Bigger, Hotter ‘Firestorms To Become The New Normal’ In Australia

NEWS.com.au - Debra Killalea

The Glen Cromie Caravan Park in Drouin pictured during the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires.

MEGAFIRES will become the new normal with the intensity and frequency of deadly disasters increasing as Australia becomes hotter and drier.

And fire crews will struggle to contain the firestorms which will not only claim more lives but destroy ecosystems and property while wreaking havoc and destruction in the process.
The dire prediction, forecast in journal Climatic Change, found the time between such megafires, also called firestorms, is shrinking while the conditions under which they develop are worsening.
In ‘Natural hazards in Australia: Extreme bushfire’, published last month, researchers also warn that by 2070 megafires in Australia are 30 per cent more likely to occur.
Australian Firefighters Climate Alliance spokesman Jim Casey said the reality was this phenomenon was becoming the “new normal” and it was the frightening future the country faced.
Mr Casey said the megafires not only destroyed everything in their path but became so fierce crews could do nothing to stop them.

A CFA fire truck leaves a blaze burning near Pakenham in Bunyip State Forest, east of Melbourne, during Victoria’s Black Saturday Bushfires in February 2009. Picture: Alex Coppel Source: Supplied

“Essentially these fires are just so big and so fuel loaded they act more like a storm than a fire,” he told news.com.au.
“With shorter winters and less time to do hazard reduction burning, it creates perfect conditions for fires like this.”
While acknowledging bushfires are and will always be part of the Australian way of life, Mr Casey said megafires were a nightmare for authorities.
“Their real danger is their size, they are unfightable,” he said.
“When fire crews are faced with fire fronts stretching across 50km and it’s 10m high, the only option is to leave.”
Mr Casey, who was a candidate for The Greens at the recent federal election, said it was obvious climate change was creating hotter conditions and you only had to look at rising insurance costs over the past 20 years to see fires were occurring more regularly.
In 1987-1996 there was $88 million in insurance claims recorded as a result of megafires.
According to Insurance Council of Australia figures, this jumped to $491 million between 1997 and 2006, and more than doubled to $1.179 billion between 2007-2016.

Megafires will not only become more frequent but more intense, researchers predict. Source: Supplied

Mr  Casey said the research and cost findings from the Insurance Council of Australia came as no surprise to firefighters on the frontline.
“They know first-hand that they are unlike anything they have faced before — fires like Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, or the Yarloop fire in Western Australia that destroy everything in their path,” he said.
“These are the sort of fires that can’t be fought in the way you would a traditional bushfire — they are too large, and too intense. You can only get people out of the way.”
Megafires have been fought in Victoria, Western Australia, New South Wales and the ACT during the past decade.
The Black Saturday bushfires saw more 400 blazes recorded across the state affecting 78 communities and claiming 173 lives and 2029 houses lost.
Images of the Black Saturday disaster remain etched in many people’s memories with the fires resembling that of a nuclear explosion.
Just last year, four people lost their lives in bushfires to the north of Esperance in Western Australia.
Mr Casey warned that unless there was real leadership shown on climate change, such disasters would continue to occur.

Grace Wilson pictured holding a garden sunflower she salvaged from ruins of her parents’ house at Mudgegonga. John and Sue died when their house was destroyed in the Black Saturday fires. Picture: Renee Nowytarger Source: News Limited

“We can take all the steps to try and get ready that we can,” he said.
“But at the end of the day it’s like sticking a Band-Aid over a wound that is rapidly becoming gangrenous.”
The Australian Firefighters Climate Alliance warn everywhere west of the Great Dividing Range face higher risks of such firestorms than ever before.
The group is also concerned about the increased risk their members will face in the line of duty and said it was clear climate change could no longer be denied.
“It’s no longer a question of belief,” Mr Casey said.
“It’s just a question of whether you can read and a question of scientific research.”
Mr Casey also said while houses could be replaced, ecosystems and lives couldn’t and the time for taking action was now.
“The cost of not addressing the root cause of worsening bushfires is high, and growing ever higher,” he said.
“This is a real threat because it has the potential to be so catastrophic.”

