06/01/2020

(AU) Morrison's Government On The Bushfires: From Attacking Climate 'Lunatics' To Calling In The Troops

The Guardian - 

From May 2018 to January 2020, the Coalition government has had an evolving stance on the fire crisis
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, speaks with Paul and Melissa Churchman at their Wildflower farm in Sarsfield, Victoria, which was destroyed by the bushfires. Photograph: James Ross/AAP
From describing bushfire warnings as the concerns of “inner-city raving lunatics” to calling in the defence forces, the following is a timeline of Scott Morrison’s government’s evolving stance on the fire crisis.

May 2018
The National Aerial Firefighting Centre sends the commonwealth government a business case requesting a permanent increase of $11m to its annual budget. Payments are made on a top-up basis only.

April 2019
The Emergency Leaders for Climate Change, a group of 22 former emergency services leaders led by former commissioner of NSW Fire and Rescue Greg Mullins, writes to the federal government alerting them to the threat of “increasingly catastrophic extreme weather events and calling on both major parties to recognise the need for “national firefighting assets”, including large aircraft, to deal with the scale of the threat.

 16 September 2019
The Emergency Leaders for Climate Change write again to Morrison asking why the government has not yet given them a meeting, despite being told on 4 July that Angus Taylor’s office would be in touch to arrange one.
“It appears that Minister Taylor, or perhaps his office, fails to grasp the urgency of this matter,” Mullins writes. “I must assume from this response and the months of delay in Mr Taylor making contact, that the minister appears at best disinterested in what the Emergency Leaders might have to say.”

8 November 2019
Australian defence force liaison officers start working with Emergency Management Australia.

9 November 2019
Carol Sparks, the mayor of Glen Innes, raises the link between climate crisis, drought and bushfire activity after the town faces down an inferno that killed two of its residents. “We are so impacted by drought and the lack of rain,” she says. “It’s climate change, there’s no doubt about it. The whole of the country is going to be affected. We need to take a serious look at our future.”

11 November 2019
Michael McCormack told Radio National it was ‘pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies’ linking climate change with the bushfires. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
The deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, tells Radio National that it is “pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies” and “inner-city raving lunatics” like Richard Di Natale and Adam Bandt from the Australian Greens that are “trying to get a political point score” for raising the link between climate crisis, drought and the devastating bushfires.
David Littleproud, the minister for emergency management, says that Taylor’s office has received no formal request for a meeting from Mullins or the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action but that his office will reach out to them.

11 December 2019
Australia is rated the worst-performing country on climate change policy out of 57 countries in a report prepared by international thinktanks. The report also criticises the Morrison government for being a “regressive force” internationally.

12 December 2019
Morrison attempts to reassure voters that he understands bushfires are a natural emergency and that he accepts the link between climate change and an extended fire season, while dismissing international censure of his government’s climate policies as “not credible”.

16 December 2019
Reports circulate that the prime minister has gone on holidays to Hawaii, as Sydney battles extreme smoke pollution as out-of-control bushfires burn through the Blue Mountains. The prime minister’s office says his whereabouts are “not a story” and that claims he is on holiday in Hawaii are “wrong”.

17 December 2019
Littleproud says he met with Mullins and told the delegation they “should take great comfort and great pride in the current cohort of fire chiefs around the country who have planned meticulously for these fires”.
Littleproud says fighting bushfires is “obviously … the responsibility of states but the federal government kicks the tin. We don’t walk away from this.”

17 December 2019
The Emergency Leaders for Climate Action say they will hold a summit after the current bushfire season because of their “huge disappointment in the lack of national leadership during a bushfire crisis”.
It comes as fires raged across New South Wales and Western Australia on Monday and as Australia was named as one of a handful of countries responsible for thwarting a global deal on the rulebook of the Paris climate agreement.

19 December 2019
Two volunteer firefighters, Geoffrey Keaton, 32, and Andrew O’Dwyer, 36, die fighting fires south-west of Sydney when a tree hits their tanker.

20 December 2019
He says the government is considering calls to pay volunteer firefighters but notes that is “in the first instance” a matter for state governments.

23 December 2019
Morrison says calls to reduce carbon emissions are “reckless” and that Australia doesn’t need to do more on tackling climate crisis. He rejects calls from the opposition to bring forward a meeting with state governments to address the bushfire crisis.

29 December 2019
Morrison agrees to compensation payments made to NSW volunteer firefighters who have lost income due to fighting bushfires, but he sees no further role for the commonwealth. “We’re there to help the states and territories as they address these crises. The states are the ones, as premier knows all too well, who are directly responsible for the funding of their fire services and all the other things that are done.”

30 December 2019
A third NSW RFS volunteer, Samuel McPaul, is killed when his truck rolls during extreme conditions at a fire near Jingellic, on the NSW/Victoria border.

31 December 2019
Morrison releases a statement through social media offering condolences to McPaul’s relatives and emphasising the leading role of the state and territory firefighting authorities in the bushfire crisis. He says the commonwealth will continue in its role of providing “support” to those efforts.

