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It’s August and Australian winter is almost over. The 2020 fire season has already started. So far, however, we haven’t had any bushfires. Moreover, after an ominously dry July, this month considerable rain has fallen over the southern part of the continent and there’s even talk of a La Niña.
That is extremely lucky. With international borders closed/restrictions to travel and interstate borders closed due to COVID19, it’s dubious state’s rural fire services could receive any firefighting resources from overseas or even share such resources among themselves. That’s particularly true of heavy water bombers: the Commonwealth leases those aircraft from American and Canadian firms.
The Northern Hemisphere has been less lucky. It’s late summer over there. Temperatures in Verkhoyansk, in northeastern Siberia, within the Arctic Circle, reached an all-time record of 38ºC last June. The following month, Western Europe experienced a heatwave, affecting Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Britain. At Heathrow Airport, for example, temperatures reached 37.8ºC on July 31.
And just this week Furnace Creek, in the Death Valley, California registered a temperature of 54.4ºC (either a world record or a second highest, depending on the confidence one puts on 1913 data).
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As I write this, wildfires have been raging for a while in Siberia, Alaska and Canada (see above), and have now started in California and Colorado. Smoke is blanketing northern California (see below). Tens of thousands of residents were ordered to evacuate and a state of emergency was decreed in California.
(My sympathies to those affected by the fires.)
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During the Black Summer, local blabbering lunatics “expertly” explained our bushfires.
For Michael McCormack it’s “self-combusting piles of manure” that cause bushfires (believe it or not, he said that; believe it or not, it wasn’t a confession; the piles of manure he talked about were literally made of dung). Craig Kelly claimed it was the work of arsonists (again, that was neither an admission nor a reference to McCormack).
Well, pair of cretins, guess what? Lightning falling over areas dried by extreme heat is what caused those fires overseas. You guys, living in the second driest continent on the planet, have difficulty understanding that.
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Speaking of cretins. Today Joel Fitzgibbon came out – yet again – in defence of coal mining. The Labor Party unofficial spokesman for Angus Taylor (believe it or not, unrelated to Mick Taylor of “Wolfe Creek” fame), Fitzgibbon now warns that any attempt to deal with climate change will end up splitting Labor. Rural and regional Australia would never stomach climate change action.
What he really means -- but nobody dares to say -- is that he fears climate change action may cost him his seat in Parliament and where else a good-for-nothing like him will ever find another teat like that?
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By one of those things in life, the very same day even the National Farmers Federation, one of the most reactionary business associations in the land -- particularly strong in rural and regional Australia-- called the Morrison Government for climate change action.
With that, the NFF moves to the left of Fitzgibbon.
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Reality defies belief.
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