Links

• Natural hazards in Australia: extreme bushfire
• Extreme bushfires and why they're becoming more frequent in Australia
• Extreme bushfires to become the “new normal”: climate change report
• The worst bushfires in Australia's history

'Nowhere On Earth Safe' From Climate Change As Survival Challenge Grows

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

As if humans weren't making it hard enough for the world's creatures great and small.
Evidence continues to mount that global warming is having an impact on ecosystems across the planet in a myriad of ways, altering both individual species and ecological communities.

Thirty years of Arctic ice decay
Incredible animated video released by NASA shows the drastic change of the Arctic ice shelves over thirty years.

"There's really nowhere on earth where the natural systems are not being affected by climate change," Lesley Hughes, a professor of biology at Macquarie University, said.
"Climate change is simply an additional stress on already stressed ecosystems," Professor Hughes said, listing habitat loss, pollution and over-exploitation among the existing challenges.
A recent paper in Science surveyed research on 94 core ecological processes and found 82 per cent were already revealing climate change impacts as temperatures warmed.
James Watson, a conservation biologist at the University of Queensland and one of the paper's authors, said people often fixated on polar bears, penguins or another emblematic species.
"They think, 'that's miles away from me; it's a pity but it doesn't affect me'," Professor Watson said. "It's everything that's affected."
Here are six key areas of change:

Physiology
Warming temperatures alter the sex ratio of offspring of certain marine and terrestrial species.

Polar bears get much of the media attention about how climate change is affecting species - but the struggles extend far wider, scientists say. Photo: SeppFriedhuber

As  Fairfax Media reported, sea turtle eggs incubate at a uniform 29 degrees, with the male-female ratio changing according to temperature. If temperatures reach 30.5 degrees all offspring will be females. (Should the species survive long enough without males, 33 degrees is enough to ensure no embryos make it.)

The oceans are home to some other big changes, such as increasing acidity as waters absorb more carbon dioxide.
Corals are among the species in the firing line, as are creatures with shells, such as tiny pteropods, the Science paper said.
"Severe levels of shell dissolution" were reported for some Antarctic pteropods, according to a paper in Nature Geoscience.
"As deep-water up-welling and CO2 absorption by surface waters is likely to increase as a result of human activities, we conclude that upper ocean regions where aragonite-shelled organisms are affected by dissolution are likely to expand," the paper said.
These kinds of changes "have the capacity to undermine and change dramatically the structure of marine food webs, which ultimately underpin much of the protein sources for humans", Professor Hughes said.

Genetics
Species with short generation spans, such as phytoplankton, are changing fast, but not fast enough.
In the Gulf of Cariaco, off Venezuela, phytoplankton have managed to adjust their ecological thermal niche by 0.45 degrees over a 15-year period. The response, though, lagged the 0.73-degree warming of waters over that time.
For others, such as the southern flying squirrels on North America, hybridisation with "cousin species" the northern flying squirrel is one response. (See image below of northern flying squirrel, via www.nature.ca )

Since 1995, a series of unusually warm winters has marked the start of a northward surge of 240 km in the range of the southern squirrel, the Daily Climate reported, based on work published in Global Change Biology.
Similar hybridisation is evident elsewhere, generating other concerns.
"The interbreeding has several consequences, none well understood: It could increase genetic diversity, helping species weather rapid ecosystem changes," the Daily Climate said. "It also could dilute the genetics of at-risk animals such as polar bears, perhaps even diluting them beyond recognition. And the changes threaten to wreak havoc with conservation efforts."

Morphology
Individuals of some species are shrinking in size, as scientists have expected, as creatures with larger surface-to-volume ratios are favoured as temperatures rise.
The body size of six woodland salamander species in the US Appalachian Mountains has shrunk an average of 8 per cent over the past 50 years, Science said.

