16/01/2020

James Murdoch Criticises Father's News Outlets For Climate Crisis Denial

The Guardian - 

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Fox cited for ‘frustrating’ coverage of Australian bushfires
James and Kathryn Murdoch have issued a statement criticising Rupert Murdoch’s firms for ‘ongoing denial’ on the climate crisis. Photograph: Joel Ryan/Invision/AP
Rupert Murdoch’s son has strongly criticised his family’s news outlets for downplaying the impact of the climate crisis, as bushfires continue to burn in Australia.
James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, issued a rare joint statement directly criticising his father’s businesses for their “ongoing denial” on the issue, which has been reflected in the family’s newspapers repeatedly casting doubt on the link between the climate emergency and the bushfires.
“Kathryn and James’s views on climate are well-established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well-known,” a spokesperson for the couple said, confirming a report in the Daily Beast. “They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary.”
James Murdoch was most recently the chief executive of the family’s 21st Century Fox entertainment business, leaving when it merged with Disney. He is making media investments through his own Lupa Systems company but continues to sit on the board of the family’s newspaper business, News Corp, which also owns the Times and the Sun.
The bushfires have focused attention on the likes of Andrew Bolt, a political commentator for News Corp’s Australian newspapers who is known for promoting the views of climate science deniers, and for his own attacks on “alarmists” and his derision of climate change science.
He also has a programme on the Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia, where he has criticised the “constant stream of propaganda” on the public broadcaster ABC about the role of the climate crisis in the bushfires.
“Politicians who should do better are out there feeding the fear and misinformation,” he said in a recent broadcast criticising politicians who said carbon emissions needed to be cut to avoid future fires. “As if that would stop a fire. You’d have to be a child like Greta Thunberg to believe that fairytale.”
US viewers have also heard commentary from Fox News presenters such as Laura Ingraham, who has said that “celebrities in the media have been pressing the narrative that the wildfires in Australia are caused by climate change”, before introducing guests who cast doubt on this interpretation.
James Murdoch’s criticism sheds light on the family’s internal rifts, amid speculation over his 88-year-old father’s succession plans. James’s older brother Lachlan is still actively involved in the family businesses as the US-based chairman and chief executive of the slimmed-down Fox Corporation, which owns Fox News.
Last year, Rupert Murdoch told shareholders “there are no climate change deniers” around his company and said his business was early to commit to “science-based targets to limit climate change” and was working to reduce its climate emissions.
However, he has been publicly critical about the “alarmist” approach to the issue. In 2015, he used his Twitter account to describe himself as a “climate change sceptic not a denier”.
Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp have all separately donated millions of dollars to bushfire recovery efforts in recent days, although the Daily Beast claimed the donations were made after it requested comment about James Murdoch’s statement.
James Murdoch has a long history of advocacy on environmental issues, inviting the former US vice-president Al Gore to present a version of his An Inconvenient Truth slideshow to Fox executives in 2006. At the time he was the heir apparent to the media empire and had been trusted with running BSkyB in London, where he would push environmental issues to the fore, working on ways to reduce the power used by Sky’s set-top boxes and insisting on using hybrid taxis long before such things were standard corporate behaviour.
Since stepping back from day-to-day roles with the family business at the end of 2018, the multibillionaire has made clear he feels uncomfortable about much of Fox News’ output and was unsuccessful in an attempt to cash-in his stock completely and make a clean break with the company – an effort that failed after Lachlan declined to buy him out.
Kathryn Murdoch has already set out the couple’s vision, telling the New York Times last year that she was increasingly focused on the issue of global heating: “There hasn’t been a Republican answer on climate change. There’s just been denial and walking away from the problem. There needs to be one.”
She said she was particularly moved to act after seeing Al Gore’s speech at the Fox event in 2006: “I decided to switch everything I was doing. I wanted to be able to look my children in the eye and say ‘I did everything I could.’”

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Opinion: The Climate Crisis – Sport Is Both Victim And Sinner

Deutsche Welle (DW) - Joscha Weber, DW Sports editor

At the Australian Open, a player struggles to breathe because of air pollution while Greta Thunberg challenges Roger Federer. Sport must face up to its responsibilities with regards to the climate, writes Joscha Weber.

