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The Forum > Article Comments > Climate change and the bushfires > Comments

Climate change and the bushfires : Comments

By Don Aitkin, published 18/11/2019

The worst was probably in Victoria in 1851, which burned a quarter of the colony, and killed unknown numbers of people, but also a million sheep, thousands of cattle and innumerable native fauna.

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Highly unlikely, individual, but you'd need to look at all the building components including materials inside a house that could readily if fire enetered through a window broken by direct flame exposure etc.
Posted by Bernie Masters, Monday, 18 November 2019 2:44:19 PM
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Bernie Masters,
Of course but the ground could open up also & swallow the whole house !
Posted by individual, Monday, 18 November 2019 7:55:40 PM
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Yep the science is settled even back in 1950's. The climate just keeps changing. The only difference is that some fools think they can stop the climate changing by not mining coal.
Posted by runner, Monday, 18 November 2019 8:23:37 PM
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Don disingenuously, I believe, tries to draw comparisons with fires as far back as the late 1800s. And in his haste to reach certain conclusions? Left out a few factors that might have influenced outcomes?

The first being our total populations at the compared events and therefore the available volunteers!

He just completely ignores the serious shortage of diesel fire trucks during the 1800s, the sparse and vastly separated bush fire brigades. The serious deficiency in diesel-powered graders and dozers and the distinct lack of water-bombing aircraft!

And water storages operated by electric pumps or diesel backups?

Were these same deficiencies, the order of the day today? Sydney would be a wall of fire decimating the city! And Black Sunday in Vic would have claimed far more many lives!

One notes also as big tobacco and asbestos were being reviled by the medical profession, the scientists employed by the foregoing, had one message for their employers and another for the average mug?

Not all that long ago it was widely reported through major media, that that same thing was occurring inside the fossil fuel industry. And, hardly surprising!?

I believe these rampant fires and their catastrophic consequences and the response by our review addicted pollies! Will play well during the very next polls that actually count!

And I'm sure will want to review the review then that again in turn so they can kick this can down the road until they retire on generous pensions and eke out their retirements on speaking tours etc, in air-conditioned and secure comfort until their respective passings?

For mine, their respective taxpayer-funded pensions and entitlements should rely on how well they've actually addressed their employer's concerns and not how much they spin outcomes and blame shift responsibility, for effective and real action!

To date, their deplorable history in this area would have me say, about your pensions and entitlements? You can go and kiss my Kester!
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Monday, 18 November 2019 8:40:02 PM
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Alan B,
By his own admission Don's an Academic, logic & pragmatism don't play into it !
One of the reasons progress in anything requiring a dose of logic is always hindered by the "experts".
Posted by individual, Tuesday, 19 November 2019 8:01:03 AM
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Alan B..,

You would be more persuasive if you abandoned attacks on the writer. You don't know me, and your assumptions about who I am and what I think are yours, usually inaccurate. For the record, I haven't been an academic for 33 years, live in an 'aged care facility', and am in my 83rd year. I write as I wish, trying always to be dispassionate and fact-based. Yes, of course I might miss a fact or two, and I think facts are most important.

You are right about differences. I limit my essays to about 1200 words, or I might have pointed out that the ratios of deaths from fires of this kind need to be set against the sizes of the population, of Victoria, for example, at the time. If you do that, the fires in the past were just as or more destructive than the recent ones.
Posted by Don Aitkin, Tuesday, 19 November 2019 9:29:19 AM
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