Species of butterflies, dragonflies and birds are also changing colour, other studies showed, with some becoming darker or lighter, depending on local advantages. The skull shape of alpine chipmunk has "revealed significant changes" in California over the past century as its ranges narrow and its diet changes.

Phenology
The timing of many life processes of species – such as the budding of plants, the hatching of birds and migration timings – is closely tied to climate variation. Climate shifts are throwing such processes out of whack.
"Across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems, spring phenologies have advanced by 2.3 to 5.1 days per decade, the Science paper said. "A combination of climate warming and higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations has extended the growing period of many plant populations."
Examples include reduced fledging success of tawny owls in the UK as hatchings over the past 27 years have become synchronous with its principal prey, the field vole.
Another predator-prey mismatch is evident among blooms of spring diatoms, which have advanced more than 20 days since 1962, triggering declining populations of its main grazer, the water flea.

Distribution
A shift in species' location is one of the most rapid responses observed especially for marine creatures with fewer connectivity issues compared with land-based ones, Science said.
Professor Watson said changing seasonal rains mean Australia's savannah regions are experiencing more intense fires later in the season, killing off grasses. The result is that rainforests are expanding to fill the ecological gap

Elsewhere, corals around Japan have shifted their range by as as much as 14 km per year over the past 80 years, the paper noted.
In the mountains of New Guinea, birds have shifted their distributions, moving up the slopes by as much as 152 metres between 1965 and 2013, according to other research.

Inter-species relations
As species are becoming redistributed, existing interactions between species are being disrupted.
Off Western Australia, for example, overgrazing of subtropical reefs by the pole-ward spread of tropical browsing fish hampered the recovery in 2013 of kelp killed by a previous heatwave event, according to research published by Ecology Letters.
Feeding rates by the browsing fish were about three times higher than previously observed on coral reefs.
Elsewhere, woody plants are invading arctic and alpine herb-dominated communities in response to rapid warming in recent decades, triggering secondary shifts in distribution of other plants and animals, Science said.

In  one example from Sweden, resident birds, such as the great tit, had become better able to adapt to warmer temperatures and out-compete with the pied flycatcher, the sole long-distance migrant.
In general, movements of many species are becoming more erratic and harder to predict, Professor Watson said.

'Almost incomprehensible'
"The frightening thing is that we have only had a degree of warming so far [since pre-industrial times], Professor Hughes said, adding that the rate of warming will be three times even if nations "perfectly kept" promises made in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
"The changes that would go along with 3 degrees are almost incomprehensible," she said.
A paper out this week published by The Royal Society examined how fast ecological niches occupied by various species were adapting and how much they would need to change over the next 55 years.
The analysis of 266 populations of plants and animals showed rates of change in climatic niches to be dramatically slower than rates of projected climate change, in the order of 200,000-fold for temperature.
Species in the tropics – typically the most various on earth – were less capable of adjusting than those at higher latitudes, the authors led by the University of Arizona found.
Professor Hughes said species in the Darwin region might only need to tolerate a temperature range over the year of about 30-35 degrees, while those in the Sydney region might endure a 0-40 degree range.
"Those species in the tropics probably have a far narrower range of variability that they can cope with," she said. "That predisposes them to being more vulnerable" in a warming world.

Links

• Threat to NASA climate role a 'disaster' for global warming action
• NASA chief slaps down climate sceptic Malcolm Roberts
• Warming up: new study points to a more sensitive climate to rising CO2
• Climate vulnerable nations aim for 100 per cent renewable energy at talks in Marrakech

The Small African Region With More Refugees Than All Of Europe

The Guardian - Patrick Kingsley

Hunger follows displaced people around north-east Nigeria, as Boko Haram and climate change drive millions from their homes

Women and children queue outside a Unicef nutrition clinic in a makeshift settlement in Muna, Maiduguri, which is home to thousands of IDPs. Photograph: Stefan Heunis/AFP/Getty

As Ali Kawu eases his handcart to a halt on a recent morning in north-east Nigeria, it is the first time he has dared to stop walking in more than 24 hours.
A day earlier, at 8am, Boko Haram militants raided his village. Kawu, 25, escaped with what he could – his wife, their three children, and kindling for a fire. They left behind their papers, six sacks of beans, up to 15 dead neighbours, and 10 kidnapped villagers. Then they walked all day and all night.

