Learning a lesson from Australia’s devastating fires

The caller to a local newspaper was irate and insistent: Media need to stop blaming climate change for causing the kind of wildfires that are currently scorching Australia. Everyone knows, the angry caller insisted, climate change didn’t start these fires, so why it is always cited in media coverage of the disaster?

The caller wasn’t wrong. Climate change did not start the wildfires, and battling climate change won’t stop them from happening. They start for a variety of reasons — sparks from cooking, campfires, smoking and industry, to name a few. And, in many cases, including in Australia, they are started deliberately, by people.

But what the climate crisis is doing is creating ideal conditions for the growth and ferocity of such fires. Because of a warming planet, fire seasons are longer than before, and the fires themselves are worse. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology reports that since the middle of the 20th century, there has been “a long-term increase in extreme fire weather and in the length of the fire season … Climate change, including increasing temperatures, is contributing to these changes.”

Australia’s wildfires are terrible, even compared to the devastating fires that ravaged Alberta and British Columbia in recent Canadian fire seasons. For Australia, it started with the driest spring on record along with an extended drought in fire regions. The country has been setting heat records regularly, with temperatures sometimes pushing 42 C.

Consider the scale. We all remember the Fort McMurray, Alta., fire of 2016, which burned nearly 6,000 square kilometres and resulted in insured losses of about $4 billion. Or the 2017 fires in British Columbia, where a record of 12,000 square kilometres stood only until the next fire season when a record of 13,500 burned square kilometres was set. California’s fires during the same year burned nearly 8,000 square kilometres.

So far, with no end to this fire season in sight, Australia has lost 50,000 square kilometres. Dozens of people have died. Thousands of houses have burned and well over a billion animals have died. Some species, such as the koala, could be technically extinct by the time this fire season ends.

You would think that given the scale of these disasters, public policy-makers would be alert and responsive. That hasn’t been the case to date in Australia, where the government has been warned repeatedly about the growing threat, but has done little to prepare and adjust for worsening fire seasons.

But we don’t have to look halfway around the world for tone-deaf politicians. In Alberta, the same province so deeply wounded by successive worsening fire seasons, the government recently announced it was cutting more than 60 specialized firefighting jobs in the interest of saving money. Fortunately, many of firefighters let go are simply taking their skills to British Columbia, which is wisely hiring more firefighters to cope with the increasing threat.

Worsening wildfires aren’t the worst climate change fallout we will face going forward. Rising sea levels and melting ice caps and sea ice are predicted to be worse. But you could look at wildfires as an early harbinger of what the future will hold.

If you need more evidence of why we have to do what we can to fight climate change, look no further than Australia. And if you are one of those people who resents having to do anything that impacts your own wallet or lifestyle, consider how you might feel if you lived there. No doubt there is no shortage of Aussies who shared the “what-difference-does-it-make-what-I-do” mindset. Many probably feel different today.