Piers Akerman: Less hysteria, more science when it comes to bushfires
The much-maligned Murdoch media ritually slammed by green-left ecoactivists is offering intelligent and diverse views on the nature of bushfires, Piers Akerman writes, saying “woke” Australian media only want to point to climate change as the sole cause of bushfires.
Opinion
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Facts do matter but not to those rabidly pushing the false claim that climate change is the sole issue in the debate raging over the cause of the current devastating bushfires.
Facts do matter but not to the New York Times correspondent Damien Cave who wrote last week that: “The idea that ‘greenies’ or environmentalists would oppose measures to prevent fires from ravaging homes and lives is simply false.
“But the comment reflects a narrative that’s been promoted for months by conservative Australian media outlets, especially the influential newspapers and television stations owned by Rupert Murdoch.”
Sorry, Damien, the report is not only wrong, it is part of the false narrative your organisation, “our” ABC and the Nine — formerly Fairfax media — outlets are publishing.
The proof lies in a now-deleted post on the ABC’s Gippsland website from September 5, 2019, headed “Planned burn protest”.
It began, “Residents have disrupted a planned burn at Nowa Nowa in East Gippsland” and continued “the protesters held up signs, and positioned themselves in the area Forest Fire Management had planned to burn.”
The local Forest Fire Management Victoria Tambo district manager Brad Fisher said the burns were part of fuel-reduction program and had been planned after extensive community consultation.
Photos of some of the ecoactivists holding signs reading “Spring burns kill baby birds alive” appeared with the article. I hope those baby birds grew quickly enough to fly out of the area before fires wiped out the forests and the communities which wanted the fuel load in their local area to be reduced.
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The NYT also published another Damien Cave article headlined “How Rupert Murdoch is influencing Australia’s bushfire debate”.
He quoted the usual whining green-left critics who claimed the “Murdoch media” (this newspaper is part of the News Group) was diverting attention from climate change.
Yesterday, The Australian newspaper, the flagship of News’ papers, was still doing a better job at informing the public than the NYT or the ABC or the Nine media and commercial television.
It had several news items on the current state of the battle to quell the blazes and on its Opinion pages it carried an article written by Lyndon Schneiders, a long-term environmentalist and former national director of the Wilderness Society.
It’s a thoughtful piece. Read it.
I hold the Wilderness Society and other environmental groups responsible in large part for permitting the build-up of the extraordinary fuel loads in the national and state parks which, along with the prolonged drought, contributed to explosive force of this season’s bushfires.
The newspaper’s coverage also included a really wide-ranging and carefully researched article by Claire Lehmann reprinted from Quillette, which should be compulsory reading for those interested in factual material on the science behind weather, climate and bushfire prevention.
My point, however, is that it is the much-maligned Murdoch media ritually slammed by green-left ecoactivists that is offering intelligent and diverse views on the nature of bushfires and not the NYT and its Fifth Column associates in the “woke” Australian media.
They want only to point to climate change as the sole cause.
This was driven home by the rabid questioning of Prime Minister Scott Morrison over the recent days in Canberra and elsewhere.
On Friday, an AAP reporter pointedly asked: “Prime Minister, do you expect fire emergencies of this magnitude to become more common in the future with climate change?”
A TV reporter then asked: “Do you accept that community sentiment has changed and shifted somewhat on climate change, that some that perhaps didn’t want more action maybe do because of the bushfire season, and will you consider perhaps bringing back the National Energy Guarantee, something that you were a big supporter of, or something similar?”
Michael Rowland from the ABC’s 7.30 show aggressively interrupted the PM on Thursday with assertions such as: “Do you accept there’s a need given the disproportionate impact these fires are having on Australia compared to other countries, there is a need for the government to do more in upping its emissions reductions target?”
Kim Landers of the ABC’s AM program pushed the same line asking Mr Morrison: “On climate change, who’s telling you that the target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2030 is still good enough?”
With the follow-up: “Doesn’t the scale of the disaster require some sort of recalibration?”
As if altering the truly insignificant 1.3 per cent of carbon dioxide Australians contribute to the 3 per cent of carbon dioxide contributed by human beings to the .04 per cent of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere would save a single twig.
Wildfire has been an important process affecting the Earth’s surface and atmosphere for more than 350 million years and human societies have coexisted with fire since their emergence.
As was pointed out in a recent Royal Society paper: “Many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses. However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends.
“Instead, global area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago.”
Less hysteria, more science — and we might get somewhere.