Tasmania fires: First images of World Heritage Area devastation emerge, show signs of 'system collapse'




'This is what climate change looks like', fire ecologist says

Fire ecologist David Bowman said the fires burning in Tasmania were a sign of climate change.

"This is bigger than us. This is what climate change looks like, this is what scientists have been telling people, this is system collapse."

Professor Bowman said it was a difficult situation for firefighters.

"You can't expect emergency services to just be able to do magic," he said.

"If you're dealing with fires on such an immense scale geographically, in such hostile terrain and burning in the ground, you have to prioritise.

"Budgets will be stretched and more money is needed."

Tasmanian Senator Nick McKim argued federal and state governments had ignored the science.

"Warnings have been given by the conservation movement that climate change is showing that there's going to be an increase in dry lightning strikes," Senator McKim said.

"This has been foreseeable, unfortunately, and yet we saw quite a lag time between those fires starting on the 13th of January and resources being thrown at them."

The head of the Tasmania Fire Service, Chief Officer Gavin Freeman, disagrees.

"We have absolute support from the State Government to get whatever resources we need and our interstate colleagues have offered whatever resources we need," he said.

"More resources, right at the moment, is not going to help us much, because trying to get into those areas, particularly when we have a day like today where visibility is poor and we can't fly people in, more resources


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-30/fire-ravages-world-heritage-area-tasmania-central-plateau/7127300

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Yes these bush fires are unprecedented and you know how we know this?, because if bush fires were natural in Australia the bush would have adapted to bush fire like conditions over thousands of years and the trees and shrubs would have evolved to survive bush fire conditions with strategy's like fire resistant seed coatings and boom and bust fire cycles that required seeds of native species to be slow roasted in order to germinate but does this happen ... NO


So when you see that aussie bush regenerate like nobody else's business after a big fire just avert your eyes and imagine instead that not embracing the global warming cults insane socialist agenda will doom your part of the world to desert and disease and pestilence.


Or alternatively you could just remain in the free world of reality with me  :)

Quote:

"We need for people to understand that this is not a natural event." Ecologist Professor Jamie Kirkpatrick is also upset by the loss of alpine flora. "They're killed by fire and they don't come back," said Professor Kirkpatrick. "It's a species that would have been around in the cretaceous period. It's regarded as one of the main reasons for listing Tasmania as a world heritage area."

innocentbystander. wrote on Jan 30^th, 2016 at 8:48pm:

Yes these bush fires are unprecedented and you know how we know this?, because if bush fires were natural in Australia the bush would have adapted to bush fire like conditions over thousands of years and the trees and shrubs would have evolved to survive bush fire conditions with strategy's like fire resistant seed coatings and boom and bust fire cycles that required seeds of native species to be slow roasted in order to germinate but does this happen ... NO So when you see that aussie bush regenerate like nobody else's business after a big fire just avert your eyes and imagine instead that not embracing the global warming cults insane socialist agenda will doom your part of the world to desert and disease and pestilence. Or alternatively you could just remain in the free world of reality with me  :)

Australia is not one small spot. It's diverse. Tasmania is an entirely different place than the rest. The rest has entirely different ecologies than "the rest".

Setanta wrote on Jan 30^th, 2016 at 10:24pm:

innocentbystander. wrote on Jan 30th, 2016 at 8:48pm: Yes these bush fires are unprecedented and you know how we know this?, because if bush fires were natural in Australia the bush would have adapted to bush fire like conditions over thousands of years and the trees and shrubs would have evolved to survive bush fire conditions with strategy's like fire resistant seed coatings and boom and bust fire cycles that required seeds of native species to be slow roasted in order to germinate but does this happen ... NO So when you see that aussie bush regenerate like nobody else's business after a big fire just avert your eyes and imagine instead that not embracing the global warming cults insane socialist agenda will doom your part of the world to desert and disease and pestilence. Or alternatively you could just remain in the free world of reality with me  :) Australia is not one small spot. It's diverse. Tasmania is an entirely different place than the rest. The rest has entirely different ecologies than "the rest".

For Christs sake wake the f*ck up would ya, how in the hell did the public become this comprehensively dumbed down, it breaks my heart to be immersed amongst so many non thinkers   :'(

innocentbystander. wrote on Jan 30^th, 2016 at 10:37pm:

Setanta wrote on Jan 30th, 2016 at 10:24pm: innocentbystander. wrote on Jan 30th, 2016 at 8:48pm: Yes these bush fires are unprecedented and you know how we know this?, because if bush fires were natural in Australia the bush would have adapted to bush fire like conditions over thousands of years and the trees and shrubs would have evolved to survive bush fire conditions with strategy's like fire resistant seed coatings and boom and bust fire cycles that required seeds of native species to be slow roasted in order to germinate but does this happen ... NO So when you see that aussie bush regenerate like nobody else's business after a big fire just avert your eyes and imagine instead that not embracing the global warming cults insane socialist agenda will doom your part of the world to desert and disease and pestilence. Or alternatively you could just remain in the free world of reality with me  :) Australia is not one small spot. It's diverse. Tasmania is an entirely different place than the rest. The rest has entirely different ecologies than "the rest". For Christs sake wake the f*ck up would ya, how in the hell did the public become this comprehensively dumbed down, it breaks my heart to be immersed amongst so many non thinkers   :'(

Not all of Australia is burnt wood forest. That's the Eucalypts job mostly and there are other ecosystems. Australia is not one big Eucalypt forest.