1 January 2020
Morrison shares his new year message urging Australians to celebrate living “in the most amazing country on earth” and remember “there’s no better place to raise kids anywhere on the planet”. He does not make any connection between the bushfires and global heating, suggesting that Australians had faced similarly terrible ordeals throughout history.
Later that day, Morrison hosts the annual New Year’s Day Cricket Australia-McGrath Foundation reception with the Australian and New Zealand teams at Kirribilli in Sydney. In his address to the teams, he says forthcoming Sydney Test match will be “played out against terrible events” but that “at the same time Australians will be gathered whether it’s at the SCG or around television sets all around the country and they’ll be inspired by the great feats of our cricketers from both sides of the Tasman and I think they’ll be encouraged by the spirit shown by Australians”.

2 January 2020
At a press conference, Morrison says he’s “always acknowledged the link … between the broader issues of global climate change and what that means for the world’s weather and the dryness of conditions in many places” but that “no response by any one government anywhere in the world can be linked to any one fire event”.
Morrison reiterates he has no plans to change Australia’s emissions reduction policy. He defends his government’s response to the fires by saying he doesn’t want state and federal governments “to be tripping over each other in order to somehow outbid each other in the response”.
Navy ships and army aircraft are dispatched to help fight bushfires in Victoria.

3 January 2020
While initially saying it was “still the plan” to go to India later in January for trade and defence talks, at which Australia’s coal exports were expected to feature heavily, Morrison says only hours later that he is “inclined not to proceed” with the visit, which has now been postponed.

4 January 2020
The army reserve is called in to assist with firefighting efforts.
Morrison says the federal government will agree to a request made 18 months ago to permanently increase funding to Australia’s aerial firefighting capacity.
The prime minister’s office releases an ad spruiking its firefighting efforts, backed by a jaunty jingle.
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(AU) We Are Seeing The Very Worst Of Our Scientific Predictions Come To Pass In These Bushfires

The Guardian - 

As a climate scientist I am wondering if the Earth system has now breached a tipping point
‘The thing that really terrifies me is that weather conditions considered extreme by today’s standards will seem sedate in the future.’ Photograph: Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images
Dr Joëlle Gergis
Dr Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer based at the Australian National University.
Currently, there are tens of thousands of people in coastal NSW and Victoria stranded in towns where the highways are closed, supermarkets are running out of food, and queues for petrol snake down the streets of devastated towns. The scenes experienced by those caught up in the ordeal are being described as apocalyptic – rightly so.
Meanwhile, the locals face the infinitely more serious situation of returning to find their homes completely incinerated. Cars melted, pets killed, beloved landscapes destroyed. A lifetime of memories razed to the ground. As Australia’s climate continues to warm, the most intimate places of human safety – our very homes – are being threatened in an increasingly dangerous world.
It’s confronting to see military evacuations, usually reserved for developing regions of the world following natural disasters, happening right here in 21st-century Australia. The sheer scale and severity of the emergency has actually overwhelmed our capacity as a nation to deal with the unfolding events. Not just in one area following a single event, but across multiple disasters occurring simultaneously in every state and territory of our nation.
As a climate scientist, the thing that really terrifies me is that weather conditions considered extreme by today’s standards will seem sedate in the future. What’s unfolding right now is really just a taste of the new normal.
At this point I could restate all the lines of scientific evidence that clearly show the links between human-caused climate change and the intensification of extreme weather conditions not just in Australia, but all over the world.
To avoid sounding like a broken record, instead I will say that as a lead author on the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report of the global climate due out next year, I can assure you that the planetary situation is extremely dire.
It’s no exaggeration to say my work as scientist now keeps me up at night.
As I’ve watched the events of this summer unfolding, I’ve found myself wondering whether the Earth system has now breached a tipping point, an irreversible shift in the stability of the planetary system.
There may now be so much heat trapped in the system that we may have already triggered a domino effect that could unleash a cascade of abrupt changes that will continue to play out in the years and decades to come.
Rapid climate change has the potential to reconfigure life on the planet as we know it.
We know this because the geologic record contains evidence that these events have occurred in the past. The key difference is that we’ve never had 7.5 billion people on the planet, so the human species really is in uncharted territory.
The scientific community is acknowledging this by including new sections on abrupt climate change throughout key areas of the upcoming IPCC report. We now consider these “low probability, high impact” scenarios an increasingly critical part of our work.
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, adapting to climate change in the driest inhabited continent on Earth is going to take a bit of work.
To prepare our nation for the very challenging times ahead, we need political leaders – at every level – prepared to face this harsh reality.
I single out our political leaders because the rest of the country is already leading the way. The leadership and true guts being shown out there by our local communities, often with minimal resources and under intense duress, has been staggering. The resilience, dedication, generosity and heart being demonstrated by our emergency services and embarrassingly unpaid volunteer firefighters is truly the stuff of legends.
Cynics might say that our government seems to be taking advantage of the fact that we are a remarkable people willing to do whatever it takes to defend our incredibly unique nation. But the longer we leave things on a national policy level, the worse things are going to get.
Failing to adequately plan for the known threat of climate change in a country like Australia should now be considered to be an act of treason.
The scientific community has been trying to warn the government of the need to plan to adapt to climate change for at least a decade. In fact, the world’s first global conference on climate change adaptation was hosted here in Australia, on the Gold Coast in 2010.
This conference was run by the former National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCARF), which lost its federal funding in June 2018. It was a visionary initiative to attempt to help the most vulnerable nation in the developed world prepare for climate change. Despite this immensely important task, the initiative is now vastly scaled-down and operating through Griffith University by a handful of dedicated researchers.
How anyone thought that axing funding to the only dedicated national climate change adaptation program in the country was a good idea is completely beyond me.
This summer has been a brutal reminder that no matter how much we want to avoid addressing the problem of climate change, it simply can no longer be ignored. As this summer has shown, it is now part of every Australian’s lived experience.
Now is the time for our political leaders to make a choice about which side of history they want to be on. There is much work to be done, and we are fast running out of time.
As a climate scientist I find prime minster Scott Morrison’s request for people to be “patient” as infuriating as it is condescending. With respect prime minster, the science of climate change has been ignored in this country for decades. We are now seeing the very worst of our scientific predictions come to pass.
Everyone’s patience has worn thin. The Australian people are justifiably angry and are now demanding true leadership in the face of this climate emergency.
We have already squandered over a decade debating climate policy in Australia. All the while, the clear reality of a rapidly destabilising planet accelerates all around us.
There genuinely is no more time to waste. We must act as though our home is on fire – because it is.

