Reality defies my imagination. Personally, I couldn’t make this up.
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| (Image credit: NASA/EOSDIS) |
That is how the state of New South Wales looked like from space last December 9, 2019.
As I write this (February 9, 1039 AEDT), eight weeks later, there were still 38 bush/grass fires active all over NSW at “advice” level. That figure does not include 22 “not applicable” category fires.
Those fires are still active in spite of the best efforts of firefighters, who, in the last two weeks or so have been aided by nature. As it happens, we’ve had copious rain over southeast Queensland, extending now southwards along the NSW coast.
(The Bureau of Meteorology call that an “east coast low”.)
To sum up: two months since that satellite photo was taken, and focusing on NSW alone the improvement registered in the fire situation is (1) the number of fires active is well below the maximum at the peak of the catastrophe (at times above 150), (2) no active fire today was classified in the more serious “emergency” and “watch and act” categories, and, (3) as far as I can tell, no single active fire is being assessed as out of control.
It’s a real improvement, to be sure. Firefighters, volunteer and professional, have a right to feel proud. But it took months of efforts and lots of resources to get there and there is still lots to do.
Australia, for all its weaknesses, is one of the richest countries on the planet. Imagine something like that playing out in a poorer country.
But that’s not what overwhelms my imagination. Something else does.
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Bjørn Lomborg achieves that feat. Facts and figures like those I mentioned above notwithstanding, he believes the ongoing Australian bushfires are not unprecedented.
Mind you, he accepts that the fires in NSW and Victoria were “definitely different” and “much larger than they have been in the previous few decades”.
I would have thought that, just by making that admission, simple coherence should have compelled Lomborg to admit that those bushfires were (using one single English language word) … unprecedented.
That didn’t happen. Details like logical consistency don’t compel Lomborg. So, after actually describing the situation as unprecedented, he rejects the word itself.
(Has Lomborg, a climate denier whose mother tongue is Danish, lost something in translation? -- I wondered. I quickly discarded that explanation, for some American climate deniers cannot even spell that word correctly. The problem with climate deniers, it seems, is with the word itself.).
Now you understand my astonishment, yes?
And the thing is that that’s not the end of the story. Apparently, most of the claims he’s seen about those fires are of the sort “Australia is burning” (his quotation marks), meaning that about every single square centimetre of Australia is on fire.
Therefore, he also finds it problematic to consider the situation in NSW and Victoria as indicative of climate change in general in Australia. To do so, he says, would be “cherry picking”.
Beyond mentioning that the area burnt in just those two states (4.9 million ha in NSW and 1.2 million ha in VIC) is about 1.5 times as large as his native Denmark and pointing to the little table below, I won’t go into details why those scorched “cherries” are rather big:
GDP/GSP: IMF (Denmark), ABS.
So, the moral of the story is if you ever need to call 000 (Australia’s emergency phone number) don’t tell the operator “my house is burning”, unless you mean the clay bricks on the wall and the bathroom tiles and every single nail are literally on fire. Unless that happens, that’s not an unprecedented event in your life.
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For the record, responsible people called those fires unprecedented (with “C” and without “I”) for a variety of reasons. Geographical extension is never mentioned as particularly important.
The Australian Academy of Science not only called those fires unprecedented, they also explained why.
But there is a source at least as authoritative. This is a short account of why that source called those fires unprecedented.
Last November 8 the fires were approaching the urban fringe of Greater Sydney.
Sydney is a textbook example of urban sprawl. Its many low-density outer residential suburbs, including parks, are often near bush land (an estimated 100 thousand houses in Sydney’s outer suburbs are located within 100 metres from bush land). Their houses with back and front yards (the “Great Australian Dream” or “McMansions”, depending on your point of view), once accessible to working class families, incorporate large amounts of flammable material, including structural wood in roofs and floors, to say nothing of furniture.
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| (my photo) |
That Friday, at 0839 AEDT, NSW Rural Fire Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons (above) had to divert his attention from the job of saving lives and property to explaining why those fires were unprecedented. In a nutshell: too many simultaneous fires spread over too large an area, stretching firefighting resources to their limit; too many fires at “emergency” level (in normal circumstances, he added, RFS would have fought 3-6 such fires; those days they were fighting 17 to 19).
It was an opportune intervention, too. As it happens, around that date irresponsible local denialists were shrieking hysterically and having fits every time they heard the word unprecedented.
(More recently, Fitzsimmons explained again why those fires were unprecedented.)
Two days later, the RFS raised the fire warning to the Greater Sydney and Greater Hunter to “catastrophic” and the NSW Education Standards Authority advised that over 25 rural schools were closed.
To senior Liberal Party leader and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s credit, she ignored howling and braying and squealing and 4 days after Fitzsimmons explained why those fires were unprecedented she decreed the first of three state-wide States of Emergency.
I shudder to think what would have happened had she done otherwise, as the dirty Murdoch media charlatans suggested. I am not a mind reader, so I’m not privy to Berejiklian’s deepest reasons. I suppose it’s entirely possible for a politician, even a COALition one, to have some decency and courage. In my almost six decades of life I have seen strange things.
There’s at least another possibility, not necessarily incompatible with that. Before his post-Hawaii January epiphany, Scott Morrison seemed intent on washing his hands of the bushfire crisis: all that was the premiers’ business. He even sneaked out of the country for a family holiday, because -- in his words -- he didn’t hold a hose, remember? Had the shit hit the fan, state premiers would have been convenient and evident fall guys (or gals) for him. Any moderately experienced politician would have seen that. Would you have trusted Scotty from Marketing not to throw you under the bus to save himself? Up to December, the premiers -- Berejiklian included -- were on their own and had no choice but to do the sensible thing.
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Were Fitzsimmons and Berejiklian right?
Judge by yourself. Precisely on November 12, the day the first State of Emergency was declared, South Turramurra, in northwest Sydney, was visited by the fires. A concerted effort by RFS and Fire and Rescue (NSW urban fire and emergency services), including heavy air tankers, saved the suburb from burning.
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| (Sydney fires on 23/12/2019. source) |
In another month the whole city would be virtually surrounded by active fires, to the point that between December 8 and 17 the Gompers Mountain mega-fire threatened Mount Piper power plant and forced a temporary closure of the Springvale brown coal mine servicing it. That power station, almost due west of Sydney, supplies 10% of the electric power used in NSW. Additionally, the coal stocked could have burned for weeks if not months. “The last thing we need is something like that”, said Deputy RFS Commissioner Rob Rodgers.
A couple of weeks later the NSW Rural Fire Service advised would-be holiday-makers to “revisit their plans”, particularly if they intended to travel to the South Coast. Many (including more than one ABC journo) wished they had paid the fireys attention. In a way, Sydney in December was virtually under siege, not entirely unlike Mallacoota next January.
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There are several messages from the preceding. The first one is that the situation is a lot more complex than a simpleton (?) like Lomborg seems to believe (does he really, genuinely believe that?) and certainly wants you to believe. It is a lot more than just a matter of square kilometres.
I also hope to have persuaded you why firefighters’ heroism, hard work and professionalism were greatly aided by luck. People like Lomborg are bad luck. Learn that lesson before the next catastrophe, before we all run out of luck. Your life may depend on it.
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