Australia Wildfires Really Are A Global Big Deal

Firefighters in a losing battle with the Australian bushfires.

I know that for the past couple months, I keep returning to the extreme wildfires in Australia, which incredibly, keep getting worse and worse.

In fact, there's a lot of media reports and weather forecasts that indicate Australia will have the worst part of the crisis yet by Saturday, as a combination of near record heat, continued drought and erratic winds will stir up the giant fires even more. 

Mass evacuations continue amid a rising death toll, widespread destruction, and a section of Australia burned that is at least as big as Belgium. Dramatic videos are at the bottom of this post.

The real reason I keep bringing the fires up is the obvious situation that this is a huge new story.  It also is, if you'll forgive my oxymoron, a microcosm of the global climate crisis writ large

Yes, yes, I know the bushfire crisis in Australia is not 100 percent caused by climate change, as some of the more strident activists would have it.

Wildfires have always happened in Australia,  pretty much every summer. This year, a  natural cycle that has brought drought to Australia, which has exacerbated the  fire situation.  On top of that, more and more people have moved to the so-called urban-wildland interface, which has made for an increasing number of potential human fire victims.

Apocalyptic scene of a mother taking her two sons
(under the blankets) out in a boat on a lake to
escape the Australian bushfires. Photo by
Allison Marion.

But there's no question that climate change has tipped the scale to make what would have been a terrible fire season absolutely catastrophic. It you make a climate a little drier, a little hotter and a little windier, in this case through climate change, you get something like the current Australian cataclysm.

We've seen this type of thing all over the world, although Australia is among the most devastating examples. I suspect the terrible wildfires in California in 2017 and 2018 were made much worse by climate change.

On the opposite extreme, epic floods, like the Hurricane Harvey inundation of Houston and much of the rest of East Texas back in 2017, likely would not have been as bad if climate change had been absent.

Australia's current summer of fire also highlights the current state of climate denial among the world's so-called leaders.

The escalation in "natural" disasters - ones that might have happened anyway but in recent years were made worse by climate change - coincides with a global rise in right wing populist "leaders."

For some reason, some, but not all of these right wingers, like Donald Trump in the United States, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, and yes, Australia's Scott Morrison, are strident climate deniers, or at least, they don't give a damn about it.

Trump, Bolsonaro and Morrison have all labeled climate change as "fake news."

Bolsonaro went as far to falsely accuse climate activists, including Leonardo DiCaprio, of setting or  having people set Amazon forest fires last year to boost their political agenda  While Morrison has certainly not copied Bolsonaro, his poltical supporters have.

I notice on Twitter, where fake news really thrives, a lot of climate deniers have retweeted patently false "news" that 200 climate activists started the Australian fires to advance their agenda.

Australians awaiting rescue from a seaside beach as bushfires
close in on them.

As always these awful deniers take something that has a grain of truth and then totally falsify what's really going on.  It's true that a lot of the Australian fires were set by humans, either accidentally or on purpose. 

These obviously weren't climate activists setting this blazes. It was stupid people doing some outdoor burning despite all advice against it, or pyromaniacs who get their jollies out of inflicting immense pain and suffering by starting wildfires.

Australia's Morrison acknowledges the existence of climate change, but says the current conflagration isn't caused by it.  And he supports and encourages the nation's coal industry, and resists calls to downsize that industry.

So, the fires continue. The death toll will mount, more destruction will happen, and then when the fires are out, or more likely before then, we'll move on to our next climate-related disaster.

Some videos:

Here a firetruck is overrun by the fire front in New South Wales. Firefighters in the video try desperately to get under blankets to protect themselves from the intense heat. Happy spoiler: They survived



A woman attached a GoPro to her forehead as she battled to save her home from the fires:



This is Mallacoota, as residents were forced to flee to the beach, a risk of having to dive into the ocean to escape the flames. The blood red sky and the darkness in the video were taken during the day, a testimony to how scary and intense this crisis was and is:



Here's some aerial views to give you just a little taste of how extensive these wildfires are:



To give you an idea of how serious this is, Australian media have begun calling this, accurately, a humanitarian crisis. That's the kind of phrase you hear when a Third World country is having a catastrophe, not an advanced nation like Australia. Here's the video that shows this: