Inconvenient Facts On Australian Bushfires

Written by Roger Pielke Jr PhD on January 17, 2020. Posted in Current News

We live in a time where every extreme weather or climate-related event is immediately associated with human-caused climate change.

Such associations are often not really about the science of climate, but rather a symbol used to exhort in the political battle over climate change.

For instance, on one extreme there is Michael Mann, of Penn State University, who is spending an academic sabbatical in Sydney.

He claims that “The brown skies I observed in the Blue Mountains this week are a product of human-caused climate change… it’s not complicated.”

Mann frequently uses the climate issue as the basis for electoral politicking – he calls for Australians to remove their Prime Minister: Australians are going “to have to vote out climate change deniers like [Scott] Morrison.”

In contrast, the Australian Academy of Science says that the causes of bushfires are actually extremely complicated:

“Bushfires, along with other weather and climate challenges, pose complex and wide-ranging problems. Population growth, climate change, temperature extremes, droughts, storms, wind, and floods are intersecting in ways that are difficult to untangle and address.” And rather than calling for changing out individual politicians, the Academy calls for improved policies: “Everything, including urban planning; building standards; habitat restoration; biodiversity and species preservation; and land, water, and wildlife management will need careful and measured consideration.”

The climate issue is so deeply politicized that some will cheerlead the politicization of the issue, some even going so far as to even deny any connection between climate change and fires at all.

Nowadays, the politicization of scientific issues is often intense, but it is not uncommon. Climate change, of course, is an extreme example of science that is variously hyped and denied, making it difficult for non-experts to tell the difference.

And using your political preferences to sort what you think is good science from bad is never a good idea.

Fortunately, the scientific community has developed some special organizations whose job it is to play things straight.

One such group is called @ScienceBrief at the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (funded by the United Kingdom and European Commission).

@ScienceBrief has produced a summary of what the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded about the risks of wildfires and placed those conclusions into the context of more recent peer-reviewed literature.

Their summary is not likely to make anyone happy at the political extremes of the climate debate, but it is a fair representation of the current state of the science, as found in leading assessments and the peer-reviewed literature.

I encourage you to read it in full, but below are some highlights.

First, and crucially, they conclude: “The impact of anthropogenic climate change on fire weather is emerging above natural variability.”

Human-caused climate change affects “fire weather”, which they define as “periods with a high likelihood of fire due to a combination of high temperatures, low humidity, low rainfall, and often high winds.”

SEE ALSO: Australia’s Epic Fires Caused By Bad Forestry And Arson, Not Climate Change

However, the emergence of that impact has only been detected in ~22% of the world’s burnable land area, according to a recent study by John Abatzoglou and colleagues.

They conclude that:

“Detection and attribution of global fire activity to anthropogenic climate change [are] confounded by influences of other anthropogenic activities such as land‐cover change, population, and fire suppression, as well as temporally limited satellite‐based fire records.”

In 2011, we contributed an early paper proposing a methodology focused on quantifying the “timescale of emergence” of a signal of human-caused climate change on tropical cyclones (hurricanes) and their impacts.

The idea behind this approach is to use climate models, assuming for purposes of analysis that their projections are accurate, and ask when would we expect to detect a signal of human-caused climate change in climate variables or in their impacts.

It will always be easier to detect the role of human-caused climate change weather and climate data (like in fire weather) than it will be to detect that role in societal impacts (like in the number of buildings burned).

As we explained in an analysis of Australian bushfire losses over time:

“…bushfire damage is not solely a function of bushfire weather; far from it, in fact. Even given a gradual aggravation of bushfire weather due to anthropogenic climate change or other factors, a bushfire still has to be ignited.

“Once ignited, a bushfire then has to traverse the landscape and impact a populated area, where outcomes in terms of damage will be a function of the spatial disposition of dwellings with respect to the fire front, and especially distance of properties from the bushland boundary.”

In the Abatzoglou study, 22% of the burnable land area where detection of the role of human-caused climate change has been achieved includes the Amazon, Mediterranean, Scandinavia, and Western North America. It does not include Siberia or Australia.

That’s right, according to the latest research looking at the issue, the role of human-caused climate change in Australian bushfires has not yet been detected.

It remains to be seen if the fires of 2019/2020 will alter that conclusion, but according to the Abatzoglou study, such detection is not expected until the 2040s.

And that conclusion depends upon projections based on an extreme (and implausible) scenario for future emissions (RCP8.5), so detection may take a bit longer, assuming the projections are correct.

Those who have chosen to wage their political battles over climate change through science – whatever side they are on – will certainly not be happy with the nuanced, somewhat complex current state of detection and attribution of wildfire to human-caused climate change.

For those of us interested in more aggressive mitigation and adaptation policies, scientific nuance and complexity are not at all a problem – because it is accurate, and accuracy is important.

Playing things straight on climate science may not always support a particular political agenda, and at times might even seem to undercut claims by one side or another.

But what playing things straight can do is sustain public and policymaker trust in the scientific community.

Playing things straight can be difficult on highly politicized issues, but organizations like the IPCC and @ScienceBrief are absolutely essential to the integrity of science as viewed by politicians and the public, whatever their political predispositions happen to be.

So how should the media report on the bushfires? Accurately. That means relying on organizations like the IPCC and placing the outlier views of individual scientists into that broader context.

Here is an example of how the information from @ScienceBrief might be translated into plain English:

“The effects of climate change have not yet been detected in Australian fires, but changes underway suggest that those effects will be detectable as early as the 2040s. If so we should expect, more and more intense fires, and respond accordingly.”

The science of climate change and extreme events does not always fit readily into political campaigns, no matter how popular or accepted, and certainly not easily into electoral politics.

However, as experts, it is absolutely essential that some part of our community plays things straight in support of our collective efforts to prepare for and mitigate an uncertain climate future.

Roger Pielke Jr. has been a professor at the University of Colorado since 2001. Previously, he was a staff scientist in the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He has degrees in mathematics, public policy, and political science, and is the author of numerous books. (Amazon)

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