Climate scientists have been predicting more frequent and severe bushfires due to climate change for some years. A 2007 report for the Climate Institute by the Bushfire CRC concluded that we could expect a two to four-fold increase in the number of extreme fire danger days by 2050 under a high global warming scenario, the path we are now on. It identified northern Victoria, the site of the most deadly fires over the weekend, as one of the areas most prone to catastrophic fires.
The bushfires and the extreme heatwave, whose death toll when tallied will probably be in the hundreds and exceed that of the fires, are global warming made manifest in the daily lives of ordinary people. Over the last ten days we have seen the future. The question is: will we face up to it or pretend they are one-off events?
The climate change debate is usually carried out at a high level of abstraction, which makes it easier for ordinary people and political leaders to treat it as a vague and distant threat. The heatwave and the fires should turn abstraction into reality, just as 9/11 did for the threat of Islamic terrorism.
If we were rational beings the events of the last 10 days would cause a massive reassessment of our whole approach to climate change. Yet it is a safe bet that over the next days and weeks the link between the bushfires and global warming will be avoided and downplayed.
It is almost as if it is bad taste or callousness to raise the spectre of climate change at the time when the terrible forecasts become a reality. But by the time the coronial inquest eventually reports the words of the experts will have lost much of their force.
Certainly, the major political parties will not want to acknowledge the association between global warming and the fires because they will immediately be asked to explain why they are not doing more about it, why Australia will go to Copenhagen with a five per cent target when the scientists say it must be at least 25 per cent.
The Prime Minister has not hesitated to accuse the Opposition of harbouring climate change denialists. But there is more than one form of denialism, including pretending to take warming more seriously than you do and claiming that the science must be “balanced” against the claims of fossil fuel lobbyists.
In all likelihood his media advisers are today urging on him a third form: “Don’t talk about the warming”.
For weeks the political system has been consumed by the global financial crisis and bickering over how best to respond to it. Yet serious as the economic slowdown is, no one has died from it.
Clive Hamilton is the author of Scorcher: The dirty politics of climate change (Black Inc.)
JamesK is Crikey’s resident expert on predictability 🙂
If you ask the aged (80 years and over) was the weather ever as bad as this they’ll tell you OH, YES!!! “Mum used to hang wet sheets across the doors and we all had to stay inside for days” – they lived at Huntleys Point in Sydney. “We were always sent home from school or work when the temperature hit 100 degrees and many times we had to get off the tram when the rails buckled in the heat”. So maybe climate change is about weather patterns alternating over 60 or more years along with the impact of industry and habitation. Another point well made was “our houses weren’t made of flimsy materials – we had double-brick walls and tiled roofs and the house was the coolest place to be”. How many homes are like that these days?
David Sanderson: re JK, I did wonder.
Now I’ve calmed down a bit I have a question which no-one will bother to give me. I’m too much of an odd-ball! Why oh why does none among you arrive at the obvious conclusion that less people =less climate change? Here we have Oz, the major part of which is rightly referred to as the driest continent on earth. Here are our politicians who pay money to women for breeding. These same ppoliticians invite hundreds upon thousands of people to come and live here. Climate Change is caused by the activities of the descendant of apes, called man. Man has bred like rabbits, and continents like Africa and Asia, large parts of Latin America are unable to sustain this population explosion.
But it’s OK to blame Climate Change. Not OK to suggest that man should modify its breeding! Such is the idealogical mind-set of the ape species called man.
Harold – 9 February 2009 4:25:54 PM
“….but let’s not fool ourselves that India or China will be inflenced….”
You raise a valid point and you may be interested that President Obama has already approached China on a joint approach to tackling climate change and so far the response has been positive:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/united-on-climate-change-obamas-chinese-revolution-1604027.html
I believe we need to move much faster on CC than anyone realises – as fast as we would were the country being invaded by foreign forces. Think about it.
If you want schadenfreude Brendan look no further than Wilson Tuckey, who has used the fires to attack political parties pursuing Green preferences – just as he did after the Canberra bushfires, which had nothing to do with forest management and everything to do with rank incompetence.
Contemptible, even by Tuckey’s bottom-of-the-barrel standards. He also insisted on passing notes around during Gillard’s condolence motion in Parliament.