Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2020 10:47:36 GMT -5
Note to Alabama Cowboy and the climate change deniers regarding Australia's recent historic, record-breaking temperatures and high winds: You can't start a fire with wet wood. If you don't believe me, try it some time.
Phil Anschutz (Washington Examiner) and other corporate U.S. media owners (Fox, AOL) with YUGE fossil fuel industry assets are pushing the false narrative that Australia's current continent-wide disaster is not a result of their historic heatwave and drought of 2019-- but merely caused by arsonists. Yeah, right... And America's brainwashed, Fox News-watching climate-change deniers have immediately seized on this bogus fossil fuel industry narrative.
Australia’s Wildfire Catastrophe Isn’t the “New Normal”. It’s Much Worse Than That.
“These are the things that keep us up at night as climate scientists,” says Michael Mann.www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/01/michael-mann-australias-wildfires-podcast-climate-change/
January 8, 2020
One of the most prominent scientists studying climate change is Michael Mann, a climatologist and atmospheric science professor at Penn State University who has been a leader in explaining the contribution that human behavior has made in creating and exacerbating the climate crisis. He was one of the scientists who created the hockey stick graph, a popular visualization of mean global temperatures of the past several centuries, showing a sudden jump starting in the 20th century.
During his sabbatical year, Mann decided to visit Australia to study the effects of climate change on the scene of bleaching coral reefs and extreme weather events. He didn’t plan for his visit to coincide with the catastrophic wildfires, but he’s now found himself at what he calls “the front lines”.
“There is no precedent for the scale and speed at which these brushfires are spreading,” Mann tells the Mother Jones Podcast. “It’s almost like we’re being given a vision for our future if we don’t act on climate.”
To better understand the forces behind this season’s fires, Mother Jones’s James West, who happens to be Australian, spoke with Mann for this week’s edition of Mother Jones Podcast:
Since September, the combination of soaring temperatures and a severe drought has triggered wildfires across Australia that have enveloped more than six times the land burned during California’s devastating 2018 wildfire season. The current blazes encompass an area about the size of Scotland and have released an estimated 200 million tons of carbon dioxide—equivalent to about 40 percent of the country’s annual average carbon emissions—into the atmosphere above the state of New South Wales, where the fires have been the most devastating. With more than 100 separate fires still burning, the end isn’t anywhere in sight. Some estimates have wildfires continuing for months into 2020.
“We’re being given a vision for our future if we don’t act.”
The consequences are only starting to be tallied: At least 25 people have been killed, and about 3,000 military personnel have mobilized to assist in the evacuation of about 100,000 residents across NSW and Victoria. The toll on the ecosystem remains less clear, but a widely reported estimate puts the number of wildlife killed at 480 million, not including frogs, bats, or insects.
Meanwhile, the Australian government is led by conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has deep ties to the coal industry and a history of indifference toward climate change. His government, critics say, belatedly has allocated $1.4 billion to fire recovery efforts, buttressed with a promise that “whatever it costs, we will ensure the resilience and future of this country.” For many Australians, the fire has diminished the value of the prime minister’s word—he’s been criticized for vacationing in Hawaii while the wildfires were in full force in December. During public appearances, hecklers haven’t minced words, calling him “an idiot.” Morrison’s indecisive behavior on the fires flies in the face of the scientific assessment that climate change has been a major contributor to their intensity.
A transcript of the Mother Jones Podcast interview has been edited for clarity and length below:
Michael Mann, thanks for joining the Mother Jones Podcast. Now it just happens that you’re in Australia. Tell us why.
I’m going to be doing research here with some other climate scientists at the University of New South Wales trying to understand the linkages between climate change and extreme weather. Of course, I’ve arrived at a time when Australia is seeing unprecedented extreme weather. It’s a tragedy what’s playing out here. And yet it feels oddly fortuitous that I’m here on the front lines to observe and talk about it.
This is like a real-life everyday laboratory for you to see this extreme, unprecedented event take place.
Absolutely. It’s one thing to make model projections and study data, but it’s something else when you see it up front, playing out in real time. Australia may soon break new all-time records [for heat]. It’s not going to help that wildfires continue to spread across this continent.
We’ll get to this science in more detail in a moment, but I just wanted to get what you saw and what you felt when you were in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, somewhere I’m really familiar with. As a kid I’d go there quite a lot. You were there, and what did you see?
We were saddened to arrive, expecting to see these remarkable vistas, this expanse of temperate rainforest that’s framed by these ridges and mountains in the background. And the bluish tinge comes from the so-called terpenes, chemicals that are emitted from the eucalyptus trees that actually absorb and scatter light in a particular way that gives it sort of this bluish tint. But all we saw was brown smoke looking down into the valleys.
