December 19, 2006
Rich Bowden
Oh My news
A report delivered this month by the independent think tank the Australia Institute has concluded that human influenced climate change will "significantly raise the fire danger in Australia" over a long term period.
The report comes as exceptionally dry conditions have fueled major bushfires in three states in Australia where firefighters have battled searing temperatures and an abundance of dry undergrowth left by the worst drought experienced in Australia in over a century.
The policy research institute found that higher average temperatures due to global warming would increase the frequency and intensity of bushfires causing further damage to Australia's environment and increasing the likelihood of higher loss of property and lives.
Written by the Australia Institute's Christian Dowie, the paper entitled "Heating Up: Bushfires and Climate Change," found Australia's weather patterns to be changing. With 2005 the hottest year on record and all but four years since 1979 warmer than average, Dowie shows that the majority of scientific evidence now strongly supports the theory of a change in climate in Australia -- already the world's driest continent.
Though much of the hotter, dryer weather recently experienced can be blamed on the naturally occurring El Nino weather pattern (a major fluctuation in the temperature of the tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean which causes dryer conditions in Australia), Dowie quotes from the government inquiry set up to investigate the 2002-2003 Victorian bushfires which recommended that potential climate change impacts be integrated into future preparation against bushfires.
Significantly Dowie's paper said increased bushfires could, in themselves, be a cause for further global warming. Not only would increased bushfires release more carbon into the atmosphere but also, as more of the bush is destroyed, the amount of trees left to hold carbon in the form of "carbon sinks" is reduced. With fewer trees available to hold carbon, the more carbon will be expelled into the atmosphere.
As a result of these findings Dowie called for urgent action to reduce climate change warning that to ignore the problem would lead to hotter, dryer conditions which, along with an El Nino weather pattern, could increase the risk of damaging bushfires.
Australia Institute Executive Director Dr Clive Hamilton has called on the Federal Government to take "serious measures" to avert the problem of climate change saying that the Government's own scientific agency has predicted "that climate change will increase the frequency of high and extreme fire danger days by 4-25 percent by 2020 and 15-70 percent by 2050 across south-east Australia."
Dr Hamilton said the Government should begin to address the climate change problem by taking international steps such as signing the Kyoto Protocol. Australia -- along with the United States -- is the only major industrial nation not to have signed the 1997 Protocol designed to set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
However Australian Prime Minister John Howard dismissed the Australia Institute's report saying its attack on the Government was predictable. He denied the Government was doing nothing to address climate change and called the report "esoteric."
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