Australian Bushfires: Firebugs Fuelling Crisis as Arson Arrest Toll Hits 183

See bottom for prayer request and answered prayer

While climate alarmists would like to blame the Aussie bushfires 100% on climate change, it has been obvious that at least half the fires were set either deliberately or because of stupidity. 

This is not the worst fire-season in Australian history in terms of lives lost and homes destroyed, though it may well be before it is done.

2019–20 Australian bushfire season

  At least 1516 homes lost (Thought to be over 2,500),  at least 25 deaths,

  At least 6.3 million hectares (63,000 km2; 24,000 sq mi) burnt, nearly half the size of England.

2008–09 Australian bushfire season:

  173 fatalities, 2,060 houses lost

1982-1983: The 'Ash Wednesday' fires of 16 February 1983 caused severe damage in Victoria

   and South Australia 75 fatalities, 2464 houses lost

1966-67 Australian bushfire season: 62 fatalities, 900 injured, 7,000 left homeless, 4,286 buildings lost

1897-1898: On "Red Tuesday", 1 February 1898 in Victoria 260,000 hectares (640,000 acres) were burnt,

  12 people were killed and 2000 buildings were destroyed 

1850-1851: The "Black Thursday" fires of 6 February 1851 in Victoria, burnt the second largest area

  (approximately 5,000,000 hectares (12,000,000 acres)) in European-recorded history and killed more than

  one million sheep and thousands of cattle as well as taking the lives of 12 people

Bushfires rage between the towns of Orbost and Lakes Entrance in east Gippsland.

DAVID ROSS
IMOGEN REID
The Australian

More than 180 alleged arsonists have been arrested since the start of the bushfire season, with 29 blazes deliberately lit in the Shoalhaven region of southeast NSW in just three months.

The Shoalhaven fires were lit between July and September last year, with Kempsey recording 27 deliberately lit fires, NSW Bureau of Crime and Statistics and Research data shows.

Police arrested 183 people for lighting bushfires across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the past few months. NSW police data shows 183 people have been charged or cautioned for bushfire-related offences since November 8, and 24 arrested for deliberately starting bushfires.

Queensland police say 101 people have been picked up for setting fires in the bush, 32 adults and 69 juveniles.

In Tasmania, where fires have sprung up in the north of the state and outside Hobart, five were caught setting fire to vegetation. Victoria reported 43 charged for 2019.

Melbourne University associate professor Janet Stanley said arsonists were typically young males, aged 12 to 24, or older men in their 60s.

“There is no one profile, but generally they seem to have a background of disadvantage, a traumatic upbringing and often have endured neglect and abuse as a child,” Professor Stanley said. “They are often kids not succeeding in school, or they have left school early and are unemployed. The boundaries between accidentally and purposefully are unclear because many arsonists don’t plan on causing the catastrophe that occurs. Often there is not an intention to cause chaos and the penalties for accidentally lighting a fire are far less than purposefully lighting a fire.”

Swinburne University professor James Ogloff said about 50 per cent of bushfires were lit by firebugs and impending fire seasons excited them. “They’re interested in seeing fire, interested in setting fire and quite often the information around how fires burn and accelerate excites them,” the director of the Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science said.

I wonder if any  were set by climate alarmists trying to make a bad situation worse. For some far-left liberals, the end justifies the means.

Prayer

Regardless of how they started, the fires are burning savagely in southeast Australia. Maps of the previous 4 or 5 fire seasons show that most of those fires were concentrated in northern Western Australia which is getting hammered with heavy rain today. The southeast hasn't had a bad fire-season for some years meaning the grounds are super-ready for kindling. 

On Sunday, (in North America), I asked my Twitter followers, and two Facebook groups to pray for cooler and wetter conditions for Australia. On Monday, when I checked, it was raining in Sydney. It wasn't a lot of rain, nor did it cover a significant area, but it was a good sign. And, the forecast was for cooler temperatures and a chance of rain over the next few days.

On Tuesday, a friend from Australia informed me that 25 record LOW temperatures had been set that morning in Australia.

I'm now asking my blog readers to join in and pray for a week of cool, wet weather across Australia, but especially in the southeast states. Do you believe in miracles? Then pray. This forecast for Sydney, in the middle of high summer, looks like a miracle to me. Please join and pray and encourage others to as well.

Sorry Global Warming Alarmists, The Earth Is Cooling - Forbes

Peter Ferrara
Contributor, Forbes

Climate change itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming.  That is because natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.

That is one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held last week in Chicago.  I attended, and served as one of the speakers, talking about The Economic Implications of High Cost Energy.

