There are far less than the outlands but it is not totally devoid of fire fuel. These unprecedented wildfires are due to three main things.. extreme temps..40/45c (107/113f), (blistering hot winds, low humidity), a prolonged dry spell and inadequate hazard reduction. Everything was bone dry.. a disaster just waiting to happen. A percentage of the fires have been man made too.. some deliberate even by firerys. Yes some pyromaniacs have infiltrated our fire services.
I wrote of this last week. One of these fire tornados flipped an 8 tonne fire truck on its roof..crushing one man to death and putting two more in hospital. Luckily they survived
We had even heavier rain last nite Patsy. Our first real summer thunderstorm. Spooked my dogs and kept me awake. Still hoping this creates a pattern from here on and stops my beloved 'harbor city' from running dry.
bullsh** mate. This bloke is having a loan of you. Some .. no more than 10% are human started..not all deliberate. He did get it spot on about the pinko greenies stopping some hazard deduction. Mostly protesting about livestock grazing in forests.
Propaganda. Sounds like a pinko greenie rag to me. Dont want the world to know that their twisted view of the world started many of these blazes. I read in the national papers that only 24 arsonists have been arrested in my state. Some for letting off fireworks in residential areas and starting small grass fires. We have had hundreds of fires burning for three months. Were these so called experts at the start of every one?
@Yvonne Smith yes 7 is a reliable news service. Are they referring to an Australia wide probe. My state has had the worst and most widespread blazes yet only 24 arrests have been made.. compared to many many more in other smaller states. No one can condone deliberate arson. It is an insidious crime perpetrated by a disturbed mind. The fact that some of those arrested were actually authorized fireys is particularly worrying.
What is shocking is how much some of these fires resemble the terrible fires we had in Southern California a year or two ago. The California fires literally exploded houses and melted vehicles, but left trees all around the houses untouched. There was a lot of speculation that many of these fires were deliberately set also. Sadly, even if the strike team can tell that the fire was arson, that does not mean that they will be able to arrest anyone for the crime, because any evidence would have already been burned up. If they have arrested at least 24 arsonists just in your state alone, then it sounds like they are doing a really good job of tracking down who was setting the fires. Here are a couple of pictures of the Australian fires that show the same scenario of houses literally destroyed with nothing left of them, and trees with green leaves still standing next to the burned homes.
California and Australia aren't the only places burning. In 2019, online platform Global Forest Watch Fires (GFW Fires) counted over 4.5 million fires worldwide that were larger than one square kilometer. That's a total of 400,000 more fires than 2018 and two and a half times as many as in 2001. The reasons fires start and take hold in the first place are complex. But experts are now pointing to a connection between the increasing number of fires and warmer ocean temperatures as a result of climate change. Man made greenhouse gases have raised Earth's average temperature by an estimated one degree Celsius since the 19th century. The sea surface has also warmed by 0.8 degrees Celsius. The warmer the ocean gets, the less energy and CO2 the water is able to absorb and store from the atmosphere. "[The ocean] is like air conditioning for the planet," explains Karen Wiltshire, the vice director of Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Marine and Polar Research. "The consequences of this could be devastating. If the sea continues to warm, it will have an enormous impact on the climate from extreme temperatures, storms and droughts to floods and late rainy seasons which disrupt ecosystems."