From 1988 to 2013 - they never ever learn

You would think in the twenty-five years, people would learn and change their behavior. From the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT):

Fuel loads � not climate change � are making Australia�s bushfires more severe

CFACT Context: The global news agency AFP reported on October 24 that �(e)nvironmental activist Al Gore has likened Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott�s insistence that wildfires are not linked to climate change to the tobacco industry claiming smoking does not cause lung cancer. The former U.S. vice president and Nobel laureate was commenting after Abbott this week dismissed UN climate chief Christiana Figueres� assertion that there was �absolutely� a connection between wildfires and rising temperatures. In the ensuing article, CFACT Advisor Dr. David Evans explains that the primary reason that fires are burning hotter and longer is the failure to clear brush from the forests � leaving a massive fuel load to fan the flames.

The bibles of mainstream climate change are the Assessment Reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) every six years or so. The latest was issued recently, in September 2013. Significantly, it backs away from the link between climate change and specific extreme weather events.

The IPCC says that connections of warming to extreme weather have not been found. �There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses [that is, adjusted for exposure and wealth of the increasing populations] have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change.� The IPCC claim only to have �low confidence� in their ability to project �changes in frequency and duration of megadroughts.�

The official report does say that �drought, coupled with extreme heat and low humidity, can increase the risk of wildfire,� but there is no drought in southeast Australia at the moment.

They also say �there is evidence that future climate change could lead to increases in the occurrence of wildfires because of changes in fuel availability, readiness of the fuel to burn and ignition sources.� Carbon dioxide is a potent plant fertilizer. According to NASA satellites there is more living plant matter today, with a 6% increase in the twenty years to 2000. So there is more to burn.

Some academic papers conclude that climate change might be a contributing factor (Cai, Nicholls); others say it is not (Crompton, Pielke).

If there was any specific evidence that linked climate change to bushfires or extreme weather events, we know they would be trumpeting it loudly. That they don�t speaks volumes.

Much more at the site -- the upshot is that the Australians have been practicing the same kind of forest management that we were doing in Yellowstone thirty years ago. FIRE=BAD and must be stopped. Undergrowth=GOOD and provides animal habitat. The problem is that the undergrowth is bone dry and highly flammable. In nature, it burns every few years leaving the healthy trees standing and yields wood ash and char to fertilize new growth. When it is allowed to accumulate, conditions shift to produce firestorms that burn healthy vegetation along with the undergrowth. This kind of catastrophic damage takes fifty years to begin to recover and seriously damages the ecosystem -- all because we meddled in something we did not understand. It is not "climate change", it is piss-poor forest management to blame. A number:

Current fuel loads are now typically 30 tonnes per hectare in the forests of southeast Australia, compared to maybe 8 tonnes per hectare in the recent and ancient pasts. So fires burn hotter and longer.

An excellent writeup on what led up to the Yellowstone disaster can be found at this paper from the National Park Service -- Chapter Seven (PDF):

Yellowstone and the Politics of Disaster
During the decade following the large, high-intensity Yellowstone fires of 1988, the National Park Service had to reinvent its approaches to fire and fire management. From the authorization of NPS-18 in the late 1970s, the NPS had faced fire as an operational assignment. Its responses reflected a powerful sense that the NPS could deploy resources in such a way as to make fire conform to management objectives. Professional fire planners and managers believed that by adhering to scientific principles derived from research, they could create a system that controlled fire and even turned it to the Service�s advantage. The belief was reasonable, but it failed to take into account the unusual instance � the once-in-a-generation event that could not be planned for. The Yellowstone fires were that event: a giant fire in a place so important to Americans that it shattered the fire management program as it had been conceived, illustrating not only the boundaries inherent in the implementation of policy, but the fundamental impossibility that existing strategies could meet the challenge presented by large-scale, out-of-control fires.

In essence, major fires such as the ones that occurred at Yellowstone in 1988 transformed fire policy from a science-based response to a political issue. As long as fire remained a threat but did not present an immediate and insurmountable danger, scientists and park managers controlled the terms of debate. They could frame the underlying science in practical and abstract forms to buttress their arguments for policy implementation. Against such a carefully reasoned, science-based strategy, those who opposed NPS fire policy sounded shrill, unreasonable and self-interested. Under such circumstances, professionals had the upper hand, supported by the growing body of research that seemed to illustrate the value of fire management.

But the convergence of events in 1988 challenged the entire fire management model of the National Park Service as well as its administration of the parks themselves. In the summer of 1988, 1,427,902 acres in the Greater Yellowstone area burned during almost four months of fire. That total included 793,880 acres in Yellowstone itself, almost one-third of the park. When a November snowfall finally put an end to the blazes, the nation�s first park, symbol for many of the country�s relationship to nature and its wisdom in preserving even a small part of it, had burned uncontrollably. In that fire, the National Park Service found its image singed, its mantel as the most beloved federal agency seriously tarnished by the public�s sense of betrayal over a circumstance beyond the Service�s control. The mission of the National Park Service was to protect nature; the �devastation� that the public saw on television seemed to belie their trust.

Thirty-three more pages but to the Park Service's credit, they did a volte-face and rewrote their firefighting policies. To bad that other Nations did not follow suit especially since the evidence was irrefutable.