14/05/2020

(AU) Scientists Fear Surge In Supersized Bushfires That Create Their Own Violent Thunderstorm

The Guardian -  | 

Exclusive: group of former fire and emergency services leaders tell bushfire royal commission rapid detection technologies are vital

Using a ‘fast-track strategy’, fire crews could be airlifted to new fires before they became too big, a group of former fire and emergency services leaders have told the bushfire royal commission. Photograph: Sean Davey/EPA

Australia should deploy new “fast-attack strategies” to combat bushfires and stop small remote blazes turning into unstoppable mega fires, a group of 33 former fire and emergency services leaders have said.

In a submission to the bushfires royal commission, the group said climate change was increasing the risk of extreme bushfire seasons.

New “rapid fire-detection” technologies should be trialled, with faster mid-sized and purpose-built water bombers made available to put out fires within 24 hours of them being detected.

The submission from emergency leaders for climate action, seen by Guardian Australia, includes 33 recommendations to the royal commission.

Fire crews could be airlifted to areas where new fires risked becoming too big, with faster long-range amphibious water bombers deployed in a military-style operation.

More than 20% of Australia’s forests burned during the recent fires, which destroyed thousands of homes and properties and killed at least 33 people. Smoke caused more than 400 estimated excess deaths.

The economic costs have been estimated at more than $4bn. Hundreds of endangered animals, plant and invertebrate species were affected, and some may have been driven to extinction.

Australia’s unprecedented bushfire season of 2019-20 coincided with the country’s hottest and driest year on record.

“It is not possible to ‘adapt’ to such catastrophic and escalating conditions, and they can only be partially mitigated,” said the submission, compiled by former commissioner of Fire and Rescue NSW, Greg Mullins.

“The failure of successive governments at all levels to show leadership and take credible, urgent action on the basic causal factor – greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas – will lead to further escalation in natural disaster risks.”

The submission recommended Australia develop a network of sensing technologies to detect fires in remote areas earlier, and then employ a “fast attack” approach to put them out.

Australia should trial a purpose-built water bombing aircraft long-used in other countries that can scoop up water and “achieve rapid turnaround and constant direct attack on fire fronts”.

Mullins told Guardian Australia a range of early detection technologies could be used to detect new fires, including remote cameras, satellite images and spotter flights.

“Every big fire was once a small fire,” he said. “It’s very much like a military operation with eyes in the sky, with your ground troops that are backed up with some artillery.”

The purpose-built water bombers were able to refuel quickly – either by skimming over large water storages or landing in paddocks – and that meant they were ideally suited to a rapid response strategy.

Firefighting experts have warned that while larger water-bombing aircraft could help control fires, they should not be seen as a “panacea” and that a suite of responses were needed.

The former emergency leaders said these aircraft had failed to make “appreciable difference to extreme fires on the worst fire weather days”.

Other recommendations included increasing funding for climate change research, putting more electricity cables underground, reviewing building standards, and building bushfire-safe shelters in fire-prone communities.

The submission also highlighted the increasing number of large fires that couple with the atmosphere to form their own storms, creating deadly conditions on the ground for firefighters.

There had been an “astounding and deeply concerning shift in the frequency of these events”.

Hearings for the royal commission will begin on 25 May and run for two weeks. It has held 17 community forums and received more than 400 public submissions.

The final report and recommendations are due on 31 August and Dominique Hogan-Doran SC, the senior counsel assisting, said in the inquiry’s first hearing in April that it would be narrowly focused on national coordination and the “challenges associated with walking across lines drawn on a map” so as to avoid duplication with current and previous state inquiries.

“We detect a worrying consistency in the themes explored and repetitiveness in the recommendations made,” Hogan-Doran said. “This is no time to reinvent the wheel.”

The royal commission is considering recommending Australia be granted the ability to declare a national state of emergency, and released an issues paper this month calling for advice from constitutional law experts.

National state of emergency powers may also be able to be invoked during a pandemic, although the royal commission has explicitly ruled out considering matters relating to the coronavirus.

Victoria’s response to the coronavirus crisis is anchored in its state of emergency powers, which were created after the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.

The issues paper said if the commonwealth had powers to declare a state of emergency it would be able to deploy national resources, such as the army, without waiting for a request from the states.

But it also said there were constitutional limitations in granting such a power which may mean a national state of emergency declaration would have either a limited or a very specific practical effect.

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Climate Explained: What Caused Major Climate Change In The Past?

The Conversation - 

Earth had several periods of high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and high temperatures over the last several million years. What caused these periods, given that there was no burning of fossil fuels or other sources of human created carbon dioxide release during those times?

Shutterstock

 is Professor, Physical Geography (climate science), Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington.


Burning fossil fuels or vegetation is one way to put carbon dioxide  into the air – and it is something we have become very good at.

Humans are generating nearly 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year, mostly by burning fossil fuels.

Carbon dioxide stays in the air for centuries to millennia and it builds up over time. Since we began the systematic use of coal and oil for fuel, around 300 years ago, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has gone up by almost half.

NOAA
Apart from the emissions we add, carbon dioxide concentrations in the air go up and down as part of the natural carbon cycle, driven by exchanges between the air, the oceans and the biosphere (life on earth), and ultimately by geological processes.

