[Pants-of-dog]

The image does show the actual extent and location of the fires.

It is simply not a NASA photo, but is instead an accurate map of the areas affected.

[colliric]

Still fake news because it was shared by millions of people as if it was a real picture of Australia, and is being used by Climate Change believers who are leaving out the creator's subsequent whoopsie correction. Making it look like it's a legit photo of cause to anyone who doesn't look it up legitimately.

[Zionist Nationalist]

Still fake news because it was shared by millions of people as if it was a real picture of Australia, and is being used by Climate Change believers who are leaving out the creator's subsequent whoopsie correction. Making it look like it's a legit photo of cause to anyone who doesn't look it up legitimately.

I saw that picture too. its obviously a photoshop I thought evreyone understood that this is for illustration only

[JohnRawls]

I saw that picture too. its obviously a photoshop I thought evreyone understood that this is for illustration only

Kind of. When i see it, i didn't think that those are the areas currently burning but the areas that had fires this "season".

[Pants-of-dog]

Still fake news because it was shared by millions of people as if it was a real picture of Australia, and is being used by Climate Change believers who are leaving out the creator's subsequent whoopsie correction. Making it look like it's a legit photo of cause to anyone who doesn't look it up legitimately.

If you want to define fake news as anything that is not 100% accurate in every detail, including misconceptions by people who read it, then everything you have posted so far would fall under that definition.

The information presented in the image is correct.

Kind of. When i see it, i didn't think that those are the areas currently burning but the areas that had fires this "season".

From the source:

After it went viral, creator Anthony Hearsey, sought to clarify the true nature of the image.

“Didn’t realise this would go viral ... This is a 3D visualisation of the fires in Australia. NOT A PHOTO. Think of this as a prettier looking graph,” he explained.


“This is made from data from NASA’s FIRMS (Satellite data regarding fires) between 05/12/19 - 05/01/20. These are all the areas which have been affected by bushfires.

“Scale is a little exaggerated due to the render’s glow, but generally true to the info from the NASA website. Also note that NOT all the areas are still burning, and this is a compilation.”

So the image is an accurate representation of the fires during the last month.

[Atlantis]

To start, Eurasia does not have such a large bushland / dryland, and so sparsely populated for fire to spread so freely.

Kiddo, you obviously know nothing but the sky scrapers of Hong Kong.

The Mediterranean has a semi-arid climate with more than enough dry vegetation to burn. Anyways, as conditions grow dryer, even Northern Europe and the Arctic forests start burning out off control.

[Atlantis]

Climate change results in extreme weather conditions even if not each and every extreme weather event can be linked to climate change by positive proof. What is certain beyond doubt is that record temperatures, record drought and extended fire seasons are directly linked to climate change. Obviously, the dying of the coral reefs is just as much linked to climate change as the melting of the glaciers.

2019 was Australia's driest year on record.
[...]
Global warming is already lengthening the fire season and making heatwaves more intense, more frequent, and longer. It is also increasing the likelihood of heavy rains, and making droughts worse.

Australia's Bushfires Are Horrifying, But Researchers Think There's More to Come

The torrential rains and flooding that will follow are also a sign of climate change. The rains will wash away top soil that's been denuded of vegetation by the record fires. Deteriorating soil will result in drier conditions and desertification. That is not reversible.

The last decade has seen record high temperatures in many parts of the world, including Europe in 2003, southeast Australia in early 2009, and Russia in 2010. Some of the recent temperatures have absolutely smashed previous records, not just broken them.

For instance, the new record daily maximum temperature established in Melbourne, Australia on Black Saturday, 7 February 2009, was more than 3˚C hotter than the previous record Melbourne February temperature (and nearly a degree hotter than the previous all-time record high temperature).

Later that year, at Windorah in western Queensland, the record temperature for August was broken six times in a single month.

Before 2009, the temperature in August at this station had never reached 35˚C. This temperature was exceeded seven times in August 2009 and a new record August maximum temperature of 38˚C was set, a full 3.1˚C higher than the previous record.

And there are many more examples like Windorah. In November 2009, 41% of NSW set record high November temperatures, in the one month.

Heatwaves are also setting new duration records. The week before Black Saturday, Melbourne saw three days in a row with temperatures above 43˚C. Previously the city had never recorded three consecutive days exceeding 42˚C.

The previous year, in March 2008, Adelaide had 15 days in a row hotter than 35˚C. Before 2008 the Adelaide record run of hot days was only eight days.

Record runs of hot days were again experienced in Adelaide in January/February 2009 and again in November that year.

