SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
Here is the image under discussion.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Australian Bushfire Map Superimosed Over America Sows Disbelief
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 76 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
There's no such thing as an original sin.
-- Elvis Costello
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @12:23PM (8 children)
You're mostly right, but
Naw. Knowing that Vietnam, Egypt, Germany, Iran, and DRC all have similar populations, at a bit under 1/3 of the USA, is not meaningless. Knowing the size of the Atacama and Sahara, of the Amazon basin and the Mississippi basin are not meaningless. These things allow us to do important estimates with ease.
Here's an example. I had someone at a holiday meal who was loudly proclaiming that 250,000 children were being killed a year in the USA by whatever it was he was bullshitting about. Because I know that's roughly 0.1% of the US population (and I don't live in the USA, so for me that's knowing international stats) I was able to pretty quickly show how it was impossible for that claim to be true. I completely shut down a bullshit claim and heavily nationalist argument with one simple datum.
This is like knowing that solid elemental iron is less sense than solid elemental gold. It's just a useless factoid until the right opportunity arises, and either there's a eureka moment or a lack of insight.
So you're wrong, because you're wrong to say that having a store of knowledge is unimportant. Do the 2nd, 3rd sig figs in these things matter? Naw. But the broad strokes, applied at the right times, allow us to understand the world around us.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @01:31PM (7 children)
I know those facts you listed, but it does not matter that I know those facts because I am not in charge of foreign policy of any country, much less America's. I can laugh at politicians who are in charge of foreign policy screwing up those facts, but it still doesn't matter that I know they screwed up because I am not solely in charge of whether or not that politician holds office.
All things being equal, I am glad that I know more about the world instead of less. It is not, however, material to anyone else in the world or to me either, for that matter.
It's well known, and amply demonstrated in this thread, that Europeans and others snear at how ignorant Americans are. They quite neglect that a number of Americas have traveled extensively and lived in their lands and have met and known their incredibly ignorant and blinkered countrymen that they ignore because they exist outside their own urban, educated bubbles. They also don't realize how ignorant they are in comparison to your average, say, Japanese junior high school student who is cramming at a juku to pass his university entrance exams, wherein they cram you full of all kinds of useful factoids like the specific terms for all the parts of a lotus root.
So it's pleasing to not be ignorant of those facts and to be able to hoist the snearing classes on their own petards, but it's not material. It does not make me richer, or them poorer. It does not take away the luxury car in their driveway and put it in mine. And so on. So how useful are such facts as the relative sizes and populations of nations, really?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pipedwho on Wednesday January 08 2020, @09:42PM (6 children)
In a democracy, the people are responsible for who is running the show. And if those people are ignorant (of whatever, not necessarily geography), they are easier to control. For example, that politician that you know is an ignorant twat and don't want in office is being kept there because too few people see how ignorant he really is.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:10PM (5 children)
No, they aren't. It's a nice theory, but in practice in a democracy the outcome is nearly always the same because it does not matter who gets elected. There might be some tinkering around the edges, but the big things, the important fundamental things, are decided by shadowy parties who control all sides of the government.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Thursday January 09 2020, @09:34PM (4 children)
This is true because people keep voting for the people they are told to vote for by their favourite media outlet. With no critical thought, they just vote their 'party' even though the party's policies and actions are actively against their best interests.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 09 2020, @10:41PM (3 children)
And the party works very hard to make sure nobody can make an informed decision because they obfuscate policies in tens of thousands of legalese. It's the same thing as software engineers dumping gigabytes of code on laymen and saying, "See! It's all right there."
Washington DC delenda est.
(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.