Dalila Jakupovic is gasping for breath. After a rally, the Slovenian bends over in pain during a qualifying match for the Australian Open against the Swiss Stefanie Vögele. Jakupovic's struggles can be clearly heard through the microphones on the edge of the court.
Then it gets worse. She has to kneel down, hold her hand in front of her pained face and crouch, curled up on the blue floor of Court 3. Coaches and organizers rush to help, but there is little they can do except talk and calm her down. Finally the umpire announces that Jakupovic cannot continue. "Game, set and match Stefanie Vögele." It is the first retirement at the Australian Open due to the poor air quality caused by the country's devastating bush fires.
The climate crisis has reached international sport. Beyond a few appeals for donations, PR campaigns and the interjections of a few climate activists, the sporting world has done little more than take note of the issue.
But it is logical that the consequences of climate change and the discussion about the sustainable use of resources are now also affecting sports - after all, top athletes are not only victims of the climate crisis, as they are now in Melbourne, but are also partly responsible for it.
Athletes jet to competitions, PR appointments or training camps around the world. Big cars are part of the lifestyle of many sports icons. And now some are having to justify their sponsors. Climate activist Greta Thunberg has told tennis star Roger Federer to "wake up" via a retweet, because his sponsor Credit Suisse is financing industrial firms that rely on fossil fuels.
Athletes are heroes - but with special responsibilities
Federer has probably never thought much about this connection before, and many professional athletes will feel the same way. But that is exactly what is about to change. All over the world, young people in particular are demanding a more thoughtful approach to the environment, from everyone.
The world of top-class sport is now particularly exposed, even if its stars are otherwise celebrated as heroes. A high degree of integrity is expected of those heroes and if one of them errs through doping or cheating, the outcry is great. The same may now be the case for the environment. The public sometimes expects more from great sports stars than politicians.
The great popularity of sportsmen and women brings astronomically high salaries and advertising revenues. The price for this is the burden of always having to behave in a correct, socially desirable manner.
Sport can, sport must do more for the climate. If athletes travel to their competitions as often as possible in a climate-friendly way, many of their fans will imitate this. When sporting events with their huge numbers of visitors do without plastic cups, use energy from renewable sources or support climate-friendly local transport, this has a noticeable effect.

Protecting athletes better
And the organizers of sporting events must do more to protect athletes. Many sports take place in the open air and some athletes are already criticizing the Australian Open for the fact the Grand Slam is even going ahead despite the considerable air pollution caused by the fires.
So far there is no sign that major sporting events will be canceled due to the bushfires in Australia, neither the Australian Open in Melbourne nor the Tour Down Under cycling race around Adelaide. The financial pressure is apparently so great that the events are being held despite the worrying circumstances. As almost always in sports, the show must go on.

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(AU) 'Dystopian Future': Climate Change To Force Review Of Military's Role

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Climate change poses "a major security challenge for Australia" that experts warn has the potential to rapidly stretch the capability of the military, as demonstrated by the current bushfire emergency.
Michael Thomas, a retired army major, said "rising emissions will result in a more unstable and insecure world that will have far-reaching human, national and international security consequences", in an article published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on Tuesday.
No longer over the horizon: climate change is already creating challenges for Australia's military, including the current bushfire season. Credit: ADF/AP

