Global warming means urban wildfires are after you
Urban wildfires are becoming more frequent, fiercer and deadlier, putting everyone at risk. Continued global warming will increase risks more
The current climate emergency triggered by the profligate production and burning of fossil fuels is the greatest danger humans have faced in our long history. Amongst many other growing perils resulting from global warming, as long as we allow our only Earth to go on warming urban firestorms will become more frequent, fiercer, and deadlier. Many of Australia’s close packed and leafy suburbs would also be susceptible to this kind of urban firestorm. As seen in the picture above from the National Library of Australia, Canberra had a foretaste in 2003 when 470 homes were destroyed and 4 people killed…….
Lessons from Colorado as detailed in the attached article, also apply to most of Australia.
Where our own future is concerned, we also mustn’t forget California’s experience with urban firestorms. Some examples include: California’s utterly meticulously documented near total incineration of the town of Paradise in 2018 (85 people killed, 18,804 buildings destroyed, 621 km² burned); the 2017 Tubbs Fire that burned more than 5,000 structures in Santa Rosa, and the Carr Fire, also in 2018, which jumped the Sacramento River in Northern California to spread into Redding, a city of 90,000 people. To say nothing of similar urban fires in Canada and around the Mediterranean.
Melbourne, especially in its northern and western peri-urban zone where I now live has a vast array of susceptible subdivisions, to say nothing of it’s leafy green eastern suburbs along the Yarra like Templestowe. When I lived there in the late 1980’s, even then I wondered how it would fare if a fire started during catastrophic fire weather, based on my memories from when I was living in inner urban Melbourne at the time of the Ash Wednesday Bushfires, and even there we were subjected to a fallout of charred leaves and twigs. If we don’t control and reverse global warming soon, such catastrophes and worse will continue to increase.
You need to take this personally. Even if you think you are safe in your big city, global warming means urban wildfires are looking for you….
Our Government is [not] working to keep Australians safe
Governments are supposed to protect us from such evils. Our Australian governments — especially the current Liberal-National party COALition — have utterly failed to do this. Despite all their blah-blah-blah consisting of humbug, denial, lies, fake news, and misdirection that is normally just passed on by our weak media and press, global warming continues to accelerate. As the world gets warmer, making catastrophic and existential risks ever-more likely, the COALition still subsidizes and protects the special interests of their patrons and puppet-masters in the fossil fuel and other exploitative industries. Meanwhile, said puppets do FA to protect the futures of the citizens who elected them from the risks directly following on from their support of the special interests.
See also Katherine Murphy in The Guardian on 09/02/2017 for the live video — “Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this? What a bunch of clowns, hamming it up – while out in the real world an ominous and oppressive heat just won’t let up.”
As early as her 2019 address to the World Economic Forum in 2019, Greta Thunberg, then only 16 years old had the clear vision that global warming was starting to burn up our ‘house’ — Earth’s biosphere including our homes in the forest, rural areas, suburbs, and even whole towns and cities. We didn’t need political humbug, we needed to wake up, smell the smoke and panic enough to actually start fighting the fire before it was too late.
Even after his promotion to Prime Minister, while some of the worst of the Black Summer Bushfires were incinerating small rural communities, Scotty made it abundantly clear (as documented in the official transcript from his own Parliamentary Office) that his job did not include fire-fighting. Quoting from the transcript dated 20/12/2019, Scotty made it abundantly clear to John Stanley on 2GB Radio that HE doesn’t fight fires… “But I know Australians understand… that, you know, I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in a control room. That’s the brave people who do that are doing that job. But I know that Australians would want me back at this time out of these fatalities. So I’ll happily come back [from his secret holiday in Hawaii] and do that.”
In other words, smell the smoke, see the reality, and fight the fire. This is the only issue that really matters. All Capt. Humbug and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything else we may care about and that the special interest puppet masters will be able to keep burning fossil fuels until the final collapse they have caused.
What can we citizens do to begin changing this this lethal stupidity?
If we want to realistically hope that our children and their children will have a future existence on our increasingly ravaged planet, we must purge our parliaments of every last person who puts meeting and protecting the desires of a special interest before “keeping Australians safe”, e.g., working to meet the needs, health, and safety of the citizens.
In the impending Federal Election there is only one issue that really matters: mobilizing effective action to stop and reverse the process of global warming that is driving the present climate emergency likely to cause global mass extinction. To be sure of removing the puppets, we have to vote for and elect people who will put climate action on the tops of their Parliamentary agendas.
Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting Guide will show you how to use the Australian Preferential Voting System to do this, without telling you that you have to vote for any particular person. In other words, our traffic lights will warn you who not to vote for to be reasonably certain that their preferences will not flow to the COALition or other candidates likely to work for special interests rather than you.