Ali Kawu, 25, fled to the town on Monguno after being attacked by Boko Haram. The number of displaced people in this small town is comparable to the number who left north Africa for Europe so far this year. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian

“Every minute I would look back to see if they were following us,” Kawu says, shortly after reaching the safety of Monguno, a town recaptured from Boko Haram last year. “Walking forward, looking back, walking forward, looking back. I thought it was the end of my life.”
But safety doesn’t mean comfort. Kawu is just the latest of approximately 140,000 displaced people sheltering in this remote town of 60,000 people. North-east Nigeria has been hit by a displacement crisis that dwarfs any migration flows seen in Europe in recent years.
Since the Boko Haram insurgency began, more people have migrated to Monguno alone than left all of north Africa for Europe in the first nine months of this year.

More Africans displaced in one Nigerian town than left for Europe this year

One upshot is a food crisis that the UN warns might see hundreds of thousands die from famine next year.
About 40% more people have been displaced throughout Borno state (1.4 million) than reached Europe by boat in 2015 (1 million). Across the region, the war against Boko Haram has forced more people from their homes – 2.6 million – than there are Syrians in Turkey, the country that hosts more refugees than any other.
The comparisons mirror a wider trend across Africa. Of the world’s 17 million displaced Africans, 93.7% remain inside the continent, and just 3.3% have reached Europe, according to UN data supplied privately to the Guardian.
“No matter how many problems Europeans have, it’s nothing like this,” summarises Modu Amsami, the informal leader of Monguno’s nine camps for internally displaced people (IDP), as he strolls past Kawu’s newly erected hut. “Please, I’m appealing to Europeans to forget their minor problems. Let them come here and face our major problems.”

Barely 3% of African refugees are in Europe

For 18 months, Monguno endured its migration crisis largely alone. Amsami is an IDP but decided to run Monguno’s nine camps himself in the absence of any government officials. It was not until this June, a year and a half after the Nigerian army retook the town from Boko Haram, that aid groups and civil servants felt safe to return.
“We were shaken by what we saw,” says Mathieu Kinde, an aid worker with Alima, a medical NGO that was the first to arrive. Many people were starving, having been cut off from their farmland. There was a polio outbreak – Nigeria’s first case in two years. Just one government doctor was left in the town.
To this day, the townspeople cannot farm their fields – Boko Haram remains too close to the town’s perimeter. Aid convoys from Maiduguri, the state capital, risk ambush. Most food can arrive only by helicopter, which is how the Guardian reached the town. The number of people in a famine-like state has been slightly reduced, but every week Alima treats up to 200 new cases of malnutrition. “The situation remains alarming,” says Kinde.
About 68 miles (110km) to the south, Maiduguri seems calmer. It remains under curfew but the roads into the city are largely secure, the streets are clean and its nightlife is reportedly experiencing a tentative revival. But if you know where to look, it is a city under extreme pressure.
More than 600,000 IDPs have migrated to this city of just 1.1 million during peacetime over the past three years, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). About a quarter have been put up in half-built schools, or in housing projects intended for teachers and civil servants. The rest have been taken in by friends and relatives.