"The bushfire crisis that’s unfolding across Australia provides some insight into what that dystopian world will look like," he said.
Major Thomas, who published a 2017 book on the security risks of climate change, said the fires that caused at least 27 deaths and burnt millions of hectares revealed the limits of Australia's forces to cope with traditional threats abroad and concurrent new ones at home.
"Climate change is talked about as a 'threat multiplier' but it's actually a 'burden multiplier'", he told the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
The Morrison government copped criticism for waiting until earlier this month to deploy 3000 dedicated reserve troops to assist with the bushfire relief despite major fires burning in some states since September.
It also dispatched the navy to assist in the evacuation of people stranded in Victoria's East Gippsland.
Major Thomas said "the bushfire crisis may be the moment that opens genuine but critically honest policy debate on climate change in Australia".
ADF Reservists preparing at Holsworthy Army Barracks in south-west Sydney earlier this month for deployment to respond to the unprecedented bushfires across the country. Credit: James Alcock
Rising sea levels and more intense storms not only threaten the stability of domestic and foreign communities, they also undermine the capability of Australia's own military to respond.
The type, location and frequencies of challenges for armed forces everywhere were already changing, with flow-on consequences for the equipment, training and structures they need, Major Thomas said.
"What was meant to be tomorrow’s security problem has been catapulted into the here and now," he said.
Major Thomas pointed to Australia's participation with South Pacific partners in 2018 in the Boe Declaration on Regional Security as a recognition by the government that defence forces have "a unique and important role" to play in a warming world.
However, while countries such as New Zealand had followed up with a defense assessment later that year and an implementation plan last month, the Australian government had made little public about the military's readiness to respond to climate change.
Major Thomas, who served in the military for 20 years, said the lack of a bipartisan political consensus in Australia - unlike in its partner across the Tasman - meant Australia's defense forces were largely absent from the public debate.
"The [ADF's] voice has been lost in the Australian debate," he said.
The government has committed some $70 billion for new submarines and joint strike fighters. In light of the emerging threats, Major Thomas said it should reconsider buying more landing craft - such as those used at Mallacoota in Victoria - or building a reserve fire-fighting or other disaster-relief capacity.
A spokesperson for Defence said the 2016 Defence White Paper identified climate change "as one of the causes of state fragility, a key driver of our security environment to 2035".
"Defence factors climate change considerations into our strategic planning for defence capabilities, estate, personnel and equipment, as well as related operational responses and preparedness," the spokesperson said.

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15/01/2020

(AU) Fire Inquiry Must Look At Climate Change

AFR - Michael Pelly

It's essential that climate change be part of an inquiry into the bushfires raging across the country, says former Supreme Court judge Bernard Teague.
Black Saturday royal commissioner Bernard Teague says the impact of climate change "needs to be looked at it in greater depth".  Eamon Gallagher
The former supreme court judge who ran the Black Saturday royal commission says it is essential that climate change impact be part of an inquiry into the 2019-20 bushfires and has warned against any move to restrict its terms of reference.
Bernard Teague told The Australian Financial Review he also supported an examination of state and federal protocols for disaster relief
Other lawyers said current roadblocks on federal assistance – a likely focus of the royal commission flagged by Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the weekend – could be overcome by relying on the implied nationhood power in the constitution, which gives the Commonwealth broad authority.
Mr Teague was a judge on the Supreme Court of Victoria from 1987 to 2008 before being tapped to run the inquiry into the Black Saturday fires of February 7, 2009, in Victoria that claimed 173 lives.
He said climate change had been "small beer" for his inquiry because of apparent consensus about its continuing impact.
"We had two hours on climate change – this is 10 years ago – because we could get a stack of scientists who would take one side and not one scientist was prepared to come before our commission and be cross-examined about climate change."
He said that in 2010 "everyone was saying there's only the prospect of worse fires in the future because of climate change".
"It needs to be looked at it greater depth in light of the experience of the past 10 years, which has only shown what everyone now accepts – well almost everyone – that it has an enormous impact that we need to better understand.
"It impacts on a lot of things, like controlled burning for example."
He said the inquiry needed to have the widest possible terms of reference and suggested there were a number of recently retired judges who would be candidates.
Mr Teague said it was better to have multiple commissioners, citing his own experience: "There were so many other perspectives they would bring to bear."
He said the Morrison government should brave the potential criticism that might arise with any examination of the roles of state and federal governments.
"If a government says 'these are the problems that are arising in the present situation and these are potential ways of dealing with them',  I think the community is going to be so much better off."
One issue for any inquiry will be the activation of defence forces. Mr Morrison said on Sunday that the compulsory calling up of 3000 Army Reservists to help in the fire recovery effort had pushed the Commonwealth to the "very edge" of  "extreme constitutional territory".
Mr Morrison said he would take a proposal for a royal commission to cabinet and that it also would include building better resilience and adaption to climate events such as fire, drought, floods and cyclones.

