Fires

REVIVE ANCIENT SKILLS TO BETTER MANAGE BUSHFIRES

VIV FORBES

There were key messages in the smoke spotted by our first explorers
The firelighter was the most powerful tool that early humans brought to Australia.

Fires lit by Aboriginal men and women created the landscape of Australia. They used fire to create and fertilise fresh new grass for the grazing animals they hunted, to trap and roast grass-dwelling reptiles and rodents, to fight enemies, to send smoke signals, to fell dead trees for campfires, to ward off frosts and biting insects, and for religious and cultural ceremonies. Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with frequent burn-offs.

Early white explorers and settlers recorded the smoke and the blackened tree trunks. They admired the extensive grasslands, either treeless or with well-spaced trees, and no tangled undergrowth of dead grass, brambles, branches and weeds.

Making fire without tinderboxes or matches is laborious. So most Aboriginals tried to keep their fires alive at all times. When on the move, selected members of the tribe were charged with carrying a fire stick and keeping it alight. In really cold weather several members may have each carried a fire stick for warmth. When the stick was in danger of going out, the carrier would usually light a tussock of dry grass or leaves and use that flame to rejuvenate the fire stick (or light a new one). As they moved on, they left a line of small fires spreading behind them. They were observed by early white explorers and settlers trying to control the movement of fires but never tried to extinguish them.

Early explorers who ventured inland were amazed to find extensive grasslands and open woodland. Their reports attracted settlers to these grassy open forests and treeless plains with mobs of cattle and sheep.

Despite modern folklore tales about Aboriginal fire management skills, anyone reading diaries from early explorers such as Abel Tasman (1642) and Captain Cook (1770) soon learned that Aboriginals lit fires at any time, for many reasons, and never tried to put them out.

If threatened by fires lit by enemies, the most frequent response was to light their own protective fires (now called backburning). Firelighting was deliberate, and sometimes governed by rules, but there was no central plan. There were no firefighters, no 4WD tankers, no water bombers, no dozers. But Aboriginal fire “management” worked brilliantly. Because of the high frequency of small fires, fire intensity was low and fires could be lit safely even in summer. Any fire lit would soon run into country burnt one or two years earlier and then would run out of fuel and self-extinguish.

Early squatters quickly learned to manage fire to protect their assets, grasslands and grazing animals.

Graziers need to protect herds and flocks, homesteads, haystacks, yards, fences and neighbours, as well as maintain grasslands by killing woody weeds and encouraging new grass. So their fire management was refined. They soon learned to pick the right season, day, time of day, place, wind and weather before lighting a fire.

Today we have replaced decentralised fire management with government-nurtured firestorms. First governments created fire hazards called national parks, where fire sticks, matches, graziers and foresters were locked out and access roads were abandoned or padlocked. And green-loving urbanites built houses beside them and planted trees in their yards. The open forests and grasslands were invaded by eucalypt regrowth, woody weeds, tangled undergrowth, dry grass, logs, dead leaves, twigs, bark and litter — all perfect fuel for a wildfire holocaust.

These tinderboxes of forest fuel became magnets for arsonists, or were lit by windblown embers or lightning. With high winds, high temperatures and heavy fuel loads some fires will race through the treetops of oil-rich eucalypt forests.

Into this maelstrom they send the brave volunteers. With insufficient tracks, insufficient nearby water, uncleared tracks, insufficient fuel reduction burning and bush right up to towns and houses, disasters are guaranteed.

Central management and control of burn-off policy has failed. Too often the people in charge did not understand bushfire history and science and were too influenced by green ideology.

Authorities should provide information but not control, which should be returned to landowners, homeowners, foresters and experienced local fire officers.

Locals with fire knowledge, experience and skin in the game could make a huge difference. Residents should be able to demand fuel load reduction near their properties and towns, and carry it out on public land if authorities refuse to do it. It can be burnt, slashed, raked, composted, heaped or buried as long as it is no longer capable of feeding runaway bushfires. Insurance companies should reflect fire risk in premiums.

No Aboriginals and few early settlers used water to fight fires. There were no water bombers, no fire trucks, often not even handspray backpacks. Graziers used backburning from station tracks. Their wives defended the homestead with garden hoses or tried to beat the flames to death with wet hessian bags and green branches. Aboriginals let the fire burn and tried to keep out of its path.

Water is undoubtedly useful to protect homes and towns, to extinguish burning buildings, to stop grass fires and to stop the backburn from escaping in the wrong direction. But trying to extinguish raging bushfires and forest wildfires with water alone is usually a waste of time, energy and water.

