Monthly Archives: August 2017

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21 August 2017, The Conversation, Where to take refuge in your home during a bushfire. When you live in a bushfire-prone area you can’t ignore the danger. Most individuals and families address this necessity by preparing a bushfire survival plan. The best … Continue reading →

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21 August 2017, The Conversation, Dry winter primes Sydney Basin for early start of bushfire season. It might feel like the depths of winter, but Australian fire services are preparing for an early start to the bushfire season. Sydney has been covered with smoke from hazard reduction burns, and the New South Wales Rural Fire Service has forecast a “horrific” season. Predicting the severity of a bushfire season isn’t easy, and – much like the near-annual announcements of the “worst flu season on record” – repeated warnings can diminish their urgency. However, new modelling that combines Bureau of Meteorology data with NASA satellite imaging has found that record-setting July warmth and low rainfall have created conditions very similar to 2013, when highly destructive bushfires burned across NSW and Victoria. Crucially, this research has found we’re approaching a crucial dryness threshold, past which fires are historically far more dangerous.How to measure bushfire fuel On September 10, 2013 several bushfires in Sydney’s West caused havoc well before the official start of the bushfire season. These were a precursor to fires that destroyed more than 200 properties a month later. Warm, dry winter weather had dried out the fuels in Sydney’s forests and bush reserves beyond “normal” levels for the time of year. The timing and severity of those preseason fires were a reminder that the region’s forests are flammable all year round; they can burn whenever the fuel they contain dries out past a certain threshold. Read More here

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14 August 2017, ECOS, Mapping fire-prone areas before the fires. Two months after Portugal’s deadliest fire season in recent record, thousands of firefighters have again been deployed in the last few days to battle new wildfires. It’s a crisis Australia knows well from its own bushfire history which paints an equally bleak and devastating picture. Events such as Ash Wednesday in Victoria and South Australia in the 1980s, Black Saturday in Victoria in 2009 and the enduring 2001 Black Christmas in NSW, resulted in hundreds of lives lost and close to 5,000 homes destroyed. These are just three examples of a long list of major Australian bushfire events. As we head towards 2050, climate change is predicted to cause fire seasons to start earlier, end later and involve more frequent extremes of weather that support major loss events. More than ever before, planning and preparation is playing a significant role in mitigating major bushfires and their effects on lives, properties and infrastructure. Following a state-wide project that saw CSIRO develop mapping technology that identified bushfire prone areas in Queensland down to a 25 metre square area, our researchers have now stepped onto the international stage by mapping regions all over the world that have conditions susceptible to fire events. This latest global tool is a valuable resource for hazard analysts, financers, developers and even the general public, seeking bushfire information online. Read More here

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14 August 2017, Climate News Network, Climate warms the Earth, not chance. Recent record year temperatures show how climate warms the Earth. Without global warming, such a sequence would have been highly improbable.Each of the last three years has seen record temperatures worldwide, further evidence that climate warms the Earth, not mere chance. Each has been named the warmest year since records began. The chance of this being pure co-incidence is little more than one in a thousand, unless human-induced or anthropogenic climate change is factored in. The chance of 2016 reaching the temperature it did, when it did, would have been one in a million, unless climate change was counted as a contributor. And if anthropogenic global warming, driven by the profligate combustion of fossil fuels over the last two centuries, is fed into the calculations, then the probability becomes quite high: in fact there would be a 50% chance of three consecutive record-breaking years at any time since the beginning of the century, according to a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Calculating the odds Michael Mann, the distinguished climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, is at it again. He and colleagues have been calculating the odds on the recent run of high temperatures to see if they can be explained by any factors other than climate change. He has done this before: at the beginning of the year he calculated the chance that 13 of the warmest 15 years ever had all occurred in the first 15 years of this century. The probabilities at their highest worked out at one chance in 5,000, unless climate change was taken into account. At their lowest, the probability was one in 170,000. Read More here