'States need to be consulted'
Fiona McLeod, SC, senior counsel for the Commonwealth at the Black Saturday royal commission, said there was a fundamental problem.
"If you look at the way Commonwealth aid has traditionally been provided, the States have to exhaust their resources – government, commercial and community – before they can ask for help," Ms McLeod said.
Ms McLeod agreed with University of Sydney Professor Anne Twomey that there were doubts about whether such action was supported by the defence power or the external affairs power, which were used to justify using the defence forces in humanitarian and disaster aid overseas.
Both said they felt the implied nationhood power under section 61 of the Constitution would support any deployment for disaster relief, but Professor Twomey added that proper protocols for co-operation with the states were needed.
"The states have the expertise in dealing with bushfires, while the Australian Defence Forces have the expertise in the logistics and management of disaster relief, so it is imperative that systems be developed for them both to work together effectively in a crisis,'' Professor Twomey said.
"It would be counter-productive for the Commonwealth to act unilaterally in calling out the troops, if they were getting in the way of firefighters. States need to be consulted before the troops are called out, so they can fill the greatest needs when they arise."
She added the move to call out the reserves was covered by the provision in section 28 of the Defence Act which covers "civil aid, humanitarian assistance, medical or civil emergency or disaster relief".
Professor Twomey said Section 119, which says the the Commonwealth "shall protect every state against invasion", could also be given a wide application.
Mr Teague said the Black Saturday inquiry had no limitations, in contrast to the Hazelwood Mine Fire Inquiry of 2015-16, over which he also presided.
When the final report offered "matter for further consideration" the state government ordered another inquiry, which led to a recommendations on the long-term rehabilitation of power plants and the impact on human health.
He said if there had been any progress, it would be that there had not been anything like the number of lives lost in recent weeks compered to the devastation of Black Saturday.

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(AU) Opinion: In Australia’s Raging Bushfires, A Climate-Change Warning To Its Leaders — And Ours

