UPDATE:: http://bushfirefront.com.au/impacts-of-bushfires/occasional-papers
Two myths have emerged about climate change and bushfire management and are beginning to circulate in the media and to be adopted as fact by some scientists:
1. Because of global warming, Australia will be increasingly subject to uncontrollable holocaust-like “megafires”.
2. Fuel reduction by prescribed burning must cease because it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus exacerbating global warming and the occurrence of megafires.
Both statements are incorrect. However they represent the sort of plausible-sounding assertions which, if repeated often enough, can take on a life of their own and lead eventually to damaging policy change.
Maybe the weather is getting hotter and dryier because of Global Warming.
Maybe we can do something about that. Maybe we should.
This is an issue that requires local, national & international action.
The challange that was put up on Twitter was - SHOW ME that the GREEN have opposed back burning.
Well as always, the GREEN Party is careful to avoid such out right claims.
But
what I can show you is a history of people complaining about
environmental activists interfering in the management of fuel load in
National Parks & other areas.
In a nutshell Two Views
THE GREEN VIEW
The extent of green opposition to hazard reduction was
clear in the days following the Canberra tragedy. The NSW Nature
Conservation Council on January 21 denounced the practice as "futile"
and a "knee-jerk reaction". The NCC chairman, Rob Pallin, said: "People
who claim that hazard reduction burning is a cure- all for bushfire risk
are either fooling themselves or deliberately trying to fool the
public."
THE CSIRO VIEW
The
CSIRO's principal research scientist, Phil Cheney, Australia's foremost
bushfire researcher, also blames the intensity of the fires on the fact
that, "for the last 30 years there has been a continuing decline in
operational prescribed burning". He said yesterday the January fires
were "a truly historic event [producing] probably the most extreme,
widespread and continuously burnt area in living history".
And
the reason history was made? "Really the only thing that has changed is
burning practices." The gradual removal of grazing stock from mountain
areas had also allowed undergrowth to build up, he said.
The above views came from 2003 http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/07/1052280321826.html
THE FOLLOWING CAME FROM Hairyman Bushcraft - THANKS MATE!
2009 Green ideas must take blame for deaths
Scott Gentle, the Victorian manager of Timber Communities Australia
Gentle
complained of obstruction from green local government authorities of
any type of fire mitigation strategies. He told of green interference at
Kinglake - at the epicentre of Saturday's disaster, where at least 147
people died - during a smaller fire there in 2007.
Dr
Phil Cheney, the former head of the CSIRO's bushfire research unit and
one of the pioneers of prescribed burning, said yesterday if the
fire-ravaged Victorian areas had been hazard-reduced, the flames would
not have been as intense.
Goonoo 2007
volunteer firefighters bulldozing a control line were obstructed by
National Parks and Wildlife Service employees who had driven from Sydney
to stop vegetation being damaged.
The poor
management of national parks and state forests in Victoria is
highlighted by the interactive fire map on the website of the Department
of Sustainability and Environment. Yesterday it showed that, of 148
fires started since mid-January, 120 started in state forests, national
parks, or other public land, and just 21 on private property.
2009 You can't see the danger for the trees
So
fearful are many Blue Mountains residents at the prospect of a
catastrophic bushfire to rival Victoria's February disaster that their
MP, Phil Koperberg, has had to call two public meetings next week to
address their safety concerns.
"People used to
say 10 tonnes of ground fuel per hectare was excessive," says Don Nott,
66, a Springwood real estate agent, life member of the Winmalee fire
brigade and former group captain of the Blue Mountains Rural Fire
Service (RFS). "Here we have 30 tonnes per hectare. We're living on a
time bomb."
He says authorities and green
groups pay only lip service to allowing local brigades to light
controlled fires in the cooler months to burn off ground fuel - a
process known as "hazard reduction" or "prescribed burning".
"Over
the years the whole process of getting approval has become so
bureaucratic and convoluted … with so much paperwork and so many
restrictions about when you can light or can't light, it has made it
virtually impossible."
