Were Australian Bush Fires started intentionally?

[s_bushido]

No it means celebrities use disaster to push their climate change agenda and to signal their environmentalist virtue. It doesn't mean climate change isn't real it only shows how shitty the celebrities are to exploit a disaster for their gains

rofl

Imagine giving a shit what celebrities have to say. I hadn't even bothered listening to Gervais's speech until some right-wing jagoff made a thread about it. So why do you care so much?

And I hate to break it to you, but the only "climate change agenda" is the one being propped up by oil/gas companies with a vested interest in civilization not moving to different sources of energy.

[zorkuus]

Ah yes... anything to distract from climate change. But what if the fires were started by laserbeams from space?

[Dezerte]

It was the emus.

[Mormolyce]

When celebrities are punishing general population with fuel taxes while spending more money yearly then average person will be able to earn in his life I don't think they actually believe in that they actively propagate.

Greta sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to New York in order to be carbon neutral, and you guys all threw a huge embarrassing tantrum over it. They just can't win with you, can they? LOL.

You really think the only environmentalists on Earth are a tiny handful of extremely rich celebrities? You must not get out much.

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P.S. This thread is based largely on fake news:

Victoria Police say the fires engulfing the eastern part of Victoria are not being treated as the work of arsonists, as claimed by a widespread social media campaign.

In the past week, a Twitter hashtag #ArsonEmergency – mimicking the popular #BushfireEmergency hashtag – attracted thousands of tweets linking the fires to arsonists and casting doubt on the role of climate change in exacerbating the bushfires' severity.

But authorities have moved to dispel those claims.

"Police are aware of a number of posts circulating in relation to the current bushfire situation, however currently there is no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and north-east Victoria have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour," a police spokeswoman said.

The CFA incident controller in Bairnsdale, Brett Mitchell, backed up that statement on Thursday, saying that none of the recent fires in the East Gippsland area have been started by arson.

More than 1.2 million hectares have burnt across the state, with the dozens of fires raging in the East Gippsland and north-eastern regions largely caused by lightning strikes in November.

A Queensland University of Technology analysis claims there has been a "co-ordinated" social media disinformation campaign in the past week promoting the theory that arsonists caused the fires, while seeking to discredit evidence suggesting climate change has helped increase the severity and length of bushfire seasons.

There were also social media reports of looting in areas hit by fires. Police have not received a single official report of looting.

A fire in Euroa, lit on January 4, is being treated as suspicious. The fire did not damage any property and burnt about 385 hectares.

The suspicion about the Euroa blaze means that less than 0.0005 per cent of the total area burnt in Victoria was as a result of fires police believe were deliberately lit.

Addressing claims of looting, the police spokeswoman said police were "aware of a number of social media posts circulating in relation to alleged looting at properties in the East Gippsland area."

"To date, police have not received any official reports regarding this type of offending. Police are actively patrolling areas."

Research conducted by a team including Tobias Keller – a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology – shows an effort by potential troll and bot accounts to promote the theory that the bushfires across the eastern seaboard were started by arsonists.

Almost 1500 tweets using the #ArsonEmergency hashtag were examined, published by more than 300 accounts.

"We found highly suspicious activity from the accounts," said Mr Keller, who said many of the accounts also disseminated US news stories published by alternative media outlets.

Using a Twitter bot detection tool, the university research team detected bot-like characteristics from many of the accounts.

Mr Keller said the content was "co-ordinated, inauthentic behaviour" that aimed to "move the narrative away from linking climate change to bushfires and towards the crisis being the fault of arson."

A tweet by an account called "Labor and Greens Trash" claimed there were 183 "total alleged Leftist arsonists" who were "presumed to be still active on social media." The tweet was liked almost 100 times and shared by almost 60 accounts.

Mr Keller said the accounts may be operated by political activists, or could be fake accounts controlled by software designers. He said there was a chance some accounts were run by a malign actor seeking to influence public debate.

"Similar activity has taken place in previous disinformation campaigns … [conducted by groups] such as Cambridge Analytica or other political entities."