The government in Maiduguri has installed 13,000 IDPs in a housing estate originally meant for civil servants. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian

“It’s an amazing story,” says Toby Lanzer, the UN’s assistant secretary general for the Sahel and the Lake Chad region. According to Lanzer, the local community has in effect said: “We built that as a school, but you [IDPs can] have it. And we built that as a new neighbourhood, but we will put you lot in it. How’s that for generosity, Europe?”
But that generosity has come at a price, says the governor of Borno state, the province where the majority of the fighting and displacement has taken place. Unemployment in Maiduguri has exceeded 50% since the start of the crisis, says the governor, Kashim Shettima, while more beggars gather at the major road junctions because the IDPs have few means of alternative income.
“Health facilities are at breaking point,” he says. “All resources have become overstretched. We ask all people of conscience to help.”
Across the region, about 65,000 people are suffering from famine-like conditions. Inside a makeshift clinic run by Médecins Sans Frontières in a Maiduguri suburb, you can find some of the most dire cases. On bed after bed, about 100 skeletal babies and toddlers stare vacantly into space. Many have plastic nodules stuck to their skull, to allow the nurses to attach them to a drip. Many children are so thin their scalp is the only place a visible vein can be found.
“Getting food became so difficult after my husband was killed [by Boko Haram],” says one mother, whose malnourished three-year-old lies motionless on the bed beside her. “I would beg every day but I wouldn’t get more than 100 naira [25p] a day. And that’s how he got hungry.”

A mother feeds her malnourished child at a nutrition clinic run by Médicins Sans Frontières in Maiduguri. Thousands of children have died of starvation and disease in Boko Haram-ravaged north-eastern Nigeria. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP

The international community has largely failed to help: UN funding is still 61% ($297m) short of its target. Local residents have stepped in where they can. Babakara al-Kali, a Maiduguri businessman, has given a plot of land to about 3,000 IDPs – forgoing the 10m naira (£25,000) he previously charged construction workers and mechanics to rent it every year. “If you help someone, God will help you,” Kali says. “So I decided to help them.”
Still, the conditions inside this makeshift camp are abject. Streams of slurry trickle through the site. A family mourns a child who died yesterday of hunger. Two elderly men have become blind in recent days and the camp’s elders blame the lack of food. Some residents spend their mornings collecting spilt grain at the local market; in the afternoons, they sift through them piece by piece, sorting the edible grains from the rotten ones.
“We have lost count of the number of people killed by hunger,” says Bulama Modusalim, the camp’s informal leader.
Aside from their physical problems, many of the IDPs across the region are suffering from psychological trauma. Almost every interviewee tells a story of being woken at dawn by gunfire, of emerging from their huts to find Boko Haram fighters killing their neighbours or kidnapping their relatives.

Ali Falfami, 73, had his hand removed after being shot by Boko Haram fighters. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian

Ali Falfami, 73, has a missing hand; it was amputated after being shot by Boko Haram. Karu Modu, 28, has a missing son – he was shot by the militants – and a missing husband: they slit his throat. Modu survived because she agreed to watch their murder. “They forced me to watch them die so that I would not be slaughtered,” she says, before breaking down in tears.
Modu was then kidnapped and held for nearly two years. After escaping with a group of fellow captives, six of their children died of thirst as they trekked to the safety of Maiduguri. On arrival, they were initially ostracised. People feared the women had become indoctrinated during their time with the extremists, and were wary of talking to or even sitting with the returnees.

Karu Modu, 28, was kidnapped and held by Boko Haram for two years. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian

These are not isolated experiences. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign has focused on the group of schoolgirls kidnapped from Chibok in 2014 – but away from the media spotlight, thousands of others are believed to have also been abducted in other incidents. At one point, Boko Haram controlled an area the size of Belgium and killed an estimated 20,000 people. Now the group is in retreat, but millions more still face food shortages.
“The narrative of this deepening humanitarian crisis in north-east Nigeria has been largely overlooked by the media, whose focus remains on the kidnapping of roughly 300 Chibok school girls,” says Orla Fagan, a spokesperson for UN’s office for coordination of humanitarian affairs.
“Each one of the girls who remains captivity is a minuscule representation of the millions of Nigerians who now face starvation across the north-east as a result of Boko Haram violence. They are some of the poorest, most vulnerable members of society, who also continue to struggle for their basic needs to survive each and every day.”
Many of them are being encouraged to return home where they face uncertain futures. The Nigerian army has retaken several key towns from the insurgents, and the government wants their former residents to go back to what they say are now safe areas. But the reality is more complex: the roads in and out are often still contested, as are the fields surrounding the towns. Many buildings lie in ruins and, as a result, returnees are often forced to live in IDP camps even after they have nominally reached their hometown.