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(AU) Could A Lawsuit Tip The Scales On Climate Policy?

Canberra Times - Mark Kenny*

 "Is the climate changing? Why weren't we told?" chided broadcaster Phillip Adams as a long-feared drought-heatwave-bushfire trifecta neared its deadly apotheosis.
It might sound fanciful - and costly - but some lawyers say a class action against those responsible for climate change could in fact be successful. Picture: Shutterstock
Eight words that nailed the smouldering betrayal which is now as pungent in the public nostril as the acrid smoke blighting south-eastern Australia.
The New Year's Eve jibe came as the last twigs of the Coalition's she'll-be-right assurances were themselves cremated - a vengeful coda to a decade of climate negligence. Of putting short-term electoral advantage before the national interest.
Only months ago a coal-brandishing Liberal Prime Minister had been re-elected.
Making consistency his sole virtue, Scott Morrison would later think little of taking off on a luxurious overseas holiday as the crisis he regarded as nothing unusual rolled forward.
And just to emphasise his party's zen-like state, the NSW Minister for Emergency Services would, astoundingly, follow suit, venturing to Europe during the very event for which he had been sworn in - a major state emergency.
This brazenness also characterises the embattled federal Emissions Reduction Minister, Angus Taylor, who confidently claims that Australia produces just 1.3 per cent of global carbon emissions and is thus doing everything required of it.
He also urges the world to keep burning as much Australian coal as we can dig out, while shamelessly pleading our case to use accounting carry-overs (from our laughably low Kyoto obligations) to meet the mediocre Paris target we were set.
If it weren't so serious these failings would qualify as high farce.
Of course our government had been told about global warming. Clearly. Repeatedly. Authoritatively.
Steadily accumulating data pointed unmistakably to catastrophic implications.
While some parts of the globe would become wetter, others would become much hotter, drier, functionally uninhabitable.
Sea levels would rise, exacerbating storm surges. Low-lying Pacific nations would disappear.
Our government has been told about global warming - clearly, repeatedly and authoritatively. Picture: Shutterstock
Atmospheric volatility would bring more furious storms, and with them floods, cyclones, chaos.
Species loss would accelerate.
In short, the preconditions for a state of more-or-less galloping crisis.
All of these threats have coalesced in recent weeks and months.
Soaring temperatures and extraordinary turbulence across tinder-dry ground have created hellish conditions.
Yet while Australia burns - 2019 being the hottest and driest year on record - in the nearby capital of Indonesia, unholy rains have seen at least 30 dead.
Jakarta's heaviest falls in 24 years (perhaps ever) have brought widespread drownings and fatal landslides.
Again, such events had been predicted.
But to what effect?
The absence of visionary leadership has been evident globally, but nowhere more self-destructively than in Australia, a sophisticated polity with perhaps the greatest interest in securing concerted action.
Yet far from doing that, Australia has actually led the resistance.
And its most successful political party, shielded by influential media barrackers, has instead preferred to undermine the scientific consensus, to inhibit action at home, and, most damningly, to lend legitimacy to tardiness abroad.
Viewed historically, this is hardly Australian. Viewed strategically, it is self-serving to the point of being unpatriotic.
Even as a small nation, Australia has boldly contributed to global initiatives in the past.
Examples include unhesitating engagement in two world wars, championing the creation of the United Nations and showing moral leadership against apartheid South Africa. Or there's the establishment of the International Criminal Court, the progression of free trade rules, and the creation of the G20 and APEC.
"The absence of visionary leadership has been evident globally, but nowhere more self-destructively than in Australia."
Yet on the existential question of climate change? Fecklessness.
Abatement has been politicised as the panicked ravings of a "climate cult", the science informing it pilloried, and the only legislated mechanism for reducing domestic carbon output triumphantly repealed.
Remarkably, the Coalition went to the 2019 election with no energy policy and no serious carbon-reduction plan - nor even any desire for one. And it prevailed.
Think about that.
Little wonder younger voters doubt democracy.
It is not just that politicians fail to deliver, or that some lie - it is that there is no electoral consequence for negligence and moral turpitude.
