After one of the worst and most devastating Australian bushfire seasons on record, it is both a time to reflect and to enact significant socioeconomic change. The warning bells of man-made global warming and subsequent extreme weather events still ring. But time and time again, it goes unheeded. How much more destruction are we willing to accept before we do something about it? We need to act and the time is now.

First off, let’s dig into some facts and stats:

• Serious out-of-control fires started in June 2019 and burned through early March 2020 until they were all finally put out. Approximately nine months of continuous non-stop burning.
• An estimated 18.6 million hectares were burnt which is almost twice the size of South Korea.
• Thirty-four deaths.
• 9350+ buildings destroyed.
• An estimated more than one billion animals killed.

Those stats speak for themselves – the bushfires were horrific, tragic and devastating. True, it’s not the worst bushfire Australia has seen but it surely isn’t a fire that can be ignored. That said, we now have aerial water bombing assets, better firefighting retardants and more resources in general which we didn’t back in the sixties and seventies, a time when Australia had its worst fires. And still, containing the 2019-20 fires were in any case extremely challenging.

Now, there’s already a lot of punditry around what causes the bushfires. Lots of criticism to go round and who or what to blame, lack of back burning and so on. Prime Minister Scott Morrison copped the brunt of the criticism with a family holiday in Hawaii during the peak of the crisis, then later getting abused by locals for lack of action and leadership (though just want to quickly add due to the timing of this article, that ScoMo is actually doing a great job in the Coronavirus crisis, thanks ScoMo!). The Murchoch press has also been criticised for their biased coverage and general conservative views on the environment and climate change ie. that climate change isn’t really a thing or that it has not much to do with the intensity of the fires. In other words, everyone has an opinion. Hence, it is critical for all you concerned citizens out there wanting to know the real deal to get the right information. So let’s cut through all the noise and decipher the facts and science behind these ferocious fires.

The basic science behind fire is a chemical reaction between oxygen, fuel and heat or ignition temperature. Any increase of any combination of these ingredients increases the fire’s risk and magnitude. A fire stops if at least of the ingredients in the reaction is completely unavailable. The fire continues to burn with fuel and oxygen as the heat of the flame itself keeps the fuel at ignition temperature. Extremely hot days, tons of dry fuel and high winds are the kinds of conditions that make bushfires the worst and that’s exactly what we had during the 2019-20 fires. Exasperated by climate change, the years and months leading up to the bushfires made unprecedented record-breaking conditions for catastrophic fire risk. The only thing left to turn it all on was ignition.

The key issue here is that the 2019-20 bushfires were not normal and this was due to multiple record breaking factors which include:

• Record breaking heat. 2019 was Australia’s hottest, driest year on record. 2018-2019 was southeast Australia’s driest two-year period on record.
• Record breaking drought. Murray-Darling Basin in worst two-to-three year drought conditions on record.
• First time catastrophic bushfire conditions declared for Greater Sydney.
• Worst bushfire season on record for NSW in terms of scale, buildings lost and area burned.
• The Gospers Mountain fire was the largest forest fire ever recorded in Australia, burning more than 500,000 hectares.
• Catastrophic fire danger ratings were experienced at locations and times of the year never before recorded.
• Substantially lengthened fire season causing reduced opportunities for fuel reduction.

All of the above were fueled by climate change, something that was warned for well over twenty years by scientists that climate change would increase the risk of extreme bushfires in Australia.

But fair enough, there are other factors involved rather than strictly climate change. An article from Vox gives a pretty good explanation of why arsonists are only a small factor to blame in the whole scheme of things. The minuscule number of actual people facing arson charges over a limited time period doesn’t account for the enormous scale, 150+ locations, area and time the bushfires have burned. The main cause of ignitions was dry lighting stemmed from thunderstorms that don’t produce rain. Some of the bushfires were even large enough to create their own weather system and dry lightning storms which further perpetuated dry lightning strikes and ignition. High winds blowing embers can also travel great distances causing multiple spot fires to ignite. Ember attack is the main cause of house loss in a bushfire, occurring before, during and after the fire front passes.

Fuel reduction policy is of course also an important factor in fighting fires but we need to again assess their efficacy and relevance in such extreme cases. Due to the substantially lengthened fire season, fuel reduction opportunities have significantly decreased and there is always the question of how much to do and who pays for it. It’s questionable whether taxpayers would ever want to fund hazard reduction for 18.6 million hectares. Furthermore, fuel reduction actually doesn’t stop the fires but rather attempts to change their behaviour. Areas subject to fuel reduction sometimes have no effect because fires can become so intense that it’ll just burn through it. High winds can also easily blow embers past fire breaks and into areas which weren’t fuel reduced.

While we need to do due diligence on other perhaps less significant factors such as arson and fuel reduction policy, it’s not a reason to ignore the overarching cause that is man-made climate change. However, putting our blinkers on and adamantly focusing on arson, fuel reduction or anything other than climate change then becomes denial or abject ignorance. Despite the decades long warnings, it is a disappointing and sad predicament that we had to see those dire predictions fulfilled, but nevertheless we’re here now. If nothing is done, these extreme events will inevitably repeat with greater frequency and even more ferocity.