg (the young Swedish climate activist), these fires are unprecedented in Australian history and the reasons have all the hallmarks of climate change.

"It wrapped the whole country in a sheet of flame," he said.

Even with another three months to go before the end of the bushfire season, the scale of the area burned represents a full 11 percent of Australia's habitable margins.

"Apart from sheer size, the current fires were already unprecedented because of timing. Every major fire since European settlement has peaked in the summer months, early February, whereas these fires started in spring," Read said.

A month ago, Australia was confronted for the first time with the concept of the 'megafire'－a term coined in 2005 to describe unsettling changes in wildfire behavior in the United States.

It was inspired by a fire that burned for 25 days and consumed 56,000 hectares. But Australia's current fires dwarf that. They have burned for 130 days and destroyed an area much larger.

"This is uncharted territory. They began earlier than ever before, with a size and ferocity historically constrained to the first week of February. They promise to outburn the largest fires in Australian history," Read said.

He disagreed with claims by Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack. McCormack asserted the scale of these fires was due to "dry lightning strikes, self-combusting manure" or child firelighters "running around like Little Lucifers".

While these are all ignition sources, Read said "there are no good reasons for arson to increase much above last year－and dry lightning itself is a consequence, not an initial cause, of a large megafire".

Ignition cannot predict fire size, he said. "What can predict size is climate as well as fuel."

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made a 12-fold increase in funding for fuel reduction burns. But Read said, "Efforts on all fronts are needed.

"What he doesn't want to do is have to admit anything that threatens one of our biggest exports－coal. This would admit his own government's culpability."