How climate change impacts bushfires

On Thursday, Sydney saw its worst bushfires in more than 10 years.

Of the more than 100 bushfires that raged across the state of NSW, at least one life was lost and the number of homes destroyed is still being counted.

Some of the bushfires still continue to burn out of control. Even right now as I type inside my home, I can smell smoke. Outside the trees are shrouded in smoke. I live nowhere near the fires.

Today, firefighters are desperately trying to contain the remaining fires, because tomorrow we are expecting yet another hot day.

Unusual weather patterns

As a Sydney-sider, I am shocked for the people whose lives have been, and will be, devastated by the fires.

But I haven’t been surprised by the bushfires. Not even by the scale of them.

This year we experienced a surprisingly early start to the bushfire season. Fires started in our first week of spring, in September. Since then we’ve had many hot days in the late 30C and late 20C, which is very uncommon. We’ve also had lots of very strong wind.

In fact, Australia as a whole has been going through some pretty unusual weather patterns and breaking various records. We’ve just had our hottest 12 month period on record, we’ve had an unusually warm winter, and the hottest September on record. We also had 28 days in a row without rain. All this is occurring with the El Niño cycle being neutral.

While climate change deniers have focused on a 'pause' in atmospheric land temperatures over the last 15 years, the oceans, which absorb approximately 30% of our CO2, have continued to warm. In fact, claiming that global warming has ‘paused’ is deeply misleading: it is factually incorrect and also selectively seizes on a very specific timeframe where a strong El Niño causing hot weather had been in play.

Bushfires and climate change

Although climate change doesn’t start bushfires, it does contribute to the conditions that exacerbate the risk of the bushfires. It also creates the conditions in which bushfires can flourish.

Global warming amplifies the risk factors for extreme weather events. The extra heat pulls water from the soil and plants on land, making it very dry. Meanwhile, as the atmosphere becomes warmer its capacity to hold water increases. As a result, downpours become more amplified. The rainfall may in turn lead to grass growth, which can then end up fueling fires.

Scientists and researchers are making it increasingly clear that a serious consequence of climate change for Australia will be an increase in the frequency and severity of bushfires.

Australia’s CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) predicts that under extreme climate change, the kind of bushfires we saw in Victoria on Black Saturday may happen on average once every two years.

A leaked draft document of a forthcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) – which is the internationally accepted authority on climate change – says that climate change will increase the likelihood of deaths from heat stress and bushfires in Australia.

Moving backwards in the fight against climate change

The timing of these terrible bushfires is ironic. They happened in the same week that Australia took a significant step backwards in the fight against climate change: its recently elected federal government released draft laws to axe the carbon tax.

By moving away from an effective model of dealing with climate change we are ignoring the fact that climate change poses the biggest ever threat to Australians and the Australian way of life.

In doing so we are also perpetuating the problem of bushfires, which puts our people and our firefighters at tremendous risk.

In November 2009, appearing before Parliament, the United Firefighters Union of Australia urged it to take real action on climate change:

"We are asking you very clearly, stop making this a political football, put in place the action that's required to secure the future because by 2020 we are going to see a frequency like we've not seen before."

Since then, Australia has made very little climate change progress. In fact, we’re currently moving backwards. We’re ignoring the facts being put before us and in doing so putting more lives at risk.

Image attribution: Desi