In Sydney the first week of February 2011 saw seven consecutive days above 30˚C, a heatwave two days longer than had ever been seen in the 152 years of data. A new Sydney minimum temperature record was set, fully one degree above the previous all-time record.

Almost everywhere where the Bureau of Meteorology has good data, we are seeing more high temperatures and longer warm spells.
[...]
But the evidence is clear for hot temperatures and heatwaves – humans are making these worse. And without political agreement to restrain greenhouse gas emissions we can look forward to worse heatwaves in the future.

Record heatwaves not just a lot of hot air

The populist right-wing climate change deniers in Brazil and Australia are fighting their last rearguard action with absurd accusations against ecologists. They will go the way of the dinosaurs. The question is only if we let them take us down with them.

This season's wildfires in Australia have already added 350 million tons of CO2 emission. In 2017, annual emissions for Australia were 550 million tons. This makes it the worst fire season ever. Australia is among the worst polluters worldwide, per capta emission are between 22 to 25 tons. That's nearly three times the amount for the EU. With the expansion of coal mining driven ahead by the government, Australian emissions will further increase while other countries make efforts to reduce their emissions. Australia is on track to become the World's pariah.

[Politics_Observer]

It's amazing for me to see after all these bushfires that Australia still seems to have all these climate change deniers. Wheeew! It take some serious self deception to keep up that level of denial. And I thought we had problems here in America. Of course, there is plenty of climate change deniers across the globe. Eventually, they are going to have to face the facts that climate change is a reality and not a "hoax." Unless, of course, they don't mind having their whole way of life just burn up in flames due to climate change.

[Atlantis]

It's amazing for me to see after all these bushfires that Australia still seems to have all these climate change deniers. ...

It's the unfettered greed of the colonial settlers. Their whole existence is based on unlimited exploitation, as in the American way of life. For them, there was always another frontier to exploit. The US, Australia, NZ, Canada, Brazil, etc., are all notorious polluters and climate change deniers. I'm afraid that Brexit Britain will join that camp too.

Number Of Animals Feared Dead In Australia’s Wildfires Soars To Over 1 Billion

Chris Dickman, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, told HuffPost that his original estimate of 480 million animals was not only conservative, it was also exclusive to the state of New South Wales and excluded significant groups of wildlife for which they had no population data.

“The original figure ― the 480 million ― was based on mammals, birds and reptiles for which we do have densities, and that figure now is a little bit out of date. It’s over 800 million given the extent of the fires now ― in New South Wales alone,” he said.

“If 800 million sounds a lot, it’s not all the animals in the firing line,” he added.

That figure excluded animals including bats, frogs and invertebrates. With these numbers included, Dickman said, it was “without any doubt at all” that the losses exceeded 1 billion. “Over a billion would be a very conservative figure,” he said.

An environmental scientist at the World Wildlife Fund Australia, Stuart Blanch, confirmed these estimates, reiterating that, given the expansion of the fires since the last calculations, 1 billion was a modest guess.

“It’s our climate impact and our obsession with coal that is helping wage war on our own country,” Blanch said.

Critically endangered species, including the southern corroboree frog and mountain pygmy-possum, could be wiped out as fires ravage crucial habitat in Victoria’s Alpine National Park and New South Wales’s neighboring Kosciuszko National Park.

Threatened species, such as the glossy black cockatoo, spotted-tail quoll and long-footed potoroo (both small marsupials), are also facing real risks of extinction in large parts of their range.

Dickman said bats, which have enormous populations along Australia’s east coast and are critically dependent on forest habitat, undoubtedly also sustained enormous losses.

“The numbers would have to be huge. And they’re very susceptible to the fires,” he said.

Over the weekend, Australia Zoo’s Bindi Irwin shared sad news from the zoo’s wildlife hospital.

“In September, flying fox admissions to the hospital skyrocketed by over 750% due to drought conditions and lack of food,” she wrote. “Flying foxes are now being drastically affected by wildfires and we’re again seeing an influx of these beautiful animals from across the country.”

Koalas have lost more than 30% of their key habitat in New South Wales and may have lost a third of their population in that region, federal environment minister Sussan Ley told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. last month. Dickman said it would be a “tough” recovery for the iconic Australian marsupial, dependent on the availability of their food ― eucalyptus tree leaves ― after the blazes sweep through.

The University of Sydney’s animal loss estimates also exclude livestock, which federal agriculture minister Bridget McKenzie expects will exceed 100,000 animals. Harrowing footage of thousands of dead animals beside roads has appeared on social media as the national Defence Force rushed to dig mass graves to avoid a health emergency.