"With each new news story about the bushfires, [the disinformation campaign] becomes more effective, because it gives these accounts a new link they can share and then blame the mainstream media or a left-wing journalist."

https://www.theage.com.au/national/v...08-p53pwj.html

Bots and trolls spread false arson claims in Australian fires ‘disinformation campaign’
Online posts exaggerating the role of arson are being used to undermine the link between bushfires and climate change

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.

"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 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.

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," 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.

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

https://www.theguardian.com/australi...n-false-claims

I'm sure it'll remain open though, the conspiracy theory rule is of course a joke.

[Fgalipios]

Why is this horseshit conspiracy theory stretching to 8 pages?

[grexly75]

It's honestly disgusting and craven.

The entire continent of Australia is on fire, millions of people are being impacted, and the ecosystem of the country is likely going to be permanently changed as a result, yet even now we have smug Americans insisting that it's a natural process or worse, it's a left wing conspiracy.

Spreading that sort of misinformation is directly contributing to the problem.

Not the entire continent, just some parts of it don't blow it out of proportion.. The affected areas are mostly east of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales, East Gippsland in Victoria.. In South Australia the most major incident is on Kangaroo Island and a few others.. With three that were deliberately lit near the Barossa Valley but were quickly contained..

And a large fire near Rockingham in Western Australia.. There are probably some in Queensland not sure though..

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What's that you say, there are other circumstances to why things might have gotten so bad?

Some of the other circumstances that play a big part here in Australia is the IOD in the Indian Ocean and the ENSO is the Pacific ocean.. http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/

Looks like that right now the IOD has gone back to neutral, but because we had a positive IOD for most of 2019, means we were going to have a drier and hotter summer..

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Seen in posted several places, with people claiming it's a photo from space. You'd be surprised

Yeah has been proven to be hogwash, but there are a lot of people out there that think that image is real.. lol

[Wyrt]

Ah yes... anything to distract from climate change. But what if the fires were started by laserbeams from space?

Seems to be what's going around.

Blame arsonists, as if that somehow beats climate change claims. The logic on that one is still lost to me, climate change was never going to start fires, just set conditions for bigger fires. And blame the Green Party despite them holding only a small number of seats in government, likely to distract from the government being lead by conservatives since 2013.

[Nurasu]

or lighting fires to camp or cook food or young children

The real story is the bush cannibals.

[Themius]

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/envi...ation-n1112736

Climate change deniers are blaming Australia’s wildfires on arson, but experts say that the exaggerated claims are part of a widespread disinformation campaign and that arson alone cannot explain the unprecedented blazes.

Theories pinning the wildfires on arsonists gained traction in recent days after police in the state of New South Wales announced that 24 people have been charged with deliberately lighting fires since November.

But wildfire researchers say it’s unreasonable to think the actions of two dozen possible offenders could have caused such destruction, with 20 million acres already scorched and more than 120 fires still active across southeastern Australia.

“Arson is a red herring,” said Mike Flannigan, director of the Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

The politicization of climate change and the popularity of social media have provided fertile ground for misinformation. On Twitter, established networks of accounts seized on the arson claims, helping them trend on the platform.

Richie Merzian, director of the climate and energy program at the Australia Institute, a Canberra-based think tank that conducts public policy research, said the arson theories are being used to deflect from discussions of climate change.

“The number of arsonists this summer [is] not higher than usual — the only thing that has changed is the disinformation campaign to elevate this as [a]key cause to explain the unprecedented bush fires,” Merzian said in an email.

The campaign has been far-reaching. Timothy Graham, a senior lecturer in digital media and communication at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, analyzed chatter about the fires on Twitter and found that tweets with the hashtag #ArsonEmergency, which saw an uptick in activity starting a few weeks ago, were disproportionately coming from highly partisan accounts or automated bots.

“They’re fictional accounts,” Graham said. “You don’t find, at least for this hashtag, many accounts that seem to be real human beings who could be identified in any way.”

He said his analysis revealed the hallmarks of inauthentic accounts that try to shift the narrative and promote skepticism of climate change.

“It really looks, in many ways, like classic disinformation,” he added. “Australia has been pulled into a global disinformation landscape.”

Similar misinformation campaigns have occurred before to discredit climate science, as in CNN’s climate change town hall in September and around discussions of the environmental consequences of fires in the Amazon rainforest.

