Australian Mega-fires are Not Caused by Climate Change According to Expert Jason Morrison, 2GB Broadcaster

“… Global warming is going to have some terrible, terrible consequences, and one of those terrible consequences are going to be mega-fires.” David Bowman, Professor of Forrest Ecology, University of Tasmania

Yesterday (Monday 9, 2009), Jason Morrison of 2GB while broadcasting live from the bushfire disaster in Whittlesea, Victoria, he introduced weather and fire expert David Bowman of the University of Tasmania. Sadly for Morrison, he had not done his homework on Bowman or else he would have realised that the expert was not going to agree with his tirade that the current fire disaster is not connected to climate change.

Morrison opened by condemning Greens Leader Bob Brown’s timing of comments that the disaster demonstrates the effects of climate change, as it was insensitive to use such horror for ideological point scoring. The problem with Brown, according to Morrison is that he, like all people who are convinced by the overwhelming body of evidence in support of the existence of man made global warming is that they are not open minded; that they boorishly ignore the facts in an ideological crusade.

Bowman agreed that right now, while the rescue operation is still underway may not be the most sensitive time for such comments. He then insisted that in a months time that such issues must be addressed. Unperturbed, Morrison continued with his attempts to put words of climate change denial into the mouth of Bowman. Finally he cracked and put it bluntly: these fires are consisted with predictions of climate change.

Morrison attacked with his ‘closed mind’ argument again, claiming he would happily debate Bowman but he did not have the time now, and on the condition that he be open to the truth.

Who predicted that fires of unprecedented severity would occur in Australia as a result of climate change? Well it was Bowman, though I’m sure he was not the only one. In a Science Show interview aired December 1, 2007 he explained the pending threat of the new phenomenon of mega-fires.

Following two such mega-fire disasters in California, first in 2003 and then in 2007, their existence has been unquestioned by climate experts. The sufficient causes of such fires are prolonged and heightened dryness, a period of extreme heat, and strong winds.

Australia has been in drought all this decade, with the long awaited El Nina wet cycle giving only a marginal reprieve. Australia, particularly Victoria, is now and will be in the future, drier than in the 20th century. South and South Eastern Australia have experienced a record shattering heatwave, both in duration and magnitude. With the memory of Adelaide’s heatwave last summer, it is hard to imagine that this is an isolated freak event. Meanwhile the North of Australia has been flooding, with the two climactic extremes contributing to create wind systems that, for fire fighters, are nightmarish.

We know the result: worse than Ash Wednesday and Black Friday, much, much worse. We were unprepared; our bushfire procedures assume temperatures of not higher than 40 degrees. More important than the extreme maximums is that the minimums were in the high 20’s. There was no reprieve to control the fires over night. They kept burning with a normal daytime intensity.

In the Science Show interview Bowman explained that such fires will increase with magnitude and frequency, pouring more carbon into the atmosphere, fuelling climate change, which will increase their magnitude and frequency; a positive feedback loop.

He said that we should be very concerned “because this isn't incorporated into the global models, this is the problem, that a lot of people say the global models...they're sceptical of them. Well, to a certain degree they should be sceptical because they're actually quite conservative. They haven't built into them some of these scarier components, like a feedback mechanism with mega-fires. It's not because the modellers are stupid or lazy, it's because the ecologists are still coming to grips of the complexity of these issues. They are very, very enormously complicated things to operationalise.”

If I were open minded, which I suppose I am not, I would dismiss all this environmentalist dogma and demand an apology for being insensitive to the current and future victims of bushfires from anyone who suggests that we need to address our carbon emissions and the realities of our changing climate in response to the this tragedy.