Australian Wildfires
Blogged by: Parker
As of January fourth, wildfires in Southern Australia had destroyed twenty-thousand hectares of land, and experts are saying that global climate change is the most likely cause of disasters like this which are becoming increasingly more common. There were twenty six homes destroyed by the inferno, and authorities were still attempting to supress the flames on January eighth.
Wildfires are not the only form of natural disaster that are becoming more common, other ones such as hurricanes and tornados are also growing in number due to manmade global warming. Tony Abbott of The UN Convention on Climate Change claims that these wildfires “are certainly not a function of climate change, they're a function of life in Australia”, however, the Australian government estimates that they’ll need to double the number of firefighters in the country by 2030 at the latest. This demand for emergency personnel has already begun however, as the number of calls for paramedics increased twenty fold during the last heat wave in Australia.
The series of wildfires that have been persisting in Australia recently has been said to been the most potentially dangerous the country has seen since the Ash Wednesday Disaster of 1983, when 180 separate fires, fueled by 110 kilometer per hour winds burned more than 1.2 million acres across Australia.
There is good news though as well, the brutal heat wave that has been creating the perfect conditions for the wildfires to thrive appears to be coming to a close. This means that soon the government will be able to begin returning people to their homes after they finish containing the fires, repairing power lines, and clearing roads. Of course, if nothing is done to counter the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to the global climate change, these fires will just continue to become more common and destructive.
image from: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/bushfires_in_victoria_australi.html
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