A graphic compiled by agriculture market analysis company Mecardo found that 8.6 million head of sheep and 2.3 million cattle were in the areas of New South Wales and Victoria affected by bushfires.

It could take months before the exact number of livestock losses are known.

Officials will reportedly kill thousands of camels in the country’s northwest as they wreak havoc on communities with their water consumption during the drought and fire emergencies.

The fires across Australia have killed 25 people, destroyed or damaged more than 2,000 homes and burned nearly 31,000 square miles ― an area about the size of Austria.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Monday that the federal government would commit $2 billion over two years to a new national bushfire recovery agency, and more if needed.

Despite sustained criticism, the government has taken a firm stance on climate policy, with Morrison dismissing calls to curb the nation’s substantial coal industry and repeatedly pushing the party line: “We’re meeting and beating our targets.”

The bushfires alone are believed to have spewed as much as two-thirds of the nation’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Dickman said that the only remaining glimmer of hope amid this disaster was that the government may finally heed the advice of ecologists and environmental scientists, who he said had been frozen out of policymaking for over two decades.

“With any luck, now the government will actually come back and think, OK, we do need the science. We do need the modeling predictions. We do need really good, informed advice about what we should be doing.”

WWF Australia’s environmental scientists have outlined a three-part plan to address the crisis, Blanch told HuffPost.

“One, reduce the threat by ending logging or bulldozing of mature forests... Secondly, a 10 million hectare major reforestation agenda, and, thirdly, in the very short term, more support for wildlife carers and wildlife hospitals around the country.”

Most of the remaining animals will starve to death because the fires destroyed their source of food.

I'm thoroughly disgusted with the bleeding hearts who make great efforts for nurturing one or two Koala's back to life while they continue a life-style that condemns billions to death and entire species to extinction.

[Atlantis]

The climate change deniers in this thread got caught with their pants down. You got fooled by trolls and bots.

Everything I said above is confirmed.

Bots and trolls spread false arson claims in Australian fires ‘disinformation campaign’

Bot and troll accounts are involved in a “disinformation campaign” exaggerating the role of arson in Australia’s bushfire disaster, social media analysis suggests.

The bushfires burning across the nation have been accompanied by repeated suggestions of an arson epidemic or “arson emergency”.

The false claims are, in some cases, used to undermine the link between the current bushfires and the longer, more intense fire seasons brought about by climate change.

The Queensland University of Technology senior lecturer on social network analysis Dr Timothy Graham examined content published on the #arsonemergency hashtag on Twitter, assessing 1,340 tweets, 1,203 of which were unique, published by 315 accounts.

Labor & Greens Trash
(@labor_trash)
#ClimateCriminals update.
Total alleged Leftist arsonists sits at 183.
Their ring leaders are presumed to be still active on Social media.
If you spot any of them call Police
The #ArsonEmergency is very real. #ClimateEmergency exposed as a fraud #auspol https://t.co/7Al3oJ71dX

January 7, 2020

Using a Twitter bot detection tool, he assessed a random sample for bot-like characteristics.

His preliminary analysis found there is likely a “current disinformation campaign” on Twitter’s #arsonemergency hashtag due to the “suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts”.

He similarly found a large number of suspicious accounts posting on the #australiafire and #bushfireaustralia hashtags.

“Australia suddenly appears to be getting swamped by mis/disinformation as a result of this environmental catastrophe, and we are suffering the consequences in terms of hyped up polarisation and an increased difficulty and inability for citizens to discern truth,” Graham told the Guardian.

“Looking at the kinds of accounts that post using the #ArsonEmergency hashtag, you see that these are individuals who are hyper-partisan ideologues, behaving in a way that is not reflective of the average Twitter user.

“The conspiracy theories going around (including arson as the main cause of the fires) reflect an increased distrust in scientific expertise, scepticism of the media, and rejection of liberal democratic authority. These are all major factors in the global fight against disinformation, and based on my preliminary analysis it appears that Australia has for better or worse entered that battlefield, at least for now.”

There is no dispute that arson is a serious problem in Australia, or that arsonists have not been active in the current bushfire season. NSW police say they have charged 24 people with deliberately lighting bushfires this season.

But that does not detract from the clear scientific evidence showing climate change is making Australia’s bushfire seasons longer and more severe. The Bureau of Meteorology’s clear advice is that climate change is “influencing the frequency and severity of dangerous bushfire conditions in Australia and other regions of the world, including through influencing temperature, environmental moisture, weather patterns and fuel conditions”.

The BoM states that there is some evidence that “climate change could influence the risk of ignitions from dry-lightning.