____ wrote on Jan 30^th, 2016 at 8:23pm:

"Warnings have been given by the conservation movement that climate change is showing that there's going to be an increase in dry lightning strikes," Senator McKim said.

One paper

' Romps et al. constructed a proxy based  to model the frequency of lightning strikes across the continental United States. They predict that the number of lightning strikes will increase by about 12% for every degree of rise in global average air temperature.'

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6211/851

So another computer model that says AGW may,could, cause more lightning strikes.

Oldest tree in Australia?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/the-oldest-tree/story-e6frg8h6-1226130673929?nk=02edaf1e5ff0e2832df121e36adca381-1454163218

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_trees

Its ok. This will fire up the denialists who will convince us that turning forests into charcoal and ashes is good for us.

AGW has momentum and perhaps now it has positive feedback from forest fires. Could this be the beginning of the end of humanity.

http://gulfnews.com/news/asia/australia/australia-bushfires-raze-ancient-world-heritage-listed-forests-1.1662438


Quote:

Sydney: World Heritage-listed forests whose origins predate the age of the dinosaurs are being destroyed by raging Australian bushfires, with conservationists increasingly fearful they could be lost forever. Firefighters in Tasmania — a state south of the mainland known for its cooler temperatures — have been battling bushfires for 18 days, with 95,000 hectares (234,750 acres) of land burnt so far, authorities said Friday. While no properties have been destroyed and no one hurt in the infernos — which are so numerous that firefighters from across Australia and New Zealand have been flown in to help — parts of western Tasmania’s famed wilderness have been destroyed by the flames. “The fires in western Tasmania are occurring in basically an ecosystem which is a remnant from the geological past, so they are of immense significance scientifically,” David Bowman, professor of environmental change biology at the University of Tasmania, told AFP. “These systems were once more widespread and indeed grew on Antarctica billions of years ago, so they are living fossils ... they go back to well before the age of the dinosaurs, they are a tangible connection to Gondwana.” Gondwana was a land mass that included present-day Africa, South America and Australia and formed the southern part of an ancient supercontinent called Pangaea. One of the last expanses of temperate wilderness in the world, the Tasmanian Wilderness was entered into the World Heritage list for its significant natural and cultural values in 1982 and covers nearly 20 per cent of the island, or 1.4 million hectares. It includes the Cradle Mountain-Lake Saint Clair National Park and the Walls of Jerusalem National Park, home to popular bushwalking tracks. With the Tasmania Fire Service (TFS) battling more than 70 blazes and access to remote areas difficult, a spokesman said the agency was not able to gauge how much forest had been burnt, although most of the fires are in the west and encompass vast swathes of protected land. Species under threat include the southern beech forests, also known as nothofagus, the pencil pine — a distant relative of American redwoods — and the king billy pine, Bowman said. Some species are only found in Tasmania, leading to concerns that if the ancient, slow-growing trees are obliterated by the blazes, they could take many years to regrow, if at all. Bowman warned that despite the firefighting efforts, only soaking rain could end the emergency as the soil of western Tasmania was drying and turning into so-called “brown coals” that burn tree roots. Light rain now falling on the island has failed to douse the flames, with lightning strikes sparking more blazes, the TFS told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Lightning strikes were “insignificant sources of ignition” just a few decades ago, Bowman said. But three years ago, a major bushfire that destroyed more than 100 homes was also in part sparked by lightning. Bowman said that from his assessment, the recent blazes in Tasmania, along with a trend of rising temperatures in Australia and across the world, reflected an increase in extreme fire situations that pointed to climate change. But all may not be lost. James Wood, the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens’ seed bank manager, said last year the organisation had been able to collect thousands of montane conifer seeds. “In these sort of circumstances, the seed bank’s take is that we may lose the ecology, but we don’t necessarily have to lose the species so we can preserve them.” But he warned that while it might be possible to overcome sporadic events, long-term environmental changes — such as those that appeared to be caused by climate change — were harder to protect against. “For really protracted, long-term changes, there’s nothing we can do,” Wood told AFP, adding that even without the fires, warming temperatures were changing the landscape, including how plants and insects interact. “We know that with climate change, even if we curb or stop CO2 emissions, the actual climate change implications are still going to wear on.”