Popular conservative, far-right and conspiracy figures all pushed the exaggerated arson claims to millions of followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Flannigan estimates that only a handful of the hundreds of massive fires that have broken out in Australia since September were due to arson. Rather, he said, many of the blazes likely were started by lightning in extremely hot and dry parts of the continent — all dangerous ingredients for wildfires and all conditions that are exacerbated by climate change.

[articuno998]

I dont think so, but I know for a fact these fires are being way too politicized

[Mormolyce]

So we're just going to leave another conspiracy thread open?

I dont think so, but I know for a fact these fires are being way too politicized

Kind of seems like it's irresponsible to politicise climate change, doesn't it?

But hey, Senators need to accept bribes from oil barons.

[Jakexe]

I've been living in the same Australian region for most of my life, never been personally threatened by the fires. Now I am, i'm on call to protect my animal sanctuary and my home. These are unprecedented fires but why would that stop you spreading lies to support a political agenda.

[Rasulis]

So we're just going to leave another conspiracy thread open?



Kind of seems like it's irresponsible to politicise climate change, doesn't it?

But hey, Senators need to accept bribes from oil barons.

In Australia, the term “Coal Baron” is more appropriate. Although, more likely the administration is trying to hide their mismanagement of the fires. Especially in the early stages.

People complained about the lack of “prescribed burns”. However, in addition to shorter window, the administration is also guilty of underfunding the fire preparation phase. The Australian government invest $15M per year for fire preparation. California spend $55M per year just on the maintenance of their fire fighting air fleet.

At the early stages of the fires, the administration claimed that Coulson Aviation did not have any airplanes to fight the fires because all their airplanes were being used to fight fires in Alaska, Canada and Western US. Coulson denied that and claimed that they had three C-130s available which they offered to the Australian government. Who to believe?

Enormous 'Megafire' In Australia Engulfs 1.5 Million Acres

A pair of massive bushfires in southeastern Australia has merged into a "megafire" engulfing some 2,300 square miles — a single blaze more than three times as large as any known fire in California.

[Aehl]

The entire continent of Australia is on fire,

And this folks is the kind of blatant fearmongering and utter panic merchanting that is TYPICAL of climate alarmists and AGW fanatics.

Last i checked Sydney isnt on fire, neither is Melbourne, neither is 98% of Australia for that matter. THAT ladies and gents is the kind of idiocy I have highlighted a dozen times as to why I DONT listen to "climate change" doomsayers.

, approximately 5.9 million hectares of land has been burnt in Australia

Size of Australia in hectares 769.2 million = 1.5380 percent

So, no, The entire continent of Australia is NOT on fire.

The one that makes me laugh the hardest are the moron protestors wanting the government dissolved, suggesting the governor intercede and sack the PM and government. Right , the Governor General is going to do a John Kerr and unilaterally sack an elected government because "they dont do enough on climate change".

/facepalm

[Rasulis]

And this folks is the kind of blatant fearmongering and utter panic merchanting that is TYPICAL of climate alarmists and AGW fanatics.

Last i checked Sydney isnt on fire, neither is Melbourne, neither is 98% of Australia for that matter. THAT ladies and gents is the kind of idiocy I have highlighted a dozen times as to why I DONT listen to "climate change" doomsayers.



Size of Australia in hectares 769.2 million = 1.5380 percent

So, no, The entire continent of Australia is NOT on fire.

The one that makes me laugh the hardest are the moron protestors wanting the government dissolved, suggesting the governor intercede and sack the PM and government. Right , the Governor General is going to do a John Kerr and unilaterally sack an elected government because "they dont do enough on climate change".

/facepalm

Depends on how you look at it. That is still more acreage burned than the 2019 Siberia, Amazon, Alaska, Canada and Western US wildfires combined.

[Aehl]

I don't think downplaying how massive these fires are is worth the effort either

No one including me is downplaying ANYTHING.

I have zero patience for panic merchants. None. Nada. I have even less patience for terminal STUPID.

The fire is larger, yes. In terms of fatalities? Not even CLOSE.

Try Black Saturday.