“Bushfire weather conditions in future years are projected to increase in severity for many regions of Australasia, including due to more extreme heat events, with the rate and magnitude of change increasing with greenhouse gas concentrations (and emissions),” the bureau says.

Claims about arson are not the only falsehoods being spread on social media. Other patently false claims include that the government has created the bushfire crisis to clear land for high-speed rail. Another absurd claim is that Islamic State is somehow responsible.

Several maps purporting to show the scale of the fires also vastly exaggerate their spread.

Nick Evershed
(@NickEvershed)
ok so the latest Bad Bushfires Map doing the rounds makes the mistake of re-rendering grids from the FIRMS map into a heat map, instead of using points and scaling correctly pic.twitter.com/hDpWpzhOYi

January 6, 2020

[Curt]

But not that big a deal in terms of "Climate science" when you realise the second biggest was the 6 million hectares in 1851's legendary Victorian blaze, and that record stood for nearly 120 years. Congratulations nature, you outdid yourself.

It outdid itself in California last October too. Ask Lebron James.

[Donna]

@Atlantis preoccupation with lifestyle choices is probably why the political will to do anything about climate change is weak in the Anglosphere. People are living paycheck-to-paycheck in North America (or have joined the ranks of the working homeless) due to high inequality levels and activists subsequently expect progress on the climate without addressing the on-going social disintegration that is occurring. Under such conditions it is very easy for industry interests to exploit climate denial.

[skinster]

[Patrickov]

Kiddo, you obviously know nothing but the sky scrapers of Hong Kong.

The Mediterranean has a semi-arid climate with more than enough dry vegetation to burn. Anyways, as conditions grow dryer, even Northern Europe and the Arctic forests start burning out off control.

Citation needed. And I find the first sentence fairly offensive.

[colliric]

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1214602992600715266

The Australian Government agrees with me.

https://www.news.com.au/national/crime/ ... 8bf79268cb

[BeesKnee5]

The Australian Government agrees with me.

https://www.news.com.au/national/crime/ ... 8bf79268cb

In what way?

I read that as saying even the 24 charged aren't all arsonists

[colliric]

Look we don't need to argue about differences in definition.

The reason he says "in a sense" is because most Australians in practice consider these people to be Firebugs(slang for Arsonists) no matter if they "intended to kill people", "started the fire for a usual purpose but then delibrately left it unattended" or "were reckless idiots".

[Godstud]

Yep, @colliric. Even in Canada it can be considered such.

Arson
Every person who intentionally orrecklessly causes damage by fire or explosion to property that is not wholly owned by that person is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Canadian_ ... nces/Arson


People know when it's dangerous to light fires. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse.

[Atlantis]

@Atlantis preoccupation with lifestyle choices is probably why the political will to do anything about climate change is weak in the Anglosphere. People are living paycheck-to-paycheck in North America (or have joined the ranks of the working homeless) due to high inequality levels and activists subsequently expect progress on the climate without addressing the on-going social disintegration that is occurring. Under such conditions it is very easy for industry interests to exploit climate denial.

I understand what you are saying, but try to look at it from the outside. The Anglosphere comprises the richest and most powerful countries on the planet. They take of the world's resources whatever they want. Their corporate empire sucks the world's wealth into Wall Street or the City of London and their associated tax havens.

No matter what they proclaim, people in the Anglosphere know perfectly well that they are among the privileged few. Why else would they want to build walls or closed prison camps for refugees to keep the poor out?

The US plutocracy is responsible for the unequal distribution of wealth. US imperialism extends the greed of the colonial settlers to the whole world by monopoly capitalism, political pressure, and if need be, by bombs and missiles. The US has no problem with dictators or retarded regimes as in KSA as long as they bend to US dictate. Iran's sin is to resist imperialist aggression.

There can be no unlimited expansion, imperialism is fundamentally unstable, it has to collapse sooner or later.

[Donna]

@Atlantis, I agree, but Europe and other developed regions are not exempt from this pattern of behavior. The only difference is that Europe has a stronger labour movement, better regulations and a superior welfare state, but they aren't exempt from the moral paradox of capitalist wealth. Materially speaking Northern Europeans are better off than most workers in North America, which is probably why climate justice is taken more seriously in Scandinavian countries. In the Anglosphere and more specifically North America, it's a dog-eat-dog society and the market is constantly pricing everyone out with very few protections, either in terms of a social safety net, wage rates or in terms of broader political economy. Everyone I know who has had a taste of European life has found it difficult to return here. So if you think we're the privileged ones, I don't think you understand how inequality operates here and how capitalism exploits false consciousness more efficiently here than anywhere else in the world.