Firestorm: Firemen monitor a conflagration raging in the Bunyip State Park near Labertouche, 125 km west of Melbourne, on Saturday. More than 40 blazes raged across two states as a once-in-a-century heatwave pushed the mercury as high as 46 ºC.
Credit: AFP
Australia's wild weather included a once-in-a-century heatwave that sent temperatures soaring to 46 ºC in the southeast just before the bushfires erupted, along with severe flooding in the nation's north.
Environmental group Greenpeace said such occurrences would become more commonplace if climate change continued unabated.
Management failure
"As climate change continues to gather pace, Australia is at risk of more frequent drought, higher temperatures, more frequent and intense bushfires, as well as increased severity of cyclones and flooding," Greenpeace campaigner leader John Hepburn said.
"The scale of this tragedy should be a clarion call to politicians for the need to begin treating climate change as an emergency."
David Packham, an academic at Monash University in Melbourne, said authorities had failed to properly manage Australia's forests, providing fuel for the fires.
He suggested they could learn from Aborigines, who for thousands of years conducted controlled burn-offs in the forests in order to prevent massive conflagrations. "We have thumbed our noses at what these people did and knew and we just can't keep on doing it," he said.
Mouthpiece
Seems Cosmos is another mouthpiece for GW movement. Sigh. Ya, whatever. Everything is due to GW now. Cold is due to instabilities induced by GW. Move out into a dessert and complain it's hot. Hurricanes of 3 and 4 years hitting the US coast were a sign of GW. No, or 1 or 2 hitting since is a sign of GW. GW makes hurricanes more intense and frequent except when GW makes wind shear blow the tops off hurricanes making them less frequent. GW makes them move right into the gulf except when GW makes them move along the east coast. It's hot and dry in Australia, now who would have thought that? BTW I found the Arctic ice sheet, it's in Kentucky.
Definitely
I have 2 agree with you, any intense weather that happens and the overcrazed greeenies with start screaming and saying the same two words-global warming.
Not just greenies..
It isn't just the greenies these days. Now that the IPCC has 'legitamised' GW the media is just as keen to use GW as an excuse for a headline and will look to quote anyone who is willing to say it.
we don't know what the effects of GW will be with any accuracy so wild claims are just that.
you have got be kidding
surely you turn to Cosmos to quote truthfully verifiable sources of information. To even try to draw this conclusion at this time demeans the reader and the magazine. Let the royal commission do its work and let us be quick to act on the findings so that this does not occur again.