Month: August 2019

If you have an interest in Tasmania’s future, please read this translated article about the future of fighting bushfires, according to Marc Castellnou, who is the Forestry Action Group (GRAF) of the Firefighters of Catalonia chief, and a former EU fire advisor.

He says: “The era of firefighting is ending and the era of landscape management is beginning … there is no capacity to extinguish the big fires, you have to manage the landscape. Large fires are entering areas where they are not expected. They have stopped being the exceptionality to start being the norm.”

Asked if people could live safely next to forest in the Mediterranean, he said: “Yes, if you have a lowered fuel load. But an unmanaged forest, which lacks species, or with an impoverished ecosystem, will burn. The answer must always be to look for healthy landscapes and, whether for mature forests or for forest management, to remove fuel from the landscape, and this has never been done in modern times.”

To reiterate, he says the future of fighting the world’s intensifying wildfires is landscape management, as it is impossible to stop big fires once they get going.

Clearly, Tassie is in a difficult place, given its endless tracts of drying pine monoculture and eucalypt forests, in a windy climate, with hot, dry summers.

Unfortunately, when burned, the flammable eucalypts quickly grow back and there is no gradual change to a less flammable landscape.

Southern Tasmania’s burned areas are already growing back after the Jan/Feb 2019 fires.

Pine plantations near towns will grow more dangerous with every year of warmer, drier, windier weather.

Weather data shows southern Australia is becoming increasingly dry, and Tasmania seems to have a growing propensity for lightning strikes. The wind is famously, at times, gale force.

Is Tassie condemned to a Groundhog Day of intense bushfires?

The solution, according to the above article, requires a little more than the famous “raking” that Donald Trump espoused.

Large scale forest removal/fuel reduction is a radical solution.

Will it take a disaster to implement it?

As discussed earlier, the weakened polar vortex in the northern hemisphere increases the likelihood of Arctic blasts creating record cold in some areas.

This tweet screenshot shows cold weather hitting Finland, as it experiences record cold temperatures.

Such cold snaps are produced as evidence by some that global warming is not happening, when in fact, it is part of the warming process.

Something else that happens – as cold air leaves the pole, hotter air moves in from elsewhere and melts polar ice.

I made a movie (below) of the polar vortexes using snippets from earth.nullschool.net

It uses all the available years from the nullschool website.

The northern hemisphere vortex has changed the most in recent years, as has northern weather.

As climate change affects the southern hemisphere, changes in the vortex and jetstream may influence Tasmanian weather.

For example, Tasmania may get polar blasts, more extreme rain events, and extended heat waves, as the vortex breaks down.

The vortex has had a stabilising effect on weather as it moves things along. Uncertainties lay ahead.

There are some good analytic videos on YouTube about the jetstream.

My video simply depicts the annual vortex over time, make of it what you will.