We must relearn two ancient skills — remove the fuel load everywhere and use fire to fight fire. Big fires need a lot of fuel. If you own the fuel, you own the fire. If you haven’t managed the fuel, you will not be able to manage the fire. And if your fire escapes and causes damage, you are responsible.

Viv Forbes is executive director of the
Saltbush Club. He has been a pastoralist in
Queensland and the Northern Territory for most of his life.

Climate Complexities

DANGEROUS TO SIMPLIFY THE COMPLEX MATTER OF CLIMATE

The push for consensus has come at the expense of exploratory scientific work

JUDITH CURRY

The UN Climate Change Conference this week in Madrid provides an important opportunity to reflect on the state of the public debate surrounding climate change.

Most of the world’s governments are prioritising energy security, affordability and industrial competitiveness over commitments made for the Paris climate agreement. Even if these countries were on track to meet their commitments, most of the national pledges would be insufficient to meet the Paris targets. At the same time, we are hearing increasingly shrill rhetoric from Extinction Rebellion and other activists about the “existential threat” of the “climate crisis”, “runaway climate chaos” and so on.

There is a growing realisation that the Paris climate agreement is inadequate for making a meaningful dent in slowing down the anticipated warming.

And the real societal consequences of climate change and extreme weather events remain largely unaddressed.

How have we arrived at this point? For the past three decades, the climate policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific horse. The 1992 climate change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans. There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of manmade climate change.

Fossil-fuel emissions as the climate “control knob” is a simple and seductive idea. However, this is a misleading oversimplification since climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways.

There is still great uncertainty about the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean circulations) will play out in the 21st century, and whether natural variability will dominate over man-made warming.

We still don’t have a realistic assessment of how a warmer climate will affect us and whether it is dangerous. We don’t have a good understanding of how warming will influence extreme weather events. Land use and exploitation by humans is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health. Local sea level rise has many causes and is dominated by sinking from land use in many of the most vulnerable locations.

We have been told that the science of climate change is settled. However, in climate science there has been a tension between the drive towards a scientific consensus to support policymaking, versus exploratory research that pushes forward the knowledge frontier. Climate science is characterised by a rapidly evolving knowledge base and disagreement among experts. Predictions of 21st-century climate change are characterised by deep uncertainty.

Nevertheless, activist scientists and the media seize on each extreme weather event as having the fingerprints of man-made climate change — ignoring the analyses of more sober scientists showing periods of even more extreme weather in the first half of the 20th century, when fossil fuel emissions were much smaller.

Alarming press releases are issued about each new climate model prediction of future catastrophes from famine, mass migrations and catastrophic fires, yet these press releases don’t mention that these predicted catastrophes are associated with highly implausible assumptions about how much we might emit in the 21st century. Issues such as famine, mass migrations and wildfires are caused primarily by government policies and ineptitude, lack of wealth and land-use policies. Climate change matters, but it’s outweighed by other factors in terms of influencing human wellbeing.

We have been told that climate change is an existential crisis. However, based on our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations.

However, the perception of man-made climate change as a near-term apocalypse has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider.

We have not only oversimplified the problem of climate change but we have also oversimplified its solution. Even if you accept the climate model projections and that warming is dangerous, there is disagreement among experts regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response.

In any event, rapidly reducing emissions from fossil fuels and ameliorating the adverse effects of extreme weather events in the near term increasingly looks like magical thinking.

Climate change — man-made and natural — is a chronic problem that will require centuries of management.

The extreme rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion and other activists is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously. The monomaniacal focus on elimination of fossil-fuel emissions distracts our attention from the primary causes of many of our problems and effective solutions.

Commonsense strategies to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events, improve environmental quality, develop better energy technologies, improve agricultural and land-use practices, and better manage water resources can pave the way for a more prosperous and secure future. Each of these solutions is “no regrets” — supporting climate change mitigation while improving human wellbeing. These strategies avoid the political gridlock surrounding the current policies and avoid costly policies that will have minimal near-term impacts on the climate. And these strategies don’t require agreement about the risks of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.

We don’t know how the climate of the 21st century will evolve, and we will undoubtedly be surprised. Given this uncertainty, precise emissions targets and deadlines are scientifically meaningless. We can avoid much of the political gridlock by implementing commonsense, no-regrets strategies that improve energy technologies, lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient to extreme weather events.

Judith Curry is president of the
Climate Forecast Applications
Network and professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of
Technology.