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Climatologist: Blaming Aussie Bushfires On Climate Change Is ‘Alarmist Nonsense’

by Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.
January 09, 2020, 11:26 AM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 6 mins read
A A
5

australia satellite bushfiresSummary Points

1) Global wildfire activity has decreased in recent decades, making any localized increase (or decrease) in wildfire activity difficult to attribute to ‘global climate change’.

2) Like California, Australia is prone to bushfires every year during the dry season. Ample fuel and dry weather exist for devastating fires each year, even without excessive heat or drought, as illustrated by the record number of hectares burned (over 100 million) during 1974-75 when above-average precipitation and below-average temperatures existed.

3) Australian average temperatures in 2019 were well above what global warming theory can explain, illustrating the importance of natural year-to-year variability in weather patterns (e.g. drought and excessively high temperatures).

4) Australia precipitation was at a record low in 2019, but climate models predict no long-term trend in Australia precipitation, while the observed trend has been upward, not downward. This again highlights the importance of natural climate variability to fire weather conditions, as opposed to human-induced climate change.

5) While reductions in prescribed burning have probably contributed to the irregular increase in the number of years with large bush fires, a five-fold increase in population in the last 100 years has greatly increased potential ignition sources, both accidental and purposeful.

Historical Background

Australia has a long history of bush fires, with the Aborigines doing prescribed burns centuries (if not millennia) before European settlement.

A good summary of the history of bushfires and their management was written by the CSIRO Division of Forestry twenty-five years ago, entitled Bushfires – An Integral Part of Australia’s Environment.

The current claim by many that human-caused climate change has made Australian bushfires worse is difficult to support, for a number of reasons.

Bushfires (like wildfires elsewhere in the world) are a natural occurrence wherever there is strong seasonality in precipitation, with vegetation growing during the wet season and then becoming fuel for fire during the dry season.

All other factors being equal, wildfires (once ignited) will be made worse by higher temperatures, lower humidity, and stronger winds.

But with the exception of dry lightning, the natural sources of fire ignition are pretty limited. High temperatures and low humidity alone do not cause dead vegetation to spontaneously ignite.

As the human population increases, the potential ignition sources have increased rapidly. The population of Australia has increased five-fold in the last 100 years (from 5 million to 25 million).

Discarded cigarettes and matches, vehicle catalytic converters, sparks from electrical equipment and transmission lines, campfires, prescribed burns going out of control, and arson are some of the more obvious sources of human-caused ignition, and these can all be expected to increase with population.

Trends in Bushfire Activity

The following plot shows the major Australian bushfires over the same period of time (100 years) as the five-fold increase in the population of Australia.

The data come from Wikipedia’s Bushfires in Australia.

Fig. 1. Yearly fire season (June through May) hectares burned by major bushfires in Australia since the 1919-20 season (2019-20 season total is as of January 7, 2020).

As can be seen, by far the largest area burned occurred during 1974-75, at over 100 million hectares (close to 15% of the total area of Australia).

Curiously, though, according to Australia Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) data, the 1974-75 bushfires occurred during a year with above-average precipitation and below-average temperature.

This is opposite to the narrative that major bushfires are a feature of just excessively hot and dry years.

Every dry season in Australia experiences excessive heat and low humidity.

Australia’s High-Temperature Trends

The following plot (in red) shows the yearly average variations in daily high temperatures for Australia, compared to the 40-year average during 1920-1959.

Fig. 2. Yearly average high temperatures in Australia as estimated from thermometer data (red) and as simulated by the average of 41 climate models (blue). (Source).

Also shown in Fig. 2 (in blue) is the average of 41 CMIP5 climate models daily high temperature for Australia (from the KNMI Climate Explorer website). There are a few important points to be made from this plot.

First, if we correlate the yearly temperatures in Fig. 2 with the bushfire land area burned in Fig. 1, there is essentially no correlation (-0.11), primarily because of the huge 1974-75 event.

If that year is removed from the data, there is a weak positive correlation (+0.19, barely significant at the 2-sigma level).

But having statistics depend so much on single events (in this case, their removal from the dataset) is precisely one of the reasons why we should not use the current (2019-2020) wildfire events as an indicator of long-term climate change.

Secondly, while it is well known that the CMIP5 models are producing too much warming in the tropics compared to observations, in Australia just the opposite is happening: the BOM temperatures are showing more rapid warming than the average of the climate models produces.

This could be a spurious result of changes in Australian thermometer measurement technology and data processing as has been claimed by Jennifer Marohasy.

Or, maybe the discrepancy is from natural climate variability. Who knows?

Finally, note the huge amount of year-to-year temperature variability in Fig. 2.

Clearly, 2019 was exceptionally warm, but a good part of that warmth was likely due to natural variations in the tropics and subtropics, due to persistent El Nino conditions and associated changes in where precipitation regions versus clear air regions tend to get established in the tropics and subtropics.

Australia Precipitation Trends

To drive home the point that any given year should not be used as evidence of a long-term trend, Australia precipitation provides an excellent example.

The following plot is like the temperature plot above (Fig. 2), but for precipitation, as reported by the BOM (data here).

Fig. 3. As in Fig. 2, but for annual precipitation totals.

We can see that 2019 was definitely a dry year in Australia, right? Possibly a record-setter.

But the long-term trend has been upward (not downward), again illustrating the fact that any given year might not have anything to do with the long-term trend, let alone human-induced climate change.

And regarding the latter, the blue curve in Fig. 3 shows that the expectation of global warming theory as embodied by the average of 41 climate models is that there should have been no long-term trend in Australia precipitation, despite claims by the media, pseudo-experts, and Hollywood celebrities to the contrary.