Natural changes in carbon dioxide

Every year, carbon dioxide concentrations rise and fall a little as plants grow in spring and summer and die off in the autumn and winter. The timing of this seasonal rise and fall is tied to northern hemisphere seasons, as most of the land surface on Earth is there.

The oceans also play an active role in the carbon cycle, contributing to variations over a few months to slow shifts over centuries. Ocean water takes up carbon dioxide directly in an exchange between the air and seawater. Tiny marine plants use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and many microscopic marine organisms use carbon compounds to make shells. When these marine micro-organisms die and sink to the seafloor, they take the carbon with them.

Collectively, the biosphere (ecosystems on land and in soils) and the oceans are absorbing about half of all human-emitted carbon dioxide, and this slows the rate of climate change. But as the climate continues to change and the oceans warm up further, it is not clear whether the biosphere and oceans will continue absorbing such a large fraction of our emissions. As water warms, it is less able to absorb carbon dioxide, and as the climate changes, many ecosystems become stressed and are less able to photosynthesise carbon dioxide.

Earth’s deep climate history

On time scales of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, carbon dioxide concentrations in the air have varied hugely, and so has global climate.

This long-term carbon cycle involves the formation and decay of the Earth’s surface itself: tectonic plate activity, the build-up and weathering of mountain chains, prolonged volcanic activity, and the emergence of new seafloor at active mid-ocean faults.

Most of the carbon stored in the Earth’s crust is in the form of limestone, created from the carbon-based shells of marine organisms that sank to the ocean floor millions of year ago.

Carbon dioxide is added to the air when volcanoes erupt, and it is taken out of the air as rocks and mountain ranges weather and wear down. These processes typically take millions of years to add or subtract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

In the present day, volcanoes add only a little carbon dioxide to the air, around 1% of what human activity is currently contributing. But there have been times in the past where volcanic activity has been vastly greater and has spewed large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.

An example is around 250 million years ago, when prolonged volcanic activity raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels dramatically. These were volcanic eruptions on a vast scale - lasting for around two million years and causing a mass extinction.

In the more recent geological past, the past 50 million years, carbon dioxide levels have been gradually dropping overall and the climate has been cooling, with some ups and downs. Once carbon dioxide concentrations became low enough (around 300 parts per million) between two and three million years ago, the current ice age cycle began, but the warming our emissions are causing is larger than the natural cooling trend.

While Earth’s climate has changed significantly in the past, it happened on geological time scales. The carbon in the oil and coal we burn represents carbon dioxide taken up by vegetation hundreds of millions of years ago and then deposited through geological processes over millennia. We have burned a significant proportion within a few centuries.

If human emissions of carbon dioxide continue to increase through this century, we could reach levels not seen for tens of millions of years, when Earth had a much warmer climate with much higher sea levels and no ice sheets.

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Pakistan Combats Massive Unemployment By Hiring People To Plant 10 Billion Trees

My Modern Met - Megan Cooper

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Though this period of uncertainty and loss has been challenging for people around the world, we’ve been able to focus on moments of compassion, renewal, and persistence to help us through the coronavirus pandemic.

Every story of an animal species returning to its habitat (which is now devoid of industrial traffic) can uplift us even in our most isolated moments.

One of these optimistically faith-restoring projects comes out of Pakistan. Prime Minister Imran Khan, who launched the 10 Billion Trees Tsunami initiative in 2018 to help the country counter the mounting effects of global climate change, has made this initiative instrumental once again; this time, it is also helping to battle the social and economic effects of the virus on Pakistan’s population.

According to the Global Climate Risk Index of 2020, Pakistan ranks fifth in a list of countries that were affected the most by planetary heating over the past twenty years.

From 1999-2018, the country reported over 150 extreme weather events (heat waves, droughts, floods, etc.), which are only projected to increase as global climate change worsens.

The 10 Billion Trees Tsunami project seeks to plant the eponymous ten billion trees across the desert landscape over a five-year period.
Although Pakistan has been on lockdown since March 23 to help mitigate the spread of the virus, the Prime Minister has issued exceptions to day laborers associated with this project. In addition, he has hired 63,000 laborers facing unemployment from these municipal lockdowns to continue afforesting.

Workers are compensated between 500-8,000 rupees (about $7 to $106) a day, which amounts to about half of their usual wages, but helps alleviate a fraction of the unemployment population in Pakistan.

To keep their workers further protected, the government has mandated that planters must wear masks and stay 6 feet apart from one another while in the field. The positive effects of these efforts are being felt, though, and about 30 million indigenous saplings have been planted in the Punjab area alone since the start of this campaign. This year, the afforestation plan hopes to have 50 million trees planted.

News of these increased efforts rides on the coat-tails of discussions about reinstating programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps in the United States—a program which was born out of FDR’s New Deal and aimed to help unemployment in the 1930s by hiring people for public works projects.

For Malik Amin Aslam, the Climate Change Advisor to the Prime Minister, this situation “has taught us the valuable lesson that when you invest in nature it not only pays you back, but also rescues you in a stressed economic situation.”
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