Los Angeles Times - Evan Karlik

Residents watch flames in Lake Tabourie, Australia. Brett Hemmings / Getty Images
Evan Karlik
Evan Karlik is a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy and an affiliate at Georgetown University’s Center for Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Studies. In 2018 he served as a defense fellow in the House of Representatives.
With more than 14 million acres in Australia blackened by bushfires, climate change is a glaring threat to Australians — and to the standing of their prime minister, Scott Morrison.
Distressed residents in fire-ravaged towns have rebuffed his handshakes and heckled his entourage. The nation’s capital, Canberra, rang in 2020 with the world’s worst air quality, causing airline cancellations and government office closures. Beach evacuations of stranded residents cornered between flames and sea now rank as Australia’s largest-ever peacetime maritime rescue operation.
U.S. firefighters feel kinship with their Australian brothers and sisters, and more than 100 have been dispatched to battle the blazes Down Under. While Americans are no strangers to wildfires, Washington would do well to note how Australia’s climate policies are entwined with this current crisis.
In 2000, an Australian parliamentary committee report acknowledged the country’s per capita carbon emissions were the highest in the world and highlighted the country’s acute climatic vulnerability. A 2013 report by the Climate Council, an independent Australian nonprofit, pointed to the increasing likelihood of high fire danger weather due to spiking temperatures, drought conditions and longer and more frequent heatwaves.
And in a November poll, 60% of Australians said they believed the country should be doing more to combat climate change.
But Australia’s reigning politicians have been deaf to these signals.
Greg Mullins, a former fire commissioner in the Australian state of New South Wales, recently told National Public Radio that the national government has been “missing in action in terms of leadership” and that Morrison “does not have his finger on the pulse of the nation.”
Morrison gleefully wielded a fist-sized chunk of coal on the floor of Parliament in 2017. A year and a half later, his right-wing party — incensed over proposed legislation that would have instituted energy sector emissions targets — ousted his predecessor and made fossil-fuel-friendly Morrison head of state.
Australian journalist Hugh Riminton has lamented the coal lobby’s grip on Canberra, calling his country “a burning nation led by cowards.” Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan compared the rabid bushfires to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster — another environmental catastrophe that foretold the demise of the existing, untenable political order — and likened Morrison and his “criminal course of inaction” to the decadent and disconnected Roman emperor Nero, who is famously said to have played a fiddle while flames leveled most of ancient Rome.
These domestic denunciations square with the persistent criticism of Australia from its regional neighbors. Pacific island countries are markedly vulnerable to climate change on account of sea level rise, ecosystem collapse due to ocean acidification and coral bleaching, and saltwater contamination of freshwater wells.
Enele Sopoaga, former prime minister of Tuvalu in Polynesia, scoffed at Canberra’s highly publicized Pacific Step-Up diplomatic initiative, which offers generous infrastructure financing, a work-visa program and new undersea communications cables “while you keep pouring your coal emissions into the atmosphere … and drowning my people into the water.” An official in Palau, 600 miles east of the Philippines, called Australia an “abusive spouse” that provides aid for climate mitigation projects while refusing to adopt meaningful emissions reductions.
Prior to the annual conclave of leaders at last year’s Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu, Rev. James Bhagwan pointedly reminded Australia’s prime minister that “he is setting foot in a country that could soon be under water.” The headline on his Sydney Morning Herald commentary said it all: “A climate plea to Scott Morrison from a churchman of the Pacific’s sinking nations.”
“No leader who claims Christian morality can allow this conduct on their watch,” Bhagwan wrote.
Present U.S. policy could benefit from such soul-searching. The White House’s abandonment of emissions targets — and combative legal action against states such as California that pursue their own fuel efficiency requirements or carbon cap-and-trade programs — demonstrate either complete obliviousness or categorical insensitivity to those affected by climate change.
For Morrison, the wrath of a traumatized Australian electorate may become evident at the ballot box. In the United States, legislators who acquiesce to how the Trump administration is undermining the 2015 Paris climate agreement and discouraging state-level climate initiatives could find themselves indicted during campaign season and punished at the polls for their dereliction and inaction.
Climate policy negligence will also undermine U.S. relations with Pacific island states.
Morrison’s “utterly tone deaf” defense of robust coal exports during the most recent Pacific Islands Forum meant Australia “upset its friends, opened the door further to China, and trashed its global reputation,” former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wrote last fall.
American climate policy requires a course correction, or it’s only a matter of time until the U.S. is pilloried in the strategically essential Pacific, leaving an influence vacuum for opportunistic Beijing. China is all too happy to tout itself as one of the first countries to sign the Paris agreement and to reiterate its pledge of stabilizing its carbon emissions over the next decade.
A heart-wrenching image of a charred juvenile kangaroo trapped against barbed wire captured the devastation of Australia’s bushfires and the bitterness of climate inaction. Distraught onlookers around the world took note. We can only hope that U.S. leaders did too.

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(AU) Australia's Wildfires Provide A Scorching Warning On Climate Change To The Rest Of Earth

USA TODAY - Editorial

Kangaroo, koala, livestock carcasses strewn along highways like it really is the end of the world. Yet Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is heading the wrong way: Our view
A mural depicting Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Melbourne on Jan. 7, 2020. James Ross/epa-EFE
Among global-warming skeptics, it used to be popular to mock environmentalists and climate scientists as Chicken Littles, forever frantic that the sky was falling.
That kind of lampooning has worn thin, given the relentless rise in global temperatures coupled, most recently, with hellish images of a fire-ravaged Australian continent: Skies cast in orange. The spectral image of the famed Sydney Opera House, lost behind smoke so thick that breathing is like inhaling a pack of cigarettes a day. A scorched region across Australia nearly the size of South Carolina.
Mountainous clouds of smoke extending 10 miles high that generate their own weather, triggering lightning without rain and on a course to circle the earth. Nearly 30 people dead since fires started in September; 2,000 homes destroyed.

Up to a billion animals dying
And the animals. A staggering estimate of up to a billion lost. Kangaroos, koalas, livestock. Carcasses strewn along highways like it really is the end of the world. The most searing and heart-wrenching disaster photograph shows the blackened, upright remains of a juvenile kangaroo, a joey, halted in flight by a fence, its arms still wrapped around the wire.
There's a warning in all of this about the direction of the planet.
No, climate change doesn't start wildfires. But its twin symptoms of persistent drought and hot weather create tinder-like conditions — particularly in southeast Australia with a climate not unlike that of California — and allow wildfires to rage out of control. Australia is in the third year of a punishing drought, and high temperature records were recently shattered with triple-digit heat.
Despite international commitments under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to curb the emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, created in large part by the burning of fossil fuels, CO2 levels in earth's atmosphere are greater than at any time in human history and are continuing to rise.
The results have been made plain not just with more destructive wildfires but also stronger hurricanes, record floods and rising seas from melting ice caps. Last year was the world's second hottest on record.

