I've posted plenty
Time we started fighting fire with fire
...and you've posted plenty back. That's why it's called 'politics'.
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IMPORTANT // Please look after your loved ones, yourself and be kind to others. If you are feeling that the world is too hard to handle there is always help - I implore you not to hesitate in contacting one of these wonderful organisations Lifeline and Beyond Blue ... and I'm sure reaching out to our PRE community we will find a way to help. T.
Global Warming
- Thread starter Disco08
- Start date
I've posted plenty
Time we started fighting fire with fire
...and you've posted plenty back. That's why it's called 'politics'.
Totally agree, both tweedledum and tweedledee have been woeful on real action on climate change. Labor did ratify Kyoto (Libs wouldn't) and haven't done things like sabotaging COP25 in Madrid recently which this government did. But the difference is marginal and neither have had the spine to actually address the issue properly.
DS
Maybe he should hold himself to the same standards as Christine Nixon was held to by, well, by Scott from Marketing himself. Hypocrite.
DS
I post links that support my specific argument for most posts.
So I need a specific source on that specific issue. That link is paywalled.
And then there was this just before he snuck off to Hawaii in a shroud of secrecy.
"Morrison’s decision to use a press conference to introduce a religious discrimination bill - instead of discussing the fires - faced strong backlash online"
www.sbs.com.au
"Morrison’s decision to use a press conference to introduce a religious discrimination bill - instead of discussing the fires - faced strong backlash online"
Prime Minister Scott Morrison rejects calls for more assistance to firefighters
Sydney has been covered in a thick smoke as fires continue to burn in the surrounding areas.
Here's the article (by Andrew Rule).
Well after midnight last Monday, my aunt limped to an already overloaded horse float with some last-minute extra possessions and crammed them in. She had already moved most of her livestock. Now she turned a few unbroken ponies loose in the bare paddocks, leaving the gates open so they could escape the approaching fires.
She stepped into her ute about 2am, exhausted and shaky, and drove out the track to the bitumen to stay with friends on the coast, safer there than in the rambling farmhouse my grandparents built in the early 1950s. It was the first time in 70 years the property had been evacuated and the longest 24 hours of her life.
That old white house on the hill overlooking the Nowa Nowa arm of Lake Tyers holds my earliest memory. I recall my father swinging me on to his shoulders in the farmyard when I was two, and my mother warming up in front of the Rayburn wood stove one morning before they milked the cows.
We soon moved down the hill to a bush block next door, into a house that was finished in time for my third birthday, years before electricity or telephone reached us.
By the time these words roll off the press, both houses might be nothing but ashes and memories. The same goes for a cabin in the bush my father built with axe and saw in the summer of 1980, 40 years ago this month.
It is a small miracle all three buildings didn’t burn this last week, with East Gippsland alight from Bairnsdale to the border. Fire is fickle. The blazes that wasted Wairewa to the north and Sarsfield to the west did not cross the Princes Highway near Nowa Nowa, closest township to the remote spot where three generations of our family lived side-by-side from the early 1950s to the late 1970s.
If there is another weekend from hell, the lull of the last few days could prove to be nothing but a stay of execution. The thousands of hectares of bush around the district is a bomb with fuse smouldering, ready to be fanned by a northerly or westerly wind.
Before my father died in 1998 he predicted that what he called his “hut” would burn in our time. Not because he didn’t clean up the scrub and debris around it, which he did, but because government agencies had abandoned the old way of burning off the fuel load on the forest floor in cooler months.
Burning off was a thrilling seasonal chore for us kids. We would scoot along the gullies, lighting silver tussocks and dead ferns and watching the flames race uphill, a lesson about not being caught above a fire. Within days, we would see the new green shoots appear, fireproof animal feed for another season.
Like other bushmen who spent more time under trees than under a roof, Dad knew nothing could resist the heat generated by built-up bark, fallen branches and undergrowth when the inevitable hot fire started on a windy day. A killer blaze was not a case of “if” but “when” as proven this week after the driest period on record in much of East Gippsland.
