Bushfires

Herald disbelieve unbelievers

10/01/2020 4:10 pm \ 20 Comments \ by Richard Treadgold

A brain-dead editorial, a fresh view of CO₂, an amazing letter, the kitten and the blue whale.

An editorial in Tuesday’s Herald ($) begins:

Amazing that he somehow knows what is discussed not only in “most households” but in “other social gatherings,” though it sounds to me like projection. The editorial goes on to conflate our discoloured sky, the scale of the bush fire outbreaks and the heat at the Melbourne cricket as reasons we ought not doubt we’re causing dangerous warming. It says we not only saw but felt the heat of the bush fires in New Zealand (which, 1200 km away, pushes the barrow a mite far). Preposterously, it ends: “The sun was so sizzling it became a wonder anything combustible was not catching fire.” But maybe Auntie Herald was trying to crack a funny. Continue Reading →

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Bushfires, Global warming, NZ Herald

Herald silencing climate sceptics

08/01/2020 1:48 pm \ 4 Comments \ by Richard Treadgold

Click to read the letters.

The Herald printed these letters on Saturday. Here is the letter (now slightly altered) I sent them that day, still unpublished as far as I know. The word count had to be under 200 words.

One cannot say much in just 200 words, but newspapers make it harder by not allowing multiple replies to multiple letters. Hence my achievement in replying to four letters, with extreme brevity, in the presence of the enemy and under fire from letter-writers on the one hand and journalists on the other, surely all but deserves the VC. Though some will demur. Continue Reading →

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Bushfires, Global warming, NZ Herald

Fighting fires with fire

31/12/2019 6:33 pm \ Leave a Comment \ by Viv Forbes

Media Release — Holiday reading

The Power of the Torch
There can be few if any races who for so long were able to practice the delights of incendiarism.
Geoffrey Blainey “Triumph of the Nomads – A History of Ancient Australia.” (Macmillan 1975)

The fire-lighter was the most powerful tool that early humans brought to Australia.

Fires lit by aboriginal men and women created the landscape of Australia. They used fire to create and fertilise fresh new grass for the grazing animals that they hunted, to trap and roast grass-dwelling reptiles and rodents, to fight enemies, to send smoke signals, to fell dead trees for camp fires, to ward off frosts and biting insects, and for religious and cultural ceremonies. Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with frequent burn-offs. Continue Reading →

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Australia, Bushfires, Climate Realists

Letters to the Editor

11/09/2019 1:45 pm \ 16 Comments \ by Richard Treadgold

Bushfire Sense and Nonsense

To the Editor
Climate Conversation Group

11 September 2019

Bushfires are normal events in this season in tropical and sub-tropical latitudes of the southern hemisphere — in Australia, Africa and South America. Even Captain Cook noted many fires in Eastern Australia in 1770, long before the era of “global warming” hysteria. Continue Reading →

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Australia, Bushfires, Carbon Sense, Letters to the editor

Science goes up in rain forest smoke

30/08/2019 11:18 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Richard Treadgold

Source: Science Goes Up In Rain Forest Smoke – The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

You could destroy all of the world’s forests and it would hardly affect our oxygen supply. In fact you could destroy every living thing on Earth and still not dent it because our atmosphere of 20.9% oxygen is the gift of geologic time, slow to build up and we have enough to last millions of years. Yet this idea of the world’s lungs and of atmospheric oxygen needing to be refreshed and replenished, ideas unsupported by science, is everywhere.

Look how much we had to go through for science to wrench our minds free of what is “obviously true” and seek proof. Is climate science, or at least the public side of it, immune from normal scientific standards? And where are the high profile, “public” scientists setting the record straight, highlighting that the Amazon rain forests are not the lungs of the world?

– Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor

BY THE WAY: To open the comment window, click the post title.

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Amazon, Bushfires, Forests

Greens about-face on Tasmania safety burn-offs

09/01/2013 9:45 pm \ 8 Comments \ by Richard Treadgold

A homestead burns in Tasmania. Would the Greens seriously sacrifice this home for crayfish?

Australia endures regular bushfires. They destroy property and kill people and wildlife, but they’re necessary for the survival of various plants and trees.

The most important tool in managing bushfires to help ensure they don’t become monster conflagrations is controlled burnoffs in the cooler months — it’s really the only tool, since burning is the only practical way to destroy undergrowth and dead timber. That way, when the fires arise in the hot season they are not so large and damaging.

Burnoffs have a fascinating history. They’ve been practised since Europeans arrived in Australia, and of course the Aborigines, who started the burnoffs thousands of years ago, taught them how to do it. Since then the application of Western science has improved our understanding of the bush.

This week, on the Tasmanian Greens web site, in response to “a few queries about the Greens’ policy on fuel reduction burns,” somebody signing himself “Greens staff” claimed that the Party supports “fuel reduction burns as a vital tool in protecting lives and property in all land tenures including National Parks.”

But it’s only two years ago that they wanted to shut them down. Continue Reading →

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Australia, Bushfires, Greens

Greens win, so Tasmania burns

09/01/2013 2:45 pm \ 26 Comments \ by Richard Treadgold

Miranda Devine Blog, Daily Telegraph.

Tuesday, January 08, 2013
h/t Andy Scrase

First

It’s nothing to do with the climate.

WHEN Julia Gillard toured fire ravaged parts of Tasmania on Monday she couldn’t resist opportunism – using the calamity to push a climate change agenda.

“As a result of climate change we are going to see more extreme weather events,” she said.

But the fact is Australia gets hot in summer – sometimes very hot – and if there is fuel on the ground it will burn. The more fuel, the wilder the fire.

Greens are environmentally disconnected

Green activists are mostly city dwellers with little understanding of the natural environment — regardless of how much they talk about it. How else could they put so much bush ecosystem, human property and human life at risk? Why did they go out of their way to meddle with well-tested systems of fire management that were working? Why do we listen to them? Continue Reading →