Antinuclear

At the time of writing, nine people have been killed. Balmoral, in the New South Wales southern highlands, is the latest community affected in a state where up to 1,000 homes have been destroyed. A third of the vineyard area and dozens of homes were razed in the Adelaide Hills. It is too early for a thorough examination of the impact on wildlife, including the many threatened species in the fires’ path.

Does this qualify as unprecedented? Plenty of experts say yes, but not all politicians and newspaper columnists are convinced. Last week the acting prime minister, Michael McCormack, assured the nation that “we’ve had these smoke hazes before. We’ve had bushfires before.” After returning from Hawaii, Scott Morrison, acknowledged the fires were severe, but also adopted a familiar line: Australia has always had bushfires.

That’s true. But a key question is whether it has always had bushfires like this.

Who says the bushfires are unprecedented?

The NSW Rural Fire Service says the scale of what has burned in that state is unprecedented at this point of the fire season. By Monday, 3.41 million hectares had burned. “To put it in perspective, in the past few years we have had a total area burned for the whole season of about 280,000 hectares,” RFS spokeswoman Angela Burford said.

A slightly larger area burned across the 1974 calendar year, but those fires were of an entirely different nature: fuelled by above-average rainfall, it burned through mostly remote outback grasslands in the state’s far west.

By comparison, this year’s fires are further east, where people live, and have been fuelled by a vast bank of dry fuel following the country’s record-breaking drought. Soil moisture is at historic lows in some areas, and rainfall in the first eight months of the year was the lowest on record in the northern tablelands and Queensland’s southern downs.

What do scientists say?

David Bowman, director of The Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania, says the most striking thing about this fire season is the continent-scale nature of the threat. The damage in each state is explained here.

“The geographic range, and the fact it is occurring all at once, is what makes it unprecedented,” Bowman says. “There has never been a situation where there has been a fire from southern Queensland, right through NSW, into Gippsland, in the Adelaide Hills, near Perth and on the east coast of Tasmania.”

He says one of the less explored issues, though it has begun to receive some attention in recent days, is the economic impact of having prolonged fires that affect so many Australians.

“You can’t properly run an economy when you get a third to a half of the population affected by smoke, and the media completely focused on fires,” he says. “I’m not quite certain why anybody would want to be claiming fires have been like this before. It’s concerning as it is a barrier to adaptation. To deal with these sort of fires the first step is to acknowledge the scale of the problem.”  …….

What role does climate change play?

Scientists cite the near absolute lack of moisture in the landscape as a key reason the fires have been so severe.

Multiple studies, here and overseas, have found the climate crisis is lengthening the fire season.

In the past, the season started in spring in NSW before moving south to Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the new year. Just as Australia’s fire season is more overlapping with that in California, making resource-sharing more difficult, it is also running simultaneously across the country……. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/25/factcheck-why-australias-monster-2019-bushfires-are-unprecedented