Fires in scientific focus but climate link proves elusive

The severity of the summer bushfires has led to Australia being named ‘ground zero’ for climate change.

The severity of the summer bushfires has led to Australia being named “ground zero” for climate change, prompting members of the international science community to demand stronger action.

In an editorial published with a series of commentaries on the bushfires, science journal Nature notes the effects of climate change have been felt already in Australia — citing coral bleaching and reef loss — but have done little to change political discourse.

However, the bushfires have led to increased calls for action, in Australia and overseas.

“This widespread impact challenges the ‘double reality’ in wealthy countries, where the science of climate change is accepted, but the impacts are held at a distance,” the editorial notes.

The incidence of extreme events “has seemingly shifted the dialogue around climate change in industrialised countries”.

It says the bushfires are viewed as “a harbinger of a future that is quickly becoming present, although capturing such fires is still a challenge for climate models”.

One paper published on Tuesday in Nature notes that Amazon forest fires produced few images of wildlife being harmed, but images of injured kangaroos and koalas inspired many to act. But it illustrates a disconnect between actions aimed at saving individual animals and broader issues of species survival.

Other papers link the fires to drought conditions. However, “efforts are still under way to establish a link between climate change and these fires”.

In a paper on climate variability, Andrew King from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, says: “There is a lot we don’t fully understand yet. While we can say with confidence that human-caused climate change has amplified the extreme heatwaves that have been observed this summer, the influence of human-caused climate change on drought and fires in Australia is much harder to disentangle and natural climate variability plays a very large role in both.”

RMIT and University of Queensland researchers identify an escalating threat to the study of climate change itself. The bushfires have been a brutal reminder that research sites are vulnerable. “Ecological field work is one of the most exposed and sensitive of any human activity to climatic and biophysical disruption,” lead author Lauren Rickards says. “Even field work designed to study exactly such events can find vital data streams (and) research projects … disrupted.”