But what if there were consequences? Liability even.
It's a long bow, but imagine a class action against government itself, against individual politicians, ministers, their political parties, and perhaps even their media apologists?
That the damage is real is beyond debate - we all know the figures. But the liability?
That case could be brought by farmers, regional businesses, burnt-out homeowners, families of deceased residents and firefighters, their insurers, conservationists - all of them seeking to show that an officially sanctioned rejection of expert advice amounted to a negligence born of self-interest and a reckless indifference on the part of governments, political leaders, individual MPs and their various organs.
Sound fanciful? Perhaps, but statutes such as the NSW Rural Fires Act, 1997 set out a very clear responsibility for ministers and officials requiring them inter alia to make provision: "(a) for the prevention, mitigation and suppression of bush and other fires in local government areas, and (c) for the protection of persons from injury or death, and property from damage, arising from fires, and (c1) for the protection of infrastructure and environmental, economic, cultural, agricultural and community assets from damage arising from fires..."
There could be other legal bases for an application also.
There's no doubt such an action would be novel and highly adventurous. It would face significant technical hurdles, and would be potentially costly.
Unlike the US, Australian litigants are generally required to pay the other's costs in the event of failure.
Even the threshold challenge would be problematic: proving a causal link between global warming and the firestorm(s).
Only after that could the claimants go on to assert that, through its particular negligence, the Coalition had increased the danger, thus breaching its duty of care.
Legally, this is a heavy burden, even if the moral and political case seems open and shut.
What is clear, however, is that the expert advice was repeatedly shelved and that the whole issue of climate change and its associated dangers was cynically politicised to the material disadvantage of citizens - current and future generations - and the national estate.
If justiciable, and that is a big "if", the words and actions of senior Coalition figures undermining the science as "crap" and claiming any risks were manageable are legion.
Just weeks ago, the Deputy Prime Minister, for example, described those linking climate to bushfires as "woke inner-city greenies".
Add to this, the repeal of the carbon price, refusal to seek global action, failure to take reasonable steps on available knowledge to avoid loss of life, loss of property, and destruction of native flora and fauna.
Would an Australian court entertain such an application? According to several lawyers contacted, it is not impossible.
Tony Abbott's replacement in the North Shore seat of Warringah, Zali Steggall, took to Twitter on New Year's Day.
"Very hard to celebrate a decade where governments had all the facts on the risks ahead and failed to act. #ClimateEmergency #ClimateActNow"
They did know. But claimed they knew better. They were wrong. Legally or otherwise, that is a fact.

 *Mark Kenny is Senior Fellow at ANU's Australian Studies Institute

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05/01/2020

NYT Q&A: How Climate Change, Other Factors Stoke Australia Fires

New York Times - Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

In this Monday, Dec. 30, 2019, aerial photo, wildfires rage under plumes of smoke in Bairnsdale, Australia. Thousands of tourists fled Australia's wildfire-ravaged eastern coast Thursday ahead of worsening conditions as the military started to evacuate people trapped on the shore further south. (Glen Morey via AP)
Australia’s unprecedented wildfires are supercharged thanks to climate change, the type of trees catching fire and weather, experts say.
And these fires are so extreme that they are triggering their own thunderstorms.
Here are a few questions and answers about the science behind the Australian wildfires that so far have burned about 5 million hectares (12.35 million acres), killing at least 17 people and destroying more than 1,400 homes.
“They are basically just in a horrific convergence of events,” said Stanford University environmental studies director Chris Field, who chaired an international scientific report on climate change and extreme events. He said this is one of the worst, if not the worst, climate change extreme events he’s seen.
“There is something just intrinsically terrifying about these big wildfires. They go on for so long, the sense of hopelessness that they instill,” Field said. “The wildfires are kind of the iconic representation of climate change impacts.”

