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Which is larger? Yours, or mine? Australia or the United States of America, that is. With the bushfires in Australia out of control incinerating large swathes of the country a map was produced to visually depict how widespread the fires are. For emphasis the map was overlaid on top of America to give people an idea of the scope of the problem Australia is dealing with. Americans responded with disbelief that Australia was just as large as the USA. People were also in shock over how large an area, measured by size of US states, are currently burning. Responses on social media show how shocked and dumbfounded people were learning this.
- Area of Australia = 7.692 million km2
- Area of USA, excluding Alaska = 7.653 million km2
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Australian Bushfire Map Superimosed Over America Sows Disbelief
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(Score: 1) by sfm on Friday January 10 2020, @01:19AM (2 children)
Would the Australian fire situation have been more improved
by an aggressive CO2 abatement policy or better rangeland fire
prevention projects (such as clearing brush/dead trees and
prescribed burns) ?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday January 10 2020, @02:00AM
Nobody knows; it's not settled. I saw a graph a couple days ago of the high and low annual temperatures for Australia for the last century. This year's are not remarkably atypical, so it seems not so straightforward to pin bush fires on the climate. Meanwhile there have been reports [mercurynews.com] of arsonists [abc.net.au] setting at least some of them; FWIW, the second link, from an Australian source, makes it sound like people setting fires during summer holidays is a common thing.
As for fire management policy, I can't speak to bush fires in Australia but have a little bit of a window on forest fires in the American West. When Yellowstone's forests caught fire in 1988, they let it burn because it had been their long-standing policy to do so; it was controversial at the time because it is a popular park and the fires were so extensive, and because it was contrary to the fire management policies pursued at every other park and place throughout the West. 36% of the park burned down.
For contrast, the summer of 2018 was an active fire season with 98 large fires in the West and smoke that didn't let up until central Pennsylvania, and those fires were on land that the Forest Service actively works to mitigate fire potential.
In other words, mitigation or no, some years are just bad.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Friday January 10 2020, @03:28AM
The fires couldn't really be prevented with local political action, however, the current pro-corporate administration in Australia actively denies climate change since they are heavily paid for by the coal industry. They've done this for a long time, and they (and people that listen to them) look for other excuses while ignoring the real problem.
The issue in Australia is due to global changes in climate that are directly impacting Australia. There are some good month to month temperature graphs that show the changes over the last 100 years. This year is hotter and dryer than any year previous. The graphs show a steady and gradual increase that seems to accelerate around 1980.
Hazard reduction (clearing, chopping, hazard reduction burning) is always ongoing in Australia, some of which was hampered by year on year cuts to the fire service budgets. However, these fires have grown so huge that gales have driven embers from the fire fronts across large rivers and started new fires up to 6km away.
Some of the most problematic fires have started in remote locations (eg. due to lightning strikes) where, by the time anyone realised anything was happening, the fire had become a monster burning across huge dry forest areas. This can always happen, but there have been more than a few dry thunderstorms over the last couple of months. That isn't a regular occurrence. The combination of all these things has made it incredibly difficult to keep the fires under control, providing too many and too large out of control fronts that the fire services can't handle them.
People lighting fires (either intentionally or otherwise) is a misdirection of what's happening. That has always happened, and is no worse this year than any other. However, the conditions that sustain the fires are worse than ever before, so any fire becomes more problematic than it otherwise would have been if the same fires had started 20 years ago.
If it wasn't this year, then it'd happen next year or the year after. Average temperatures are continually increasing across Australia and it was only a matter of time before a big bushfire season like this occurred.