[genS3]

do we even have proof its due to climate crisis. eucalyptus is highly flammable, tourism increases, im pretty sure fires can start from some foil paper on the floor in those regions. also like the aboriginal australian use to do, you need to clean the bush and forests. we should focus our efforts onto that rather than talking about a philosophical "climate crisis" that wipes out concrete efforts that governements can lead to protect their forests.

[crispinb]

Ignition sources are pretty much a constant so don't remotely explain a truly dramatic rise in the extent and ferocity of forest fires. Eucalyptus has been flammable for millennia. Tasmania and Queensland have seen fires in forests and forest types (rainforest!) that literally haven't burned for thousands of years. The RFS is having to redraw its boundary maps because longstanding firebreak forests are no longer firebreaks. What were permanently wet forests are now dry. My local council is having to rethink housing planning permissions because longstanding truths about which vegetation types are safe to build around are themselves going up in flames.

As for hazard reduction burns, these have been on the increase for years. The rate of increase has been hard to sustain, because the fire season has been rapidly extending, and reducing the windows of opportunity for burning. There's certainly scope to draw on indigenous understanding of cool burns, but that's not something that is likely to happen quickly at scale.

Simplistic notions of 'proof' are no more pertinent to assessing the evidence on the relationship between climate collapse and forest fires than they were with lung cancer and smoking. These are complex systems we're talking about. We just have to assess prior scientific knowledge and multiple lines of empirical evidence as best we can. University-based research, the CSIRO, and relevant on-the-ground forest management and firefighting agencies have been predicting an increase in forest fires consequent on expected climate change patterns in Australia for many years. This has now come to pass. If people have alternative explanations, these would be bolstered by, preferably, pointing out where they similarly predicted the increase in forest fires, and then making their predictions for what will happen in the coming decades.

[kaybe]

This is not something that can be proven, the correlations are too complex and you have n=1.

You can predict that probably statistically you'll see changing patterns of precipitation with changing climate leading to dryer woods, but whether that correlation holds is only clear with observed statistics, and whether that specific instance is connected can only be quantified probabilistically.

Do you want to wait until we're reasonably sure that this specific issue is connected, let alone all the other things bound to happen? (Some more probable than others.) By then it'll be too late to roll it back or do anything but keep it from getting worse in a meaningful way.

[bdamm]

The point that we can revisit forest management practices regardless of climate change still holds though. While yes we may be seeing more fires due to climate change, we also may be able to make it less of a problem in the short term. And doing that doesn't take off the table doing something about climate change, so why not?

[pjc50]

> philosophical "climate crisis"

The climate crisis is very real and very observable.