Q: Is climate change really a factor?
A: Scientists, both those who study fire and those who study climate, say there’s no doubt man-made global warming has been a big part, but not the only part, of the fires.
Last year in Australia was the hottest and driest on record, with the average annual temperature 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above the 1960 to 1990 average, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. Temperatures in Australia last month hit 121.8 F (49.9 C).
“What would have been a bad fire season was made worse by the background drying/warming trend,’’ Andrew Watkins, head of long-range forecasts at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, said in an email.
Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada, said Australia’s fires are “an example of climate change.”
A 2019 Australian government brief report on wildfires and climate change said, “Human-caused climate change has resulted in more dangerous weather conditions for bushfires in recent decades for many regions of Australia.”
In this satellite image released by Copernicus Sentinel imagery, 2020 twitter page dated Dec. 31, 2019, shows wildfires burning across Australia. (Copernicus Sentinel Imagery via AP)
Q: How does climate change make these fires worse?
A: The drier the fuel — trees and plants — the easier it is for fires to start and the hotter and nastier they get, Flannigan said.
“It means more fuel is available to burn, which means higher intensity fires, which makes it more difficult — or impossible — to put out,” Flannigan said.
The heat makes the fuel drier, so they combine for something called fire weather. And that determines “fuel moisture,” which is crucial for fire spread. The lower the moisture, the more likely Australian fires start and spread from lightning and human-caused ignition, a 2016 study found.
There’s been a 10% long-term drying trend in Australia’s southeast and 15% long-term drying trend in the country’s southwest, Watkins said. When added to a degree of warming and a generally southward shift of weather systems, that means a generally drier landscape.
Australia’s drought since late 2017 “has been at least the equal of our worst drought in 1902,” Australia’s Watkins said. “It has probably been driven by ocean temperature patterns in the Indian Ocean and the long term drying trend.”

Q: Has Australia's fire season changed?
A: Yes. It’s about two to four months longer, starting earlier especially in the south and east, Watkins said.
“The fires over the last three months are unprecedented in their timing and severity, started earlier in spring and covered a wider area across many parts of Australia,” said David Karoly, leader of climate change hub at Australia's National Environmental science Program. “The normal peak fire season is later in summer and we are yet to have that.”
In this image released Thursday, Jan. 2, 2020, from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning in Gippsland, Australia, smoke rises from wildfires burning in East Gippsland, Victoria. Thousands of tourists are fleeing Australia's wildfire-ravaged eastern coast ahead of worsening conditions as the military started to evacuate people trapped on the shore further south. Cooler weather has aided firefighting and allowed people to replenish supplies. (DELWP Gippsland via AP)
Q: Is weather, not just long-term climate, a factor?
A: Yes. In September, Antarctica’s sudden stratospheric warming — sort of the southern equivalent of the polar vortex — changed weather conditions so that Australia’s normal weather systems are farther north than usual, Watkins said.
That means since mid-October there were persistent strong westerly winds bringing hot dry air from the interior to the coast, making the fire weather even riskier for the coasts.
“With such a dry environment, many fires were started by dry lightning events (storms that brought lightning but limited rainfall),” Watkins said.

Q: Are people starting these fires? is it arson?
A: It’s too early to tell the precise cause of ignition because the fires are so recent and officials are spending time fighting them, Flannigan said.
While people are a big factor in causing fires in Australia, it’s usually accidental, from cars and trucks and power lines, Flannigan said. Usually discarded cigarettes don’t trigger big fires, but when conditions are so dry, they can, he said.

Q: Are these fires triggering thunderstorms?
A: Yes. It’s an explosive storm called pyrocumulonimbus and it can inject particles as high as 10 miles into the air.
During a fire, heat and moisture from the plants are released, even when the fuel is relatively dry. Warm air is less dense than cold air so it rises, releasing the moisture and forming a cloud that lifts and ends up a thunderstorm started by fire. It happens from time to time in Australia and other parts of the world, including Canada, Flannigan said.
“These can be deadly, dangerous, erratic and unpredictable,” he said.

Q: Are the Australian trees prone to burning?
A: Eucalyptus trees are especially flammable, “like gasoline on a tree,” Flannigan said. Chemicals in them make them catch fire easier, spread to the tops of trees and get more intense. Eucalyptus trees were a big factor in 2017 fires in Portugal that killed 66 people, he said.

Q: How can you fight these huge Australia fires?
A: You don’t. They’re just going to burn in many places until they hit the beach, Flannigan said.
“This level of intensity, direct attack is useless,” Flannigan said. “You just have to get out of the way... It really is spitting on a campfire. It’s not doing any good.”

Q: What's the long-term fire future look like for Australia?
A: “The extreme fire season in Australia in 2019 was predicted,” said Australian National University climate scientist Nerilie Abram. “The question that we need to ask is how much worse are we willing to let this get? This is what global warming of just over 1 degree C looks like. Do we really want to see the impacts of 3 degrees or more are like, because that is the trajectory we are on.”

