When bushfires burned through parts of the west coast of Tasmania in 2016, the Klimate Kult were quick to jump on the bandwagon – certainly far quicker than they ever are to jump on a fire tanker. “Ecocide!” they shrieked. “These places have never seen fire for millions of years!”
And, of course: climate change. Cue scary music.
With large-scale fires ravaging New South Wales, the same scary stories are being trotted out again.
The rainforests along the spine of the Great Dividing Range, between the Hunter River and southern Queensland, are remnants of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent that broke up about 180 million years ago […]The forests are mountaintop islands that have been “permanently wet” for tens of millions of years.
But now, some of these forests are being burnt for the first time.
“We are seeing fire going into these areas where fire is simply not meant to go,” says [ecologist Mark] Graham, a fire specialist with the Nature Conservation Council.
The claim that the forests of Tasmania’s west coast had never experienced fire is easily questioned by a search of past newspapers, revealing past stories of large-scale bushfires ravaging the coast. Similarly, a brief search of old newspapers turns up the following regarding Daintree:
“As a result of the almost complete absence of winter rains, the position throughout the Far North is expected to become acute in a few weeks. Bushflres are raging in some northern areas. Daintree township north of Cairns. is completely surrounded by bush and grass fires” – The News, 10 October 1939.
The Cairns Northern Herald of June 1937 referred to “showers which, although very light, were sufficient to restore to the grass the greenness so familiar in Daintree”, suggesting that unusually dry conditions were present in the area in the late ‘30s.
More importantly, if the claim that “some of these forests are being burnt for the first time” is true, then it demolishes the Klimate Kult’s hysterical bandwagon-jumping that “it’s all because of climate change!”
These 100-million-year-old forests have lived through periods of much higher global temperatures than anything experienced today. Even in the quite recent past – some 10-13,000 years ago – global temperatures were some four degrees higher. If these forests didn’t burn in those warm, greenhouse conditions, that suggests that it is very unlikely that the much milder temperatures of today are to blame.
There’s a final irony in the story:
Mr Graham has been fighting the fires in the forests since they began about three months ago.
He, and dozens of likeminded people, have managed to save some of the old growth trees by clearing around them.
abc.net.au/news/2019-11-27/bushfires-devastate-ancient-forests-and-rare-wildlife/
So clearing vegetation build-up is a sure way to stop devastating bushfires? Somebody try and tell the Greens that.