Tragically, such predictions came true this summer. None of it surprised John Mulligan, a longtime Cann River farmer descended from pioneers of the Gypsy Point settlement threatened by the Mallacoota fire.
For Mulligan, now retired and living away from the district he still calls home, being “right” is no pleasure. It is distressing. The guesthouse his grandmother built and the Cann Valley farm he worked for years are in the path of the fires that trapped thousands of terrified people at Mallacoota all week. He says it is the biggest disaster to strike East Gippsland in living memory.
For years, Mulligan has warned that a killer fire was coming. He has called me and other reporters at the beginning of every summer since before Black Saturday, frustrated by the complacency, carelessness, apathy or apparent arrogance of government departments that manage forests and public lands.
Mulligan was born in 1931. As a boy, he rode his stock horse through the bush with locals whose families had run cattle on leases in the border districts since the late 19th century. They lit “cool fires” in autumn that crept along the forest floor and burned the fuel load of bark and branches dropped by gum trees.
“I remember going out at night with the men,” he said this week. “They would rake a break and burn back from it. My job was to run along with a bit of burning candlebark, lighting up leaves and rubbish.
“We lived with fire every summer but it wasn’t something to worry about because we stopped the fuel load building up. As we rode around if we saw a ‘dirty patch’ of bush we’d drop a match in it. Everyone east of Orbost did the same thing.”
In hill country inland, lightning strikes were left to burn themselves out. Lower down, burning off meant the fuel was reduced and the bush kept relatively safe from summer wildfire.
The practice survived in that isolated eastern tip of the state much longer than it did closer to Melbourne, where mostly English-born forestry “experts” with little understanding of eucalypts and fire opposed the custom of burning off the way that settlers had learned from “the natives”.
Instead, they wanted to “fight” fires to “save” the bush, a “heroic” approach about as sensible as World War I generals sending foot soldiers out of trenches to be mown down by machine guns.
In 2018, Mulligan and former CSIRO scientist David Packham joined film producer turned cattle breeder Geoff Burrowes and other interested people to form the Howitt Society at a meeting in Traralgon. Their aim was to strengthen calls for a pragmatic response to what Packham and Mulligan and some former foresters saw as an inevitable catastrophe.
It is ironic that the former timber town of Nowa Nowa, a few kilometres from our old farm, is threatened by the current fires. Because it was at Nowa Nowa that CSIRO fire scientists ran the $12 million Project Aquarius in 1984, showing under test conditions that only the mildest of fires could be “beaten” by conventional fire fighting.
David Packham, who worked on the project, says experiments exposed “the great myth that if you put in firefighters, it makes a difference. The fact is, the fire wins”.
Packham, who has studied fires since 1958, says the Nowa Nowa experiments showed that the maximum fire intensity that can be extinguished by firefighters is 4 megawatts per metre of the fire’s edge. But the current fires are up to 30 megawatts intensity and the worst Black Saturday fires were about 70 megawatts, which is like a nuclear bomb blast.
Such fires are simply too big to fight, Packham says.
“The science of this is very safe, as good as Isaac Newton and gravity.”
The tests showed that extra fuel massively multiplied fire intensity. Double the fuel load and intensity is multiplied fourfold. The good news is that the reverse is also true: halve the fuel load and you cut the risk to a quarter of what it was.
If fuel reduction is such a good idea, why isn’t it happening? The answer to that is buried in the messy politics of fire, complicated by the influence of urban Green attitudes and the shortsighted but inevitable “not-in-my-backyard” complaints from thousands of “treechangers” from Daylesford to Mallacoota who expect their retreats to be as civilised as the suburbs.
No one wants killer bushfires, but many of us also don’t want the inconvenience of autumn smoke haze, the risk of asthma and of property, livestock and wildlife being damaged. Bureaucrats and their political masters are nervous of lawsuits, losing votes and prevailing fashion.
The result is that while our leaders fiddle and posture and wring their hands at the loss of life and property, the countryside is burning. Massive resources are eaten up coping with uncontrollable wildfire rather than with preventing it.