Bulama Modusalim is the informal leader of a makeshift camp for IDPs displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency in north-east Nigeria. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian

Bulama Modusalim, the leader of the informal camp in Maiduguri, took a group of villagers back to Konduga in August, after the government assured them it was safe. “But when we went back we found that Boko Haram was still [in the surrounding area],” says Modusalim. “We went back and we found our houses were destroyed. We couldn’t go further than 1km from the town, so we couldn’t farm.”
Eventually, the situation became so desperate that they went back to Maiduguri, despite the poverty they knew they would face there. In a choice between war and starvation, they would rather risk the latter.
Amid all this misery, Boko Haram is the most obvious explanation for what has gone wrong. Nearly everyone is running from the jihadis who still control significant parts of the Lake Chad basin. But what led to the group’s rise in the first place? Local leaders say the group was initially able to present its fighters as victims of police brutality – and more generally positioned Boko Haram as a radical alternative to the high levels of regional poverty and unemployment.

Between 1963 and 2005, the surface area of Lake Chad decreased from approximately 25,000 km2 to 1,350 km2

But according to several interviewees, including the local governor, this social alienation was partly fuelled by rapid climate change. North-east Nigeria borders Lake Chad, a vast inland lake that supplies water to about 70 million people in four countries – Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger. But since the 1970s, it has shrunk by 90% – from 25,000km² to less than 2,500km². And those who live near its former shores say this shrinkage is one indirect cause of violence in the region, and the subsequent displacement.
Modu Amsami, the IDP who runs the nine camps in Monguno, comes from the village of Gumnari, which was once just 2km from the lake. Now it’s 18km away.
“In the 70s, you could put this tree in the lake,” Amsami says, pointing at a nearby tree, “and you wouldn’t even see it. Now if I walked in there, the water wouldn’t even reach my chest.”
As a child, Amsami’s father would tie him to a tree to stop him entering the lake and being eaten by crocodiles. Today there would be no need. The water is nowhere in sight and it’s difficult to even see a crocodile.

Modu Amsami stands next to a tree that he says would once have been submerged by Lake Chad. Now the waters would not reach his shoulders, he says. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian

All this has led to unemployment for thousands of fishermen and farmers – including several people from Amsami’s family. He reckons this worsened living conditions, created a wave of unemployed and disaffected youth – and so helped fuel the anger and resentment that created Boko Haram. “If the Lake Chad water was normal,” says Amsami, “all these problems [with Boko Haram] would be eliminated economically, because nobody would have time to do all these things.”
According to the IOM, few of the roughly 35,000 Nigerians who have in Europe this year are fleeing from the insurgency in the north-east. But the west would be wise to take the Lake Chad crisis seriously, lest the millions seeking sanctuary in the region decide to move towards Europe. Lanzer says he is “willing to bet a month’s salary that the proportion of people who will arrive in Europe from Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and via Niger will grow substantially”.
Shettima speaks in even starker terms: “As long as the underlying problems that precipitate the crisis are not met, then there is a risk that more Nigerians will try to go to Europe.
“At the moment, most of them are economic migrants, but if this madness is not solved, believe me you will see a mass of humanity trying to get to Europe via the Mediterranean.”

Links

• Southern Africa cries for help as El Niño and climate change savage maize harvest
• The 13 impossible crises that humanity now faces
• Hurricanes become more costly
• The new climate change story must be one of rapid transition
• Is this the beginning of the end for coal?