Thread by @Phil_Zylstra

Thread: Why the big fires of the past don't make the point that Craig Kelly thinks they do.

Yesterday, Mr Kelly distributed this map from a book I wrote in 2006. I had mapped the 1939 NSW burnt area from witness interviews and old news reports.
theaustralianalps.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/bushfi…

1. 1939 is a good case for Mr Kelly to choose. Judge Stretton in the following Victorian Royal Commission called it "a wicked attempt at state suicide". This was because the fires were all lit by people, not lightning.

2. The (albeit scant) evidence that exists for fire frequency across the Australian Alps shows a roughly seven-fold increase in frequency in the decade that the land was taken from its Aboriginal owners.

3. The increase occurred because English graziers had used fire at home to clear forest for grazing land (the moors). They burnt landscapes to change them, but the First Nations of the Alps had multiple small, targeted burns to manage a complex regime instead of clearing.

4. A culture developed where burning became seen as an end in itself. Stretton reported that many witnesses had told him they believed it was morally wrong not to burn when possible.

5. As a result, one summer after another saw fires escape and create massive bushfires. All of these huge fires were escaped burns.

6. Burning also made the landscape more flammable. Water managers made the point that the catchment was filled with dry scrub because of burning: "“It is our experience that if fire is excluded that kind of bush will gradually revert to the cleaner type of bush”.

7. NSW high country graziers such as Roy Hedger said: "...We would never burn bush country as it would make it worse and bring suckers up... In my experience, bush country should not be burnt above 5000 ft. It’s the clear country that should be burnt every five or six years.”

7. Burning continued, however, until stronger laws curbed it in the 1950s. When that happened, Massive fires simply stopped occurring. There were certainly bad fires where tens of thousands of ha burnt, but million ha fires became a thing of the past.

9. In the worst weather of the next half-century, fires burnt until they hit cleared country, then the flanks could be controlled. Million ha fires did not occur in the Alps and Gippsland because they needed multiple, widespread ignitions, and these had been stopped.

10. Fire frequency began to return toward the pre-European state, where there had been no evidence of million ha fires for a century or so before invasion. Forests began to recover.

11. That all changed when we hit this millennium. In 2003, lightning lit a massive number of fires across most of the Alps. In the drought conditions, 1.5 million ha were burnt: the first instance we know of for a million ha+ fire in the area caused by lightning not people.

12. Again in 2006. Massive dry lightning storms in the Victorian Alps and another million ha burnt - much of it re-burnt from 2003.

13. The trend in dry lightning and drought continued elsewhere. Tasmanian Gondwanan remnants have dried and been ignited a couple of times in the past few years. Studies have shown a clear increase in dry lighting across this southern latitude belt.

14. This year's fires continue to push that trend higher. These were overwhelmingly lightning fires, lit without rain in landscapes where pockets have been too wet to burn for many many millennia. These fires are also much bigger than the pre-1950's fires.

15. In short: big fires happened back then because:
a) people burnt outside of a safe burning envelope
b) instead of learning where fire belonged, people burnt forests that become more flammable when regrowing

16. Today's massive fires happen because of overwhelmingly clear effects of climate change. Landscapes are dry that haven't been for thousands of years, massive dry lightning storms happen that didn't happen before.

17. Today, prescribed burns are already escaping and burning houses because the window of safe burning is shrinking due to climate change.

18. Mr Kelly's pressure to increase burning will push managers to burn outside of safe conditions and to burn more forest that shouldn't be burnt. In short: a return to the exact things that caused the fires he is using as examples.

19. On top of that, as the Chair of the Parliamentary Friends of Australian Coal Exports, Mr Kelly is marketing and manoeuvering for an increase in the thing that gave us this year's #ClimateEmergency. Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal. #ClimateCriminals