There is another way. While the eastern states burn, Western Australia does not, at least not to anywhere near the same degree. There are reasons for that.
After a terrible fire at Dwellingup south of Perth in 1961, leaving 800 people homeless and burning huge tracts of jarrah forest, the then state government finally ditched the European forestry precepts set down by imported English administrators.
The government appointed an experienced local forester, Allan Harris, who had safeguarded Perth against potential Japanese incendiary bomb attacks in World War II by setting up a system of burning off bushland around the city.
Despite fierce opposition, Harris appointed his own experts to research “cool burning” as practised by the Noongar people before white settlement.
This led to the “Sneeuwjagt Curve”, named after forest scientist Rick Sneeuwjagt, showing that if 10 per cent of forest is burned off each year in rotation, it stops killer wildfires.
Harris not only proved burning-off as a conservation technique. He resisted political pressure to allow more forest to be cleared for agriculture. The result is one of the great forest reserves of the world … and the fact there has not been a fire in Western Australia as serious as the Dwellingup blaze in close to 60 years.
The eastern states, meanwhile, have had Ash Wednesday, Black Saturday and now this catastrophe. Several dead, many more missing and feared dead. And it’s still early January. The worst fire weather is still ahead.
As the Herald Sun stated in an editorial this week, our leaders need the wisdom to grasp the problem and the nerve to act on it. Maybe it’s time we went back to fighting fire with fire.
I think we have enough issues with inland water without damming it all for hydro.
Now if you were thinking tidal, that's a totally different scenario IMO and could generate some significant energy. If theres one thing we have a lot of its coastline, and that coastline has significantly strong tidal currents that would suggest that we should at least be doing studies into the possibilities of tidal power generation within Australia.
How long's this been gathering dust in the 'too hard basket' ? F....and hell. C'mon Sco Mo, don't think, don't hope...DOOOOOOOOO!!!
Woowzers jeebus, you are one absolute pretentious *smile*. One or 2 posts born from anger is bad enough for a mature elite human but your ability to go above and beyond is extraordinary. Keep up the good work, super human.
Thanks for posting. Apart from mentioning greens generically and "hand wringing lefties" it contains no information about who made decisions and what they were.
Here's a fact about Green policies..
Here's the perspective of a man who actually does burns and clears fuel from properties. Really interesting thread, hope you read it.
Andrew Rule must know something I don't. Must have been those decades while the Greens were in government when they managed to restrict burning off.
You just keep ignoring what the actual people (that is, not some shortsighted urban journalist) say about this:
Ken Thompson, former Deputy Commissioner of NSW Fire and Rescue recently wrote:
But what would he know? Obviously we should trust some gutter journalist from a newspaper that tried its best to ignore the fires (Thursday's HUN had the fires on page 4) over someone who fought fires for a living.
DS
You just keep ignoring what the actual people (that is, not some shortsighted urban journalist) say about this:
Ken Thompson, former Deputy Commissioner of NSW Fire and Rescue recently wrote:
But what would he know? Obviously we should trust some gutter journalist from a newspaper that tried its best to ignore the fires (Thursday's HUN had the fires on page 4) over someone who fought fires for a living.
DS
No, it hints about the risk-averseness of forestry policy and the red tape put in the way of pre-emptive burns. Which is partly a result of green pressure.
Ironically in an article linked to yesterday, some locals at Nowa Nowa twice blocked planned burns in the spring, resulting in 9 hectares out of a planned 370 being cleared. Nowa Nowa is under threat tonight.
It's like buying insurance, you give up a little to save a lot.
So the greens have never been in power anywhere but they are responsible for the sins of forestry policy? Ok.
No I'm not ignoring it. I've acknowledged that it's frequently thrown up as a reason. Happy to let the review get to the truth.
I'm just showing that there are other perspectives than are being given airtime in the media. You lot are determined to pin the entire thing on Morrison. The groupthink is frightening. But that's what universities breed nowadays.
Never said that, in fact I have pointed to inadequate responses to climate change from both the major parties, but that is clearly too nuanced and complex for your nice simple right wing world view.
DS
