Much of the world's focus at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 was on the massive heat waves and fires that afflicted the country of Australia. Multiple reports have suggested that over 1 billion animals have died in the blazes. Did a change in climate play a role in this? The answer is not a simple one — it never is — because there are other factors involved that should not be overlooked. But there is sufficient evidence to implicate a warming, drying climate in the heat waves and fires that the island continent has been experiencing.
For starters, Australia suffered from a massive heatwave. Obviously heat waves are more likely in the warming world. But what about the fires themselves? In a warming world, wet areas tend to get wetter and dry areas tend to get dryer. A regrettably prophetic 2016 study had suggested that California was becoming more vulnerable to forest fires due to a warmer and drier climate, well before the fires that afflicted the state over the last two years. And as it turns out, a paper concerning bushfires in southeastern Australia and their connection with climate change was published in 2007. It stated, “A study conducted in 2005 examined the potential impacts of climate change on fire-weather at 17 sites in southeast Australia. It found that the number of ‘very high’ and ‘extreme’ fire danger days could increase by 4-25% by 2020 and 15-70% by 2050.” So the potential for fires to get worse in Australia as the climate warms has been known and documented for at least a decade.
But other factors have exacerbated the extent and damage of this summer’s fires. One factor is natural: a periodic oscillation called the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). In the positive phase of the IOD, warm waters off the African coast lead to high rainfall in Africa, relatively cool and dry conditions in Indonesia, and relatively hot and dry air in Australia. That is the present phase of the IOD, making it an important contributor to the fire season. But there is also the factor of human carelessness and stupidity. Much press has been devoted to the large number of fire-related arrests in Australia over the last couple of months, including over 40 deliberate fires and well over a hundred more accidental fires. While that behavior is inexcusable, it is also not unusual; a 2009 survey by the Australian Government concluded that “between 2001–02 and 2006–07, the number of bushfires in Australia varied from approximately 46,000 to 62,000 per year, with an average of nearly 54,000 fires per year. This agrees quite closely with the average of nearly 52,000 fires per year calculated by the Australian Institute of Criminology using data from fire agencies from 1995–06 to 2005–06. It is estimated that 50 percent of fires are either deliberately lit or suspicious in origin.” This leads to two important conclusions. The first is that people directly affect the number of bushfires that get started, just like they played a role in the California wildfires. The second is that a normal amount of human activity cannot begin to account for the extraordinary extent of the damage that this summer’s Australian fires have caused.
But if we are talking about the effects of a changing world on Australia, it is important to acknowledge how the politics and media of Australia are not helping the situation. This past year, the Australians held an election where climate change was very clearly on the agenda. The party that wanted to do something about climate change lost to the party that didn’t. Why did this happen? Australian voters were more fearful of the consequences of doing something than they were the consequences of doing nothing. This happened despite the heat waves the country has recently experienced, and the Great Barrier Reef suffering massive bleaching events in the past couple of years to the point that it is in danger of dying altogether if the planet continues to warm. This fear of the cost of acting against climate change has been fueled in part by coal interests, predictably, but also the media -- especially Rupert Murdoch (the owner of News Corp. which runs Fox News in the USA), who owns 57% of the newspapers sold in Australia. (That statistic comes for a fairly old study, to be fair, but there's no reason to think that percentage has shrunk in the meantime.) That is a lot of control over a free press for one person to exert.
In 1998 the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, known for their advocacy of aboriginal land rights and their environmental activism, released a concept album called Redneck Wonderland about the state of Australia at the time. The album was prescient in many ways about how politics would change not only in Australia, but also in places like the United States and the United Kingdom, in the subsequent two decades. A song from that album called “Comfortable Place on the Couch” describes how people sit on the couch and absorb whatever their TV channel or newspaper (or website, if you bring it to the present) of choice tells them, without actually going out into the world and experiencing it for themselves. In the chorus, Peter Garrett sings “Some say the truth is what you see, I know the truth is what you feel” — predating Stephen Colbert’s more concise expression “truthiness” by a few years, and also predicting people’s stubborn indifference to what is going on right in front of their faces. In many ways, this sums up what Australia has become today. Sydney is burning, the koalas are in danger of going extinct, the Great Barrier Reef is dying, and Australians reelected the people who want to sell a billion people in India all the coal that they can burn. As a climate scientist, I can only hope that the rest of the world doesn't wait till the change is right in front of them before they act to stop it.
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