The conference featured serious natural science, contrary to the self-interested political science you hear from government financed global warming alarmists seeking to justify widely expanded regulatory and taxation powers for government bodies, or government body wannabees, such as the United Nations.  See for yourself, as the conference speeches are online.

What you will see are calm, dispassionate presentations by serious, pedigreed scientists discussing and explaining reams of data.  In sharp contrast to these climate realists, the climate alarmists have long admitted that they cannot defend their theory that humans are causing catastrophic global warming in public debate.  With the conference presentations online, let’s see if the alarmists really do have any response.

The Heartland Institute has effectively become the international headquarters of the climate realists, an analog to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  It has achieved that status through these international climate conferences, and the publication of its Climate Change Reconsidered volumes, produced in conjunction with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Those Climate Change Reconsidered volumes are an equivalently thorough scientific rebuttal to the irregular Assessment Reports of the UN’s IPCC.  You can ask any advocate of human caused catastrophic global warming what their response is to Climate Change Reconsidered.  If they have none, they are not qualified to discuss the issue intelligently.

In 2015, I discussed a 30 year temperature cycle that I had read about in the 1970's. It would appear that this is the cause and confirmation of that cycle.

For example, temperatures dropped steadily from the late 1940s to the late 1960s.  The popular press was even talking about a coming ice age.  Ice ages have cyclically occurred roughly every 10,000 years, with a new one actually due around now.

Central to these natural cycles is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).  Every 25 to 30 years the oceans undergo a natural cycle where the colder water below churns to replace the warmer water at the surface, and that affects global temperatures by the fractions of a degree we have seen.  The PDO was cold from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, and it was warm from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, similar to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

In 2000, the UN’s IPCC predicted that global temperatures would rise by 1 degree Celsius by 2010.  Was that based on climate science, or political science to scare the public into accepting costly anti-industrial regulations and taxes?

Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University, knew the answer.  He publicly predicted in 2000 that global temperatures would decline by 2010.  He made that prediction because he knew the PDO had turned cold in 1999, something the political scientists at the UN’s IPCC did not know or did not think significant.

Well, the results are in, and the winner is….Don Easterbrook.  Easterbrook also spoke at the Heartland conference, with a presentation entitled “Are Forecasts of a 20-Year Cooling Trend Credible?”  Watch that online and you will see how scientists are supposed to talk: cool, rational, logical analysis of the data, and full explanation of it.  All I ever see from the global warming alarmists, by contrast, is political public relations, personal attacks, ad hominem arguments, and name calling, combined with admissions that they can’t defend their views in public debate.

Easterbrook shows that by 2010 the 2000 prediction of the IPCC was wrong by well over a degree, and the gap was widening.  That’s a big miss for a forecast just 10 years away, when the same folks expect us to take seriously their predictions for 100 years in the future.  Howard Hayden, Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Connecticut showed in his presentation at the conference that based on the historical record a doubling of CO2 could be expected to produce a 2 degree C temperature increase.  Such a doubling would take most of this century, and the temperature impact of increased concentrations of CO2 declines logarithmically.  You can see Hayden’s presentation online as well.

Because PDO cycles last 25 to 30 years, Easterbrook expects the cooling trend to continue for another 2 decades or so.  Easterbrook, in fact, documents 40 such alternating periods of warming and cooling over the past 500 years, with similar data going back 15,000 years.  He further expects the flipping of the ADO to add to the current downward trend.

But that is not all.  We are also currently experiencing a surprisingly long period with very low sunspot activity.  That is associated in the earth’s history with even lower, colder temperatures.  The pattern was seen during a period known as the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830, which saw temperature readings decline by 2 degrees in a 20 year period, and the noted Year Without A Summer in 1816 (which may have had other contributing short term causes).

Even worse was the period known as the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715, which saw only about 50 sunspots during one 30 year period within the cycle, compared to a typical 40,000 to 50,000 sunspots during such periods in modern times.  The Maunder Minimum coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, which the earth suffered from about 1350 to 1850.  The Maunder Minimum saw sharply reduced agricultural output, and widespread human suffering, disease and premature death.

Such impacts of the sun on the earth’s climate were discussed at the conference by astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon, Nir J. Shaviv, of the Racah Institute of Physics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Sebastian Luning, co-author with leading German environmentalist Fritz Vahrenholt of The Cold Sun.

Easterbrook suggests that the outstanding question is only how cold this present cold cycle will get.  Will it be modest like the cooling from the late 1940s to late 1970s?  Or will the paucity of sunspots drive us all the way down to the Dalton Minimum, or even the Maunder Minimum?  He says it is impossible to know now.  But based on experience, he will probably know before the UN and its politicized IPCC.