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NYT: See Where Australia’s Deadly Wildfires Are Burning

New York Times - Nadja Popovich | Denise Lu | Blacki Migliozzi

Days into the New Year, deadly wildfires, fueled by wind and scorching summer heat, continued to rage across Australia’s southeast.
Source: NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System. Data as of January 3.
Thousands of tourists and residents have been forced to evacuate from areas along the southeast coast so far, and tens of thousands more are fleeing to safer ground ahead of the weekend, with forecasters predicting a new round of dangerous fire conditions.
High winds and temperatures reaching close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 38 Celsius, are expected starting Friday.
Australia’s 2019 fire season started early and has been exceptionally brutal, experts say, even for a country used to regular burning.
Wildfires have scorched millions of acres of land across the country since October, destroying more than a thousand homes and killing at least 19 people, including three volunteer firefighters.
The most-affected state, New South Wales, which includes Sydney, Australia’s largest city, is having its worst fire season in 20 years.
Source: Cumulative sum based on NASA Terra and Aqua satellite data.
This chart was created using data from two NASA satellites, Terra and Aqua, which can detect the infrared radiation emitted by fires.
The last time New South Wales saw a similarly large area burn was in 1974, but those fires were in more remote areas, Ross Bradstock, director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, told The Guardian.
A spokeswoman for the New South Wales Rural Fire Service called the scale of the fires “unprecedented” so early in the season.

Source: Maxar Technologies, via Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite. Note: Map colors are a visualization based on sensor data.
Why Is This Year’s Fire Season So Brutal?
A combination of record-breaking heat, drought and high wind conditions have dramatically amplified the recent fire season in Australia.
This week, government records confirmed that 2019 was the country’s hottest and driest year on record:

Source: Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology
The last month of 2019 saw particularly low rainfall, and the country recorded its hottest day yet.
The combination of extremely dry and extremely hot conditions adds up to more powerful fires, said Crystal A. Kolden, a wildfire researcher at the University of Idaho.
“When the vegetation is just dry, it will burn,” she said. “But when you add this extreme heat, it magnifies the effect allowing it to burn that much more intensely.”

Source: Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to assess major research on global warming and related climate impacts, found that the number of days with high-risk fire weather are expected to increase across southern Australia as the world warms.
This year’s early and intense fire season is “a harbinger of what is to come,” Dr. Kolden said, and a “strong indicator” that some of the effects of climate change are already here.

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(AU) The Pain And Terror Of These Bushfires Cannot Be Held In A Single Human Heart

The Guardian - First Dog On The Moon

Why is our prime minister being so WEIRD about it
Cartoon by First Dog on the Moon
LARGE IMAGE
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04/01/2020

The Environment In 2050: Flooded Cities, Forced Migration – And The Amazon Turning To Savannah