At the royal commission
into the Black Saturday fires, counsel assisting, Jack Rush, has
acknowledged the importance of burning off ground fuel.
Whether
or not you go along with the green view that global warming played a
crucial role in the fire intensity, what we do know is we aren't going
to stop global warming before summer. We have control only over ground
fuel.
2007 Firefighters' anger still burning
Two
weeks ago, as a bushfire was raging through the Goonoo Community
Conservation Area, an angry showdown between Rural Fire Service
volunteers and National Parks and Wildlife Service employees threatened
to derail firefighting efforts.
The streets are abuzz with the
story of how, at the height of the blaze, greenie NPWS workers drove
their vehicles in front of a bulldozer driver trying to clear a
firebreak in order to stop him damaging any more vegetation.
2005 Burning issue that gave fire chief his political kickstart
Green
ideology - opposed to any human interference with nature, such as
systematic hazard-reduction burning - has increasingly obstructed proper
bushfire management.
Bushfire brigade volunteers who once efficiently managed their patch of turf were emasculated.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/miranda-devine/burning-issue-that-gave-fire-chief-his-political-kickstart/2006/11/05/1162340090516.html
2003 - CSIRO Said Hazard reduction did not prevent fires, but it kept them manageable.
The
CSIRO's principal research scientist, Phil Cheney, Australia's foremost
bushfire researcher, also blames the intensity of the fires on the fact
that, "for the last 30 years there has been a continuing decline in
operational prescribed burning". He said yesterday the January fires
were "a truly historic event [producing] probably the most extreme,
widespread and continuously burnt area in living history".
And
the reason history was made? "Really the only thing that has changed is
burning practices." The gradual removal of grazing stock from mountain
areas had also allowed undergrowth to build up, he said.
The
amount of fuel on the ground had a quantifiable effect on the speed and
intensity of a fire, combined with weather and slope variables, said
Cheney. If ground fuel was kept under control, with regular cool,
controlled burns in winter, a fire would usually peter out in a eucalypt
forest. Hazard reduction did not prevent fires, but it kept them
manageable.
2002 The bushfire disaster inquiry seems intent on hearing only a limited range of views.
The
parliamentary inquiry into the Christmas bushfire disaster is in danger
of becoming a farce designed to exclude anyone with a view contrary to
the Government's. Submissions blaming inadequate hazard reduction by NSW
authorities have been mislaid, committee members remain in the dark and
major players in land management, such as State Forests, which
advocates prescribed burning, have been ignored.
One
committee member said yesterday that until a forester called him to ask
why he had not been asked to appear at the inquiry, he was not even
aware that State Forests had submitted a detailed, thick, bound report
setting out the scientific case for regular hazard reduction to minimise
bushfire devastation. What's more, he has had no say in who the
committee has called as witnesses.
Price said
yesterday he did not expect a submission from Cheney and had not
invited one, as federal organisations such as the CSIRO would not be
expected to participate in state inquiries.
WANT SOME REAL SCIENCE:
Managing fire
If
we want to reduce fire intensity and make fire suppression safer and
easier we need to accept that it is the dry undergrowth and dead leaf,
bark and twig litter that provides the fuel for bushfires, and use
prescribed fire to reduce fuel loads.
How does prescribed burning reduce fuel loads and fire hazards?
CSIRO's Project Vesta studied the characteristics of the behaviour
and spread of high-intensity bushfires in dry eucalypt forests under dry
summer conditions.
Project Vesta found that reducing fuel loads
by prescribed burning reduces the rate of spread, flame height and
intensity of a fire, as well as the number and distance of spot fires,
by changing the structure of the fuel bed and reducing the total fuel
load.
Some Other Reading:
http://www.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/
SPECIFICALLY www.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/getdoc/...6522.../EXP.018.001.0002
YES
a.
Prescribed burning is always effective in reducing fuel loads, and
thus mitigating bushfire risk, for a minimum of 3--‐5 years following
its application to the majority
of eucalypt forest types in Southern Australia.
