Opinion: Fire seasons getting longer, more extreme
As a Queenslander and fire service leader over several decades, I’ve never seen a start to a fire season as ferocious as this before, writes Lee Johnson.
Opinion
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As a Queenslander and fire service leader over several decades, I have dealt with many large-scale emergencies including floods, cyclones and fires. But I’ve never seen a start to a fire season as ferocious as this before.
As I write this, more than 50 properties have been lost to fires here in Queensland. It’s still spring, and more homes have been lost than the entirety of the 2019 Black Summer fires.
If, like me, you are feeling worried about what’s coming next, understand that those feelings are valid.
Our fire season should be slowing, but it’s looking likely that it will extend into December. Firefighters have been called in from Victoria to help and our neighbours in New Zealand are sending support too.
We used to be able to call in colleagues from New South Wales, but today, they’re fighting too many fires on their home turf to be able to spare personnel to assist Queensland.
Fire seasons across states and across hemispheres are overlapping, and our emergency resources and volunteer forces are stretched to the limit.
Queenslanders are not unfamiliar with extreme weather events. We are quite accustomed to dealing with floods, fires and cyclones, which have been getting worse over time. These disasters are now arriving with a ferocity and frequency that’s caught communities and emergency services off-guard. Queensland is the most disaster-prone state, with damage costs twice as much as Victoria and 50 per cent more than New South Wales.
Since 2006, when Tropical Cyclone Larry hit Innisfail, the state has dealt at least one major disaster every year. The increase we have seen in severity and frequency of extreme weather events is not natural. It has a name, and its name is climate change.
We have entered a new age of unnatural disasters, supercharged by climate change. This includes more destructive storms, extreme downpours (which Queenslanders know all too well), and – as we are experiencing right now – more dangerous fire seasons.
In Queensland in 2018, we suffered record losses of property and wide-reaching devastation to homes and communities. It was hard to imagine that things could get worse, but they did when Black Summer arrived in 2019. At the end of the fire season in January 2020, we once again experienced a record loss and that seemed like the limit of what we could endure, and yet here we are again.
Queensland stands at the edge of a horrendous summer once again set to shatter records that should never have been set in the first place.
The science has been saying the same thing for years: fire seasons will continue to get worse, driven by the burning of fossil fuels. We need to act with urgency on climate change, and every tonne of avoided pollution will help limit future harms. While we will eventually put these fires out with a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, the only way to extinguish the climate crisis is to stamp out fossil fuels. For good.
Our government owes it to the generations to come to leave fossil fuels in the ground, or their legacy will be one of adding fuel to catastrophic fires and floods.
They have the chance, within this decade, to leave a different legacy if they commit to driving down emissions and working alongside other countries to show true fortitude to tackle the biggest crisis of our generation.
First responders are undoubtedly tough and tenacious. But they are also tired. And when confronted by Black Summer style megafires which have no end and cannot be tamed: terrified. There are limits to what can be endured – and like millions of Australians who are having to pick up the pieces, after being slammed by disaster after disaster, they are saying that enough is enough.
The only way we can turn down the heat for summers to come, is to turn off fossil fuels.
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