A sizable group of climate scientists tends to regard the IPCC-based climate consensus as too optimistic.

However, mostly these scientists tend to be shunned by the media, as stated by Chomsky:

It's interesting that these (public climate) debates leave out almost entirely a third part of the debate, namely, a very substantial number of scientists, competent scientists, who think that the scientific consensus is much too optimistic. A group of scientists at MIT came out with a report about a year ago describing what they called the most comprehensive modelling of the climate that had ever been done. Their conclusion, which was unreported in public media as far as I know, was that the major scientific consensus of the international commission is just way off, it's much too optimistic ... their own conclusion was that unless we terminate use of fossil fuels almost immediately, it's finished. We'll never be able to overcome the consequences. That's not part of the debate.


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-29/glikson-the-dilemma-of-a-climate-scientist/7123246

____ wrote on Feb 1^st, 2016 at 4:07am:

A sizable group of climate scientists tends to regard the IPCC-based climate consensus as too optimistic. However, mostly these scientists tend to be shunned by the media, as stated by Chomsky: It's interesting that these (public climate) debates leave out almost entirely a third part of the debate, namely, a very substantial number of scientists, competent scientists, who think that the scientific consensus is much too optimistic. A group of scientists at MIT came out with a report about a year ago describing what they called the most comprehensive modelling of the climate that had ever been done. Their conclusion, which was unreported in public media as far as I know, was that the major scientific consensus of the international commission is just way off, it's much too optimistic ... their own conclusion was that unless we terminate use of fossil fuels almost immediately, it's finished. We'll never be able to overcome the consequences. That's not part of the debate. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-29/glikson-the-dilemma-of-a-climate-scientist/7123246

Its already too late. The momentum of AGW will continue for decades and may even accelerate if the forests suffer systemic collapse.

strewth.. RUN FOR THE HILLS HENNY PENNY!!!

____ wrote on Feb 1^st, 2016 at 4:07am:

A sizable group of climate scientists tends to regard the IPCC-based climate consensus as too optimistic. However, mostly these scientists tend to be shunned by the media, as stated by Chomsky: It's interesting that these (public climate) debates leave out almost entirely a third part of the debate, namely, a very substantial number of scientists, competent scientists, who think that the scientific consensus is much too optimistic. A group of scientists at MIT came out with a report about a year ago describing what they called the most comprehensive modelling of the climate that had ever been done. Their conclusion, which was unreported in public media as far as I know, was that the major scientific consensus of the international commission is just way off, it's much too optimistic ... their own conclusion was that unless we terminate use of fossil fuels almost immediately, it's finished. We'll never be able to overcome the consequences. That's not part of the debate. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-29/glikson-the-dilemma-of-a-climate-scientist/7123246

How to become a climate change expert without going to University ?

Simply sign up with the liberal party and you automatically become an expert :D LOL

President Elect, The Mechanic wrote on Feb 1^st, 2016 at 11:47am:

strewth.. RUN FOR THE HILLS HENNY PENNY!!!

Keep you pants on sport. System collapse is coming.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/environmental-change-expert-says/7128722


Quote:

Environmental change expert says Tasmanian fires can be attributed to climate change Listen now(Link will open in new window)Download audio Monday 1 February 2016 6:35AM (view full episode) Firefighters are continuing to battle terrible fires in Tasmania's remote and rugged world heritage forests. A Tasmanian fire scientist is now warning there are signs of what he calls 'system collapse'. David Bowman, Professor of Environmental Change Biology at the University of Tasmania, has likened the disaster to the annual peat fires that, each year, blanket South East Asia in acrid smoke at great economic and health costs. He says the case is strong these fires are climate change related, and that there will be more in the future threatening the existence of some of the nations most valuable forests. David Bowman joins Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast.

Quick lets set up a $2 trillion dollar carbon derivatives market so the oligarchy can play money games by taxing us all on the air we breathe, so our governments can give billions to the United nations.

Quick the sky is falling, the Earth will be no more, CO2 will gas your children, cause bush fires, tsunamis, cyclones, tornadoes, earthquakes, disease, its the end.

Our only hope is a $2 trillion dollar carbon derivatives market.

http://i67.tinypic.com/2n99qop.jpg

Pray to Saint Gore that we will line his pockets and the oligarchies pockets with billions of tax payer dollars from all nations around the world.

http://i64.tinypic.com/2chqalw.png
Environmental prophet and Saint Al Gore

SOmetimes the gullibility of people surprises me. We all know that Joe Average is gullible but just how gullible do you have to be to believe Climate Change caused the Tassie bushfire when the actual climate has not changed at all? It's not as if Tasmania has never had devastating bushfires before this week.