The Guardian - 

Unless we focus on shared solutions, violent storms and devastating blazes could be the least of the world’s troubles. Civilisation itself will be at risk
What the world will look like in 2050 if we continue to burn oil, gas, coal and forests at the current rate? Composite: Guardian Design; Filippo Monteforte/AFP; Patra Kongsirimongkolchai/Getty Images/EyeEm; Alex Board/BBC NHU; deepblue4you/Getty Images/iStockphoto; NOAA/AFP/Getty Images; Mike Eliason/Santa Barbara County Fire Depart/AFP; Will Oliver/EPA 
"Good morning. Here is the shipping forecast for midday, 21 June, 2050. Seas will be rough, with violent storms and visibility ranging from poor to very poor for the next 24 hours. The outlook for tomorrow is less fair."
All being well, this could be a weather bulletin released by the Met Office and broadcast by the BBC in the middle of this century. Destructive gales may not sound like good news, but they will be among the least of the world’s problems in the coming era of peak climate turbulence. With social collapse a very real threat in the next 30 years, it will be an achievement in 2050 if there are still institutions to make weather predictions, radio transmitters to share them and seafarers willing to listen to the archaic content.
I write this imaginary forecast with an apology to Tim Radford, the former Guardian science editor, who used the same device in 2004 to open a remarkably prescient prediction on the likely impacts of global warming on the world in 2020.
Journalists generally hate to go on record about the future. We are trained to report on the very recent past, not gaze into crystal balls. On those occasions when we have to venture ahead of the present, most of us play it safe by avoiding dates that could prove us wrong, or quoting others.
Radford allowed himself no such safe distance or equivocation in 2004, which we should remember as a horribly happy year for climate deniers. George W Bush was in the White House, the Kyoto protocol had been recently zombified by the US Congress, the world was distracted by the Iraq war and fossil fuel companies and oil tycoons were pumping millions of dollars into misleading ads and dubious research that aimed to sow doubt about science.
Radford looked forward to a point when global warming was no longer so easy to ignore. Applying his expert knowledge of the best science available at the time, he predicted 2020 would be the year when the planet started to feel the heat as something real and urgent.
“We’re still waiting for the Earth to start simmering,” he wrote back in that climate-comfortable summer of 2004. “But by 2020 the bubbles will be appearing.”
The heat of the climate movement is certainly less latent. In the past year, the world has seen Greta Thunberg’s solo school strikes morph into a global movement of more than six million demonstrators; Extinction Rebellion activists have seized bridges and blocked roads in capital cities; the world has heard ever more alarming warnings from UN scientists, David Attenborough and the UN envoy for climate action, Mark Carney; dozens of national parliaments and city councils have declared climate emergencies; and the issue has risen further to the fore in the current UK general election than any before it. With only weeks to go until 2020, the bubbles of climate anxiety are massing near the surface.
Radford’s most precise predictions relate to the science. Writing after the record-breaking UK heat of 2003, he warned such scorching temperatures would become the norm. “Expect summer 2020 to be every bit as oppressive.” How right he was. Since then, the world has sweltered through the 10 hottest years in history. The UK registered a new high of 38.7C this July, which was the planet’s warmest month since measurements began.
Hostile world: tackling forest fires in China. Photograph: Costfoto/Barcroft Media
He also correctly anticipated how much more hostile this would make the climate – with increasingly ferocious storms (for the first time on record, there have been category 5 hurricanes, such as Dorian and Harvey, for four years in a row), intensifying forest fires (consider the devastating blazes in Siberia and the Amazon this year, or California and Lapland in 2018) and massive bleaching of coral reefs (which is happening with growing frequency across most of the world). All of this has come to pass, as have Radford’s specific predictions of worsening floods in Bangladesh, desperate droughts in southern Africa, food shortages in the Sahel and the opening up of the northwest passage due to shrinking sea ice (the huge cruise liner, Crystal Serenity, is among the many ships that have sailed through the Bering Strait in recent years – a route that was once deemed impossible by even the most intrepid explorers).
A couple of his predictions were slightly premature (the snows on Kilimanjaro and Mt Kenya have not yet disappeared, though a recent study said they will be gone before future generations get a chance to see them), but overall, Radford’s vision of the world in 2020 was remarkably accurate, which is important because it confirms climate science was reliable even in 2004. It is even more precise today, which is good news in terms of anticipating the risks, but deeply alarming when we consider just how nasty scientists expect the climate to become in our lifetime. Unless emissions are slashed over the next decade, a swarm of wicked problems are heading our way.
How wicked? Well, following Radford’s example, let us consider what the world will look like in 2050 if humanity continues to burn oil, gas, coal and forests at the current rate.
The difference will be visible from space. By the middle of the 21st century, the globe has changed markedly from the blue marble that humanity first saw in wondrous colour in 1972. The white northern ice-cap vanishes completely each summer, while the southern pole will shrink beyond recognition. The lush green rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and Papua New Guinea are smaller and quite possibly enveloped in smoke. From the subtropics to the mid-latitudes, a grimy-white band of deserts has formed a thickening ring around the northern hemisphere.
Coastlines are being reshaped by rising sea levels. Just over 30cm at this stage – well short of the 2 metres that could hit in 2100 – but still enough to swamp unprotected stretches of land from Miami and Guangdong to Lincolnshire and Alexandria. High tides and storm surges periodically blur the boundaries between land and sea, making the roads of megacities resemble the canals of Venice with increasing frequency.
On the ground, rising temperatures are changing the world in ways that can no longer be explained only by physics and chemistry. The increasingly hostile weather is straining social relations and disrupting economics, politics and mental health.
Generation Greta is middle aged. Their teenage fears of the complete extinction of the human race have not yet come to pass, but the risk of a breakdown of civilisation is higher than at any previous time in history – and rising steadily. They live with a level of anxiety their grandparents could have barely imagined.
The climate activist Greta Thunberg leads a school strike outside of the Swedish Parliament in 2018. Photograph: Michael Campanella/The Guardian 
The world in 2050 is more hostile and less fertile, more crowded and less diverse. Compared with 2019, there are more trees, but fewer forests, more concrete, but less stability. The rich have retreated into air-conditioned sanctums behind ever higher walls. The poor – and what is left of other species – is left exposed to the ever harsher elements. Everyone is affected by rising prices, conflict, stress and depression.