164 people died in the fires themselves, 12 died later in hospital, and 4 died from other causes including car crashes

So spare me.

BTW I was a volunteer emergency services officer, and had fire training. So I actually KNOW what is going on and why and how. The situation is coming under control, our firefighters have done an incredible job, the last thing we need are a bunch of ignorant morons spreading misinformation to inflate the situation for their own sick, twisted political agendas.

"The nation wont recover" they wail...yes it will

"The entire country is on fire" - NO IT ISNT

3. Black Friday (VIC), 13-20 Jan 1939

Drought conditions and water shortages also preceded Black Friday, but the usual combination of high temperatures, strong winds, and low humidity finally triggered fires throughout bush communities near Melbourne. Well-meaning locals and graziers made the problem worse by trying to use controlled burns to protect themselves from disaster, only to see their good intentions help spread the flames. In all, 71 people were killed and 650 houses were destroyed. A Royal Commission investigation into the fires led to increased fire awareness and prevention efforts throughout Australia.

Was that also due to "climate change"?

[JohnBrown1917]

How pathetic do you have to be to downplay the biggest forest fires in recorded human history.

[Sliske]

Theres a lot of reasons bush fires happen.

Genuine arsonists, as in, people that actually lit fires with malicious intent. This could be just people who love fire, love chaos or, it could be like those people who spray paint swastikas on their dorm houses and then pretend right wingers did it. I would bet my bottom dollar that at least one of these bushfires, probably not in Australia but in California, will have been started by a mentally ill soyboy trying to 'raise awareness.'

Accidental fires, like campfires going too far, people trying to do controlled burns but fucking them up, children off school playing with fire without realising the consequences...

and lastly and least likely - climate change. It is very, very unlikely that any bushfire in Australia was started by climate change, given that all of the meteorological reports were coming back as normal. This is just bushfire season in Australia. Remember, whilst its freezing cold up here in Europe, NA and so on, down there they're currently having their hottest months of the year. That combined with this time of year always resulting in the least amount of rain in the year, results in essentially the entire country just being one big tinderbox.

The solution to this for decades was 'controlled burns' or 'backburns' / other names. Essentially seperating an area in the dead underbrush and burning away that, so when the bushfires inevitably happen, they can't spread nearly as fast or far.

Green lobbyists have been fighting back against this for a decade or so now. If i was to blame one single group, it wouldn't be arsonists, who are few and far between, it would be Green lobbyists, who've done to Australia, what anti-vaxxers would do to their kids - love them to death. They're so terrified of anything happening to the planet, that they'll not allow people to save their country when needed.

[zorkuus]

Remember, whilst its freezing cold up here in Europe, NA and so on

It isn't though. Overall it's one of the mildest winters up north in a good while.

[Aehl]

How pathetic do you have to be to downplay the biggest forest fires in recorded human history.

How pathetic do you have to be to make such a gross exaggeration.

biggest forest fires in recorded human history

LMAO.

Try the 2003 Siberian Taiga Fires , covering 47 Million Acres in Russia.

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I will wager when this is all over, a lot will be down to "green tape" councils and clearance that was never done or hamstrung in scope owing to local council "green agenda" interference.

Remember this?

https://www.beefcentral.com/news/qld...eaks-too-wide/

Anyone wanting to undertake clearing works in areas containing native vegetation, even if for a firebreak, fenceline or road, should seek legal advice prior to undertaking those works,” Mr Marland said.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/fine...0212-85bd.html

But seven years after the Sheahans bulldozed trees to make a fire break — an act that got them dragged before a magistrate and penalised — they feel vindicated. Their house is one of the few in Reedy Creek, Victoria, still standing.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/20...overy/11413858

https://www.northweststar.com.au/sto...-says-agforce/

"Landholders now have to know, understand and comply with legislation and regulations by all three levels of Government - much of which is contradictory," he said. "This is a disastrous outcome for producers at a time when many need to urgently clear firebreaks ahead of a predicted brutal fire season, control weeds and invasive plants, and use vegetation as fodder for cattle starving due to the record drought."

I use the term "green tape" as an accurate description of the bureaucratic idiocy involved.

Conspiracy? No.

Green agenda stupidity? Yes.

See you all in six months.