Keep in mind that wildfire risk can actually increase with more precipitation during the growing season preceding fire season. More precipitation produces more fuel.

In fact, there is a positive correlation between the precipitation data in Fig. 3 and bushfire hectares burned (+0.30, significant at the 3-sigma level).

Now, I am not claiming that hot, dry conditions do not favor more bushfire activity. They indeed do (during fire season), everything else being the same.

But the current 2019-2020 increase in bushfires would be difficult to tie to global warming theory based upon the evidence in the above three plots.

Global Wildfire Activity

If human-caused climate change (or even natural climate change) was causing wildfire activity to increase, it should show up much better in global statistics than in any specific region, like Australia.

Of course, any specific region can have an upward (or downward) trend in wildfire activity, simply because of the natural, chaotic variations in weather and climate.

But, contrary to popular perception, a global survey of wildfire activity has found that recent decades have actually experienced less fire activity (Doerr & Santin, 2016), not more.

This means there are more areas experiencing a decrease in wildfire activity than there are areas experiencing more wildfires.

Why isn’t this decrease being attributed to human-caused climate change?

Concluding Comments

There are multiple reasons why people have the impression that wildfires are getting worse and human-caused climate change is to blame. First, the news tends to report only disasters… not a lack of disasters.

The desire for more clicks means that headlines are increasingly sensationalized. The media can always find at least one expert to support the desired narrative.

Second, the spread of news is now rapid and it penetrates deeply, being spread through social media.

Third, an increasing number of environmental advocacy groups seize upon any natural disaster and declare it to be caused by increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.

The hyperbolic and counter-factual claims of Extinction Rebellion is one of the best recent examples of this.

This is all against a backdrop of government-funded science that receives funding in direct proportion to the threat to life and property that the researcher can claim exists if science answers are not found, and policy is not changed.

So, it should come as no surprise that there is political influence on what research gets funding when the outcome of that research directly affects public policy.

My personal opinion, based upon the available evidence, is that any long-term increase in wildfire activity in any specific location like Australia (or California) is dominated by the increase in human-caused ignition events, whether they be accidental or purposeful.

A related reason is the increasing pressure by the public to reduce prescribed burns, clearing of dead vegetation, and cutting of fire breaks, which the public believes to have short term benefits to beauty and wildlife preservation, but results in long-term consequences that are just the opposite and much worse.

Recent news reports claim that dozens of people have been arrested in Australia on arson charges, a phenomenon which we must assume has also increased by at least five-fold (like population) in the last 100 years.

Accidental sources of ignition also increase in lockstep with the increasing population and all of the infrastructure that comes along with more people (vehicles, power lines, campfires, discarded matches, and cigarettes, etc.)

So, to automatically blame the Australian bushfires on human-caused climate change is mostly alarmist nonsense, with virtually no basis in fact.

Read more at Dr. Roy’s Blog

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Comments 5

  1. Allan says:
    6 years ago

    Every single claim this article makes is not supported by their own links.

    The Bushfire source links to the wikipedia article. The wikipedia article lists the bushfire season as consuming 17 million hectares, not 100 million.

    The source of the temperature model they link to shows temperatures that are ALL 0.3 degrees less than what they have put into their graph, which seems really freaking odd to me. The actual report in their source seems to supports their claim, so to mislabel every single point by increasing the temperature by 0.3 degrees seems senseless.

    But more to the point, the model in the source was a measure of anomalies, those that go AGAINST the average, not the average itself. So to claim here that it IS the average is not only wrong but generates false data. Their source ONLY shows the outliers, meaning the source they are using for their statistics is presenting an entirely different set of statistics.

    The same is true for their precipitation model.

    I hate to say it, but this website is useless. It certainly gave me things to look into, but they’ve blatantly altered and clearly mislabeled every single graph, and thus the basis of everything past the introduction is either flawed or a falsification.

    Reply
    • John says:
      6 years ago

      I completely disagree with Allan as his reliance on Wikipedia should not be taken as gospel. Wikipedia’s information is only as good as the persons knowledge who supplied it. It is not backed by scientific fact always and so I don’t accept its contents unless I can find several other reliable sources that confirm the content. It is a case of not accepting things at Face Value.

      Reply
  2. Private Citizen says:
    6 years ago

    Police in New South Wales released a statement disclosing that since Nov. 8, 2019, 183 people, including 40 juveniles, have been charged with 205 bushfire-related offenses. Of the 183, 24 people have been charged with deliberately setting fires. According to police, of the 183, another “53 people have had legal actions for allegedly failing to comply with a total fire ban,” and an additional “47 people have had legal actions for allegedly discarding a lighted cigarette or match on land.”

    Reply
  3. knightsOz says:
    6 years ago

    More than 200 people have been arrested and charged with arson … many of whom were responsible for lighting several fires.
    It is Summer and the hot, dry, drought conditions are not without precedent. For example, in 1896, Australia’s east coast (especially New South Wales) experienced a savage heat wave with temperatures in excess of 48 degrees Celsius for 3 consecutive days and above 38 degrees Celsius daily, for more than 3 weeks. It rarely fell below 30 degrees Celsius at night time. The official death toll attributed to the heat wave was 437.

    I understand that for record purposes, the Bureau of Meteorology does not consider historical temperature data prior to 1910.

    Reply
  4. Spurwing Plover says:
    6 years ago

    To the climate Change wanks the ends justifi the means and they want us to all live i a so called Simple Life while they still live their life of luxery and ease

    Reply

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