Australia and USA ranked last
Greenhouse gas emission must be curbed in the next decade if there is any chance of preventing average global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) beyond preindustrial levels, the Paris accord goal.
The independent Climate Change Performance Index ranks Australia and the United States dead last among nations on climate policy. The parallels are beyond troubling. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has scoffed at climate concerns by brandishing a lump of coal before Parliament and exhorting, "Don't be scared. Won't hurt you."
Australia is one of the world's leading exporters of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels contributing to greenhouse gases, and Morrison seeks to increase exports. While he hasn't gone so far as characterizing climate change as a hoax, as President Donald Trump has done, both administrations were blamed for stalling international negotiations last month in Madrid aimed at advancing worldwide emission-reduction goals.
Morrison's approval ratings are tanking as Australia burns. He was ridiculed for flashing a thumbs up from a beach in Hawaii as the fires grew in December. Demonstrations in Australia for climate justice are on the rise.
Earth is growing warmer, and there's no stopping that reality. But Americans, like their counterparts Down Under, can demand that their leaders heed the lessons of a burning continent and take the hard steps necessary to prevent even worse from happening.

The Australian Embassy in Washington declined to provide an opposing view to this editorial.

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14/01/2020

(AU) Explainer: What Are The Underlying Causes Of Australia's Shocking Bushfire Season?

The Guardian - 

Despite the political smokescreen, scientists are in no doubt that global heating has contributed to Australia’s fire emergency
Smoke from Australia’s unprecedented bushfires as seen from the International Space Station on January 4. Photograph: NASA Earth Observatory Handout/EPA
As Australia’s unprecedented bushfire season continues to unfold, competing arguments have been made about the principal causes of the human and environmental tragedy – particularly around the role of climate change.
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has acknowledged that climate change has had an influence on the fires and has defended his government’s climate record.
But Morrison has also said that “job-destroying, economy-destroying, economy-wrecking targets and goals” on climate change “won’t change the fact that there have been bushfires or anything like that in Australia”.
Backbench MP Craig Kelly denied any link between climate change and bushfires in a combative interview on British TV.
Conservative media have concentrated on other factors, such as the amount of hazard reduction burning carried out, or the activities of arsonists – a claim shown to have been inflated and misrepresented.
Bushfire experts say that in normal years hazard reduction is a way to control the behaviour of fires, but the changing climate is making it harder to carry out prescribed burns and, according to fire chiefs, it is not a “panacea” for extreme bushfires.
Here is what we know about the long-term influences on the bushfire catastrophe.

 Why has this bushfire season been so devastating?
Extreme heat and dryness are two important influencers of fire and, on both measures, 2019 was remarkable for Australia.
Australia experienced its hottest year on record in 2019, with average temperatures 1.52C above the 1961-1990 average. Our second hottest year was 2013, followed by 2005, 2018 and 2017.
New South Wales – one state hard hit by the bushfires – broke its record by a greater margin, with temperatures 1.95C above average, beating the previous record year, 2018, by 0.27C.
At a very basic level, rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere change the earth’s radiation balance, allowing less heat to escape.
Australia also had its driest ever year in 2019, with rainfall 40% lower than average, based on records going back to 1900. NSW also had its driest year.
A visualisation from Prof Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at the Australian National University, examines hot and dry years in Australia since 1910 and how they correlate with major bushfires.

An animated history of average maximum temperatures and rainfall in Australia since 1910.

Fire authorities and the Bureau of Meteorology look at the risk of bushfires using the forest fire danger index, a combined measure of temperature, humidity, wind speed and the dryness, but not the amount, of fuel on the ground.
Australia’s 2019 spring months of September, October and November were the worst on a record going back to 1950 for bushfire risk.

