Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

The article is about the fires in Australia. Mentioning the Amazon out of the blue threw me off is all.

Washington had Ivory teeth.

Bots and trolls spread false arson claims in Australian fires ‘disinformation campaign’

Victoria police say there is no evidence any of the devastating bushfires in the state were caused by arson, contrary to the spread of global disinformation exaggerating arsonist arrests during the current crisis.

A misleading figure suggesting 183 arsonists have been arrested “since the start of the bushfire season” spread across the globe on Wednesday, after initial reports in News Corp were picked up by Donald Trump Jr, US far-right websites and popular alt-right personalities.

Australia is struggling to cope with deadly infernos and faces the loss of nearly a billion animals to terrible bushfires — but in the midst of those tragedies, authorities are also battling against hoaxes and misinformation, including false reports of widespread arson. Many of the claims seek to suggest arson, not climate change, was a key driver of the historic fires.

The hashtag #ArsonEmergency began trending shortly after the new year. Queensland University of Technology researcher Timothy Graham says he identified troll and bot social media accounts that tried to shift the narrative about the fires as being the work of dozens of criminals.

Climate change deniers are blaming Australia’s wildfires on arson, but experts say that the exaggerated claims are part of a widespread disinformation campaign and that arson alone cannot explain the unprecedented blazes.

Theories pinning the wildfires on arsonists gained traction in recent days after police in the state of New South Wales announced that 24 people have been charged with deliberately lighting fires since November.

But wildfire researchers say it’s unreasonable to think the actions of two dozen possible offenders could have caused such destruction, with 20 million acres already scorched and more than 120 fires still active across southeastern Australia.

“Arson is a red herring,” said Mike Flannigan, director of the Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

The fires in the Amazon were/are due to direct human action, not Climate Change.

Many scientists now believe some of the planets forests may never recover. If the forests somehow can defy all odds in an increasingly warming world, it still may take burned forests around the globe decades to recover. Those are decades that we don’t have to save ourselves from the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

A savanna or savannah is a mixed woodland grassland ecosystem characterised by the trees being sufficiently widely spaced so that the canopy does not close. The open canopy allows sufficient light to reach the ground to support an unbroken herbaceous layer consisting primarily of grasses.

The fires in Australia are the same.

There has been much debate about the links between climate change and the fires. Australian National University climate scientist Imran Ahmed told the BBC there was a direct link "because what climate change does is exacerbate the conditions in which the bushfires happen."

Glenda Wardle, an ecologist from the University of Sydney, told the BBC: "It's not every weather event that is the direct result of climate change. But when you see trends…it becomes undeniably linked to global climate change."

Unseasonably high temperatures and drought over the last three months have contributed to the conditions that have allowed the fires to proliferate.

"One of the key drivers of fire intensity, fire spread rates and fire area is temperature. And in Australia we've just experienced record high temperatures," Mark Howden, director of the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University, told Reuters.

A report by the Australian Government's Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) said that last Spring, there was the highest fire weather danger with record high values right across the country.

"The dangerous fire weather conditions during spring 2019 is consistent with the increasingly severe fire weather seen in many areas of the country, owing to increasing temperatures and reduced cool season rainfall," the report said.

Meanwhile, dry lightning was to blame for sparking a number of fires in December in Victoria's East Gippsland region, according to Victoria Emergency, and the unusually hot weather has accelerated the flames.

More than 1 million fires in Australia
detected by satellites since September

The fires in the Amazon were/are due to direct human action, not Climate Change. The fires in Australia are the same. https://www.newsweek.com/australia-wildfires-arson-new-south-wales-police-1480733

I've no doubt that changes in the climate are part of the "puzzle" (your somewhat callous term, not mine), just as they have been over eons, but they did not cause these wildfires. Australia has a "bushfire season" that long predates any handwringing about climate change. Such fires are a natural dynamic of the ecology. Unfortunately, every so often such natural dynamics go to extremes. If you think that there is any way to modulate such things to an "acceptable" and constant pattern you are foolish.

Volcanoes erupt regardless of whether or not puny humans inhabit the world with gas-guzzling machines. Often they do so without "dramatic" results, but sometimes the results are catastrophic on a similar or more severe scale to the Australian bushfires.

returning the West to a pre-industrial economic state is not going to prevent 50, 100, 150 or 200 arsonists from setting fires during the "bushfire season."

There is a far greater chance that humans will destroy life on earth through nuclear or biological warfare (and even then I doubt we can do it) than by continuing to emit carbon. Your time and effort would be better spent on those issues but likely have the same impotent effect.

It just dawned on me that I started this thread 15 years ago.

Australia was warned about bushfires becoming more extreme and wreaking havoc across the country for longer periods of time in an incredible report published 12 years ago.

The Garnaut Climate Change Review's final report preempted that fire seasons would 'start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense.'

The report, which was published in 2008, predicted the effects would increase over time but the affects wouldn't be seen until 2020.

The temperature increase Australia has experienced is within the range of our earliest climate change projections, which CSIRO published almost 30 years ago. In other words, our climate models adequately capture the processes that cause the long-term warming trend, which in turn means that our projections of future climate change are realistic, plausible and importantly, can allow us to plan.

There is a far greater chance that humans will destroy life on earth through nuclear or biological warfare (and even then I doubt we can do it) than by continuing to emit carbon. Your time and effort would be better spent on those issues but likely have the same impotent effect.

many volcano fields have nothing at all to do with plate boundaries or plates at all.

Thats the trouble with popular science.

so whaddya want, a cake?