Australian bushfires and climate change
It was with increasing horror we read of the people who died in the bushfires in Victoria last weekend. Bush fires have always plagued the outskirts of cities and rural communities in the southeast and to a far lesser extent, the southwest of Australia. But never have the horrors been visited upon the local residents like the results of this wave of fires! A true firestorm must have raged through the tree tops, fueled by high speed winds for people to have been unable to flee a fire in their cars.
However what irks us at the Dappled Planet are the articles coming out now blaming global warming and ’strong calls’ for the Prime Minister to impose stricter CO2 emission on the Australian populace! Lives were LOST and families torn apart this last weekend – horribly and tragically because of bushfires. But lets get one thing clear – bushfires are a part of the Australian ecosystem and have been a part of the ecosytem for million of years before man even set foot on the continent.
Calling for stricter controls on CO2 emissions won’t prevent anothe disaster like this one happening. It is irresponsible of the media to call for this. What WILL prevent disasters like this from happening again are things like banning people from building homes in the dry, bushfire prone forests of southern Australia, or enforcing that anyone who builds in areas with property surrounded by dense trees, have a a fire-proof bunker.
Asking for CO2 emission to be reduced may in 50 or 100 or 200 years time have a minor impact, but how many more lives will have been lost by then as a result of people wrecklessly building in Australia’s dry forests over the next 10 or 20 years while they wait for reducing CO2 emissions to have an effect??? Since the Australian city dwellers of Sydney and Mebourne started bushing deeper into the bush to have a rural retreat within an hours drive of a city, they have endured bushfire diasters with (until this disaster) upwards of 70+ people killed at least once a decade. If people want to live through these fires, then blaming climate change is not going to save lives in the future – the frequency of bushfires in Australia is frequent enough naturally (but exacerbated by arsons which seem attracted to city dwelling) that we can’t wait several decades for a small, quite possibly negligible effect caused by reducing man-made CO2 emissions.
Man maybe contriburing to global warming, but its calls like this which make us smoking hot under the collar… When there is a solution which has a far quicker and positive impact than global warming, why do the media and environazi’s always try to ram global warming down our throats? Surely it is better to question people’s ongoing desire to leave in densely wooded areas of Australia which have evolved to be regenerated by natural bushfires? Surely is better to mandate fire proof bunkers in these communities? Surely it is better to mandate firebreak areas around communities – and not then succumb to a false sense of security and allow people to build in the firebreak areas when there are no fires for a couple of decades?
But the last thing that we should be doing is focusing exclusively on a reduction in CO2 emissions in an effort to prevent such a disaster ever happening again. People should not have unwillingly have lost their lives to only have people focus on long term solutions when so much more can be done to prevent these diasters in the near future as well.