What about ‘natural’ weather patterns?
There have been two other meteorological patterns that helped generate the extreme conditions Australia has been experiencing, and both these “modes of variability” were in “phases” that made conditions worse.
The Indian Ocean dipole was in a “positive phase”, meaning the Indian Ocean off Australia’s north west was cooler than normal and the west of the ocean was warmer.
Positive dipole events draw moisture away from Australia and tend to deliver less rainfall.
But there is evidence that the extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are also impacting the dipole and another phenomenon, known as the southern annular mode (SAM).
A 2009 study found that positive dipole events “precondition” the south of the country for dangerous bushfire seasons and that these events were becoming more common.
A 2018 study in the journal Nature Communications found the number of extreme positive dipole events goes up as climate heating continues.
At 1.5C of global warming, the frequency of extreme positive dipole events doubles compared with the pre-industrial period.
The southern annular mode was in a “negative phase” as the bushfires took hold in November and December. This phase was generated by a sudden warming event in the stratosphere above Antarctica.
This caused westerly winds to track further north, blowing hot air across the continent into fire-prone areas, further fanning flames.
Abram’s own research has found that the SAM is being pushed towards more positive phases which, when they occur in Australia’s winter, tend to dry the continent.
Prof Matt England, of the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre, said: “These modes of variability are not changing in a way that’s good for south-east Australia.
“We know with certainty that we are stacking the dice for the chances of these extreme drought years because of the changes in the modes.”

What has happened to Australia’s fire weather?
Scientists have already detected a trend towards more dangerous fire weather in Australia.
A 2017 study of 67 years of FFDI data found a “clear trend toward more dangerous conditions during spring and summer in southern Australia, including increased frequency and magnitude of extremes, as well as indicating an earlier start to the fire season”.
That trend continued in 2019, which was the riskiest year for bushfires on a record going back to 1950.

What role is climate change playing in the risk of fire?
A study of Queensland’s historic 2018 bushfire season found the extreme temperatures that coincided with the fires were four times more likely because of human-caused climate change.
In advice issued in November 2019, Australia’s National Environmental Science Program was unambiguous.
“Human-caused climate change has resulted in more dangerous weather conditions for bushfires in recent decades for many regions of Australia.
“Observations show a trend towards more dangerous conditions during summer and an earlier start to the fire season, particularly in parts of southern and eastern Australia.
“These trends are very likely to increase into the future, with climate models showing more dangerous weather conditions for bushfires throughout Australia due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Despite such unequivocal statements, Scott Morrison has been irritated that interviewers have asked about his government’s record on climate change, saying it was “just ridiculous” to link “any one emissions reduction policy to any of these fires”.
Morrison’s argument that no emissions reduction policy can be tied to individual events is spurious, as the same argument could be put for any and all efforts to reduce emissions anywhere in the world, at any time.
Scientists also believe that 2019 was a “stand out” year in Australia for the formation of extreme bushfires that became “coupled” with the atmosphere, generating their own lightning and gusty, violent and unpredictable winds. Rainfall is replaced with blackened hail and embers that can be shot out over distances of 30km.
Another study has found that global heating will create more favourable conditions for these “pyroCB” storms to form in Australia.

What about the future?
Climate studies show that conditions in Australia for extreme bushfires will only get worse as more greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere.
On Friday afternoon the president of the Australian Academy of Sciences, Prof John Shine, said Australia would need to further improve its climate modelling ability and understanding of fire behaviour to mitigate against the extreme events that would become more frequent and intense because of climate change.
“Australia must take stronger action as part of the worldwide commitment to limit global warming to 1.5° C above the long-term average to reduce the worst impacts of climate change,” he said.
England said: “We are loading the dice for more and more of these summers. But we have had knowledge of this for some time.
“What we have seen in Australia this year will just be a normal summer if we warmed the planet by 3C. And an extreme summer would be even worse than we’ve seen now.”
Abram said: “Even from my perspective, I am surprised by just how bad 1C of warming is looking.
“It’s worrying that we are talking about this as a new normal, because we are actually on an upward trajectory. Currently the pledges in the Paris agreement are not enough to limit us to 1.5C – we are looking more like 3C.”

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