This is a doorway into peak climate turbulence. Global heating passed the 1.5C mark a couple of years earlier and is now accelerating towards 3C, or possibly even 4C, by the end of the century. It feels as if the dial on a cooker has been turned from nine o’clock to midnight. Los Angeles, Sydney, Madrid, Lisbon and possibly even Paris endure new highs in excess of 50C. London’s climate resembles Barcelona’s 30 years earlier. Across the world, droughts intensify and extreme heat becomes a fact of life for 1.6bn city dwellers, eight times more than in 2019. For a while, marathons, World Cups and Olympics were moved to the winter to avoid the furnace-like heat in many cities. Now they are not held at all. It is impossible to justify the emissions and the world is no longer in the mood for games.
Extreme weather is the overriding concern of all but a tiny elite. It wreaks havoc everywhere, but the greatest misery is felt in poorer countries. Dhaka, Dar es Salaam and other coastal cities are hit almost every year by storm surges and other extreme sea-level incidents that used to occur only once a century. Following the lead set by Jakarta, several capitals have relocated to less-exposed regions. But floods, heatwaves, droughts and fires are increasingly catastrophic. Healthcare systems are struggling to cope. The economic costs cripple poorly prepared financial institutions. Insurance companies refuse to provide cover for natural disasters. Insecurity and desperation sweep through populations. Governments struggle to cope.
“By 2050, if we fail to act, many of the most damaging, extreme weather events we have seen in recent years will become commonplace,” warns Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. “In a world where we see continual weather disasters day after day (which is what we’ll have in the absence of concerted action), our societal infrastructure may well fail … We won’t see the extinction of our species, but we could well see societal collapse.”
Huge waves at Porthcawl, Wales: there will be more extreme storms and longer droughts. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA 
Adding to the anxiety is the erratic temperature of the planet. Instead of rising smoothly it jolts upwards, because tipping points – once the stuff of scientific nightmares – are reached one after another: methane release from permafrost; a die-off of the tiny marine organisms that sequestered billions of tonnes of carbon; the dessication of tropical forests. People have come to realise how interconnected the world’s natural life-support systems are. As one falls, another is triggered – like dominos or the old board game, Mouse Trap. In some cases, they amplify one another. More heat means more forest fires, which dries out more trees, which burn more easily, which releases more carbon, which pushes global temperatures higher, which melts more ice, which exposes more of the Earth to sunlight, which warms the poles, which lowers the temperature gradient with the equator, which slows ocean currents and weather systems, which results in more extreme storms and longer droughts. It is also now clear that positive climate feedbacks are not limited to physics, but stretch to economics, politics and psychology. The Amazon is turning into a savannah because the loss of forest is weakening rainfall, which makes harvests lower, which gives farmers an economic motivation to clear more land to make up for lost production, which means more fires and less rain.
On our current course, carbon concentrations in the atmosphere will pass 550 parts per million by midcentury, up from around 400ppm today. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, explains how this stacks the odds in favour of disaster.
“By 2050, we’d be seeing events that are far more frequent and/or far stronger than we humans have ever experienced before, are occurring both simultaneously and in sequence.”
Her greatest concern is that food production and water supply systems could buckle under the strain, with dire humanitarian consequences in areas that are already vulnerable.
Generation Greta live with a level of anxiety their grandparents could barely have imagined
Hunger will rise, perhaps calamitously. The United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change expects food production to decline by 2% to 6% in each of the coming decades because of land-degradation, droughts, floods and sea-level rise. The timing could not be worse. By 2050, the global population is projected to rise to 9.7 billion, which is more than two billion more people to feed than today.
When crops fail and starvation threatens, people are forced to fight or flee. Between 50 and 700 million people will be driven from their homes by midcentury as a result of soil degradation alone, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimated last year. Fires, floods and droughts will prompt many others to migrate within and across borders. So will the decline of mountain ice, which is a source of meltwater for a quarter of the world’s population. The poorest will be worst affected, though they have the least responsibility for the climate crisis. For the US author and environmentalist, Bill McKibben, this injustice will make the greatest impact in 2050.
“Forcing people to move from their homes by the hundreds of millions may do the most to disrupt the world. And, of course, it’s a deep tragedy, because these are precisely the people who have done the least to cause the problem,” he says.
In 2050, climate apartheid goes hand-in-hand with increasingly authoritarian politics. Three decades earlier, worried electorates voted in a generation of populist “strongmen” in the hope they could turn back the clock to a more stable world. Instead, their nationalism made a global solution even harder to achieve. They preferred to focus on the immigration consequences of global heating rather than the carbon-capital causes. When voters realised their mistake, it was too late. The thugocracy refused to give up power. They no longer deny the climate crisis; they use it to justify ever-more repressive measures and ever-wilder efforts to find a technological fix. In the past 20 years, nations have tried volcano mimicking, cloud brightening, albedo modification and carbon dioxide removal. Most were expensive and ineffective. Some made weather circulation even less reliable. Powerful countries now threaten rivals not just with nuclear weapons, but with geo-engineering threats to block sunlight or disrupt rainfall patterns.
This is not an inevitable future. Unlike Radford’s prediction for 2020, this vision of 2050 factors in human behaviour, which is more volatile and less predictable than the laws of thermodynamics. Many of the horrors above are already baked into the climate, but our response to them – and each other – is not predetermined. When it comes to the science, the dangers can be substantially reduced if humanity shifts decisively away from business-as-usual behaviour over the next decade. When it comes to the psychology and politics, we can make our situation better immediately if we focus on hope in shared solutions, rather than fears of what we will lose as individuals.
That means putting faith in institutions, warning one another about risks, and treasuring shared eccentricities and traditions – a bit like the shipping forecast.
A storm is certainly brewing. The science is clear on that. The question now is how we face it.

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