Not all fires were started by arson, but a large number were.

Bushfires have all sorts of causes, but hotter and drier conditions make them worse whenever they do occur.

There's a reason these are the worst fires on record, and it's not because Australian hooligans are worse than before.

Just ask the Australians who live there and study it and live it. Don't like climate scientists? Fine. Ask the farmers. The ranchers. The wine producers. They all know.

I agree, that hotter and drier conditions do make bushfires worse, and Australia has been hot and dry this year. Climate or weather?

Don't know that the conditions are the only reason these fires are so numerous. The latest figure has it that now there are almost 200 people arrested for arson.

What I do not agree with is the activists who are saying the climate is the only reason. Like most of what these climate activists say there is very little proof backing that it up.

I agree the climate is changing, it always has been. I also agree that mankind has contributed to that change. How much of an impact, I don't know.

What I have a problem with is the assumption that we are the major cause and that we can stop the climate from changing. As I said, the climate has always been changing. Ice ages, to periods hotter than now, and back again.

I am old enough to remember when the science was that we were entering an ice age, then it was the ozone layer was going away. I believe this was followed by England would be Siberia by 2000.

The only consistent has been that if my taxes are raised, and we destroy the economy, the weather will get better.

Link to map source: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/how-climate-change-affecting-australia

Yes, you have a firm grasp of the obvious. Drier conditions create opportunity for more severe fires. “Intense bushfires are not uncommon in southern Australia. The region is one of the three most fire-prone in the world. Within the last two hundred years, the area has experienced and documented at least twenty-five major fires, beginning with Black Thursday in 1851.” (Wikipedia - Black Thursday Bushfires 1851)

The authorities saw this coming as a result of a particularly dry season this year and they tried to legislate their way through it by banning fires. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone obeyed the government ban on setting fires? Wouldn’t it be great if people weren’t either ignorant (159 people) or malicious (24 people), and stopped setting these fires? I guess for now we’ll just have to arrest these types of people and prosecute them for causing such a catastrophe.

To say these are the ‘worst fires on record’ is just plain misleading. It’s tough to even quantify something like that when you consider all the variables in calculating loss due to natural disaster. It’s a common misleading tactic of the media to speak/print in absolute terms. Words like ‘worst’ are often flippantly and falsely tossed around for the sake of creating a more profound headline. Be wary of anyone speaking in absolutes.

Additionally, you have a scientific community today that has been found guilty of several different fallacies associated with their “research” which is portrayed by activists and the media as gospel. These stories are typically ignored by the MSM. Confirmation bias, data manipulation, data omission, etc. It’s just another instance in a series of apocalyptic catastrophes that the fear-mongering, left-wing activists preached doom and gloom about since the 60’s. These things were prophesized by climate alarmists:
1. We would be living through a new Ice Age by the year 2000.
2. We would all die when the ozone layer disappeared.
3. The oceans would be dead.
4. Global Cooling would destroy the world.
5. Acid rain would destroy our forests.
6. Overpopulation would result in worldwide famine.
7. We would deplete our natural resources.
8. We would run out of oil.
9. The polar ice caps would melt.
10. Manhattan would be underwater.
11. People who live in cities will have to wear gas masks.
12. Nitrogen buildup will make the land unusable.
13. Decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

When a category 5 hurricane slams into a coastline in 1850 and destroys a few commercial buildings and half a dozen homes it can’t be used as a comparison against the next category 5 hurricane which slams into the same area 100 years later. People have irresponsibly built up billions of dollars of infrastructure in and around hurricane and flood prone areas. When it gets wiped out and billions are lost, you can’t just adjust for inflation and say…see, 100 years ago it wasn’t nearly as bad of a storm. Sorry, doesn’t work like that. It’s irresponsible and untruthful to make such a statement. Same thing with these fires.

A farmer, rancher, or wine producer simply observing that our climate is changing proves what exactly? The climate has ALWAYS been changing and will continue to do so. There are many facets to understanding what drives these changes, some of which I doubt we even fully grasp yet. Solar activity, ocean salinity levels, trade winds and currents, geothermal activity. We should be good stewards of our planet and no one is arguing otherwise. What you don’t do is completely upend the world economy with bogus CO2 emission related fear mongering used to justify things like a carbon tax. It’s nothing more than a money grab justified by leveraging fear and emotion on a gullible public. Humans are not causing the climate to change Kylie, this isn’t man-made climate change and no matter how much of our money the government steals from us, they won’t stop the temperature or oceans from rising and falling.

Citation for all those alarmist predictions? I can’t speak for every single prediction ever made, but the ones I’m thinking of have been a lot more cautious than that.

The fact that some predictions of doom didn’t come true — or just haven’t come true yet — is not that persuasive. The underlying science is sound. Everyone studying this topic agrees we are seeing global warming, and 97% agree it’s caused by human activity.

These two charts fit together like a hand in glove. Do you have a better explanation?

I'm not going to do your homework for you. If you're actually interested in understanding the historical pattern of doomsday predictions being made to energize a voting base, sell newspapers, or secure continuing gov't grants for "research", you'll have to do that on your own. More cautious? pffft....please.

So, you think that there's still a chance we could see a man-made ice age in the coming years...right along side the man-made global warming catastrophe that's going to kill us all?

It's bothersome to me of how accepting the climate hoax believers are when data is cherry-picked or just tossed out that doesn't support the narrative. Their control over their believers is so strong they can just pivot and explain away failed predictions and the lemmings just fall right in line and continue marching along.

The "science" is far from settled. The 97% figure is bogus. 2012 poll of American Meteorological Society members - a quarter of the members responded (1,862) - 1,099 (59%) stated human activity was the primary cause of global warming. 204 (11%) said human + natural activity. 429 (23%) said not enough data to make a determination as to cause. (not sure what happened with the remaining 7% but that's what's shown) 1,415 predicted that warming over the next century would be "very" or "somewhat" harmful, but only 311 of those thought that "all" or a "large" amount of the harm can be prevented "through mitigation and adaptation measures".

2015 - PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency study of 1,868 scientists working in climate-related fields found that 3 in 10 respondents said that LESS THAN HALF of global warming since 1951 could be attributed to human activity, or that they did not know.

Finding two line graphs that somewhat mimic one another is not very persuasive. I could create a similar inference between the miles of paved roads we have and rising temperatures. Two numbers coinciding in time isn't even close to proof of man-made global warming. If you look at the Wikipedia page that you grabbed your top chart from, you'd notice 3 other charts showing a lot more history than the past 100 years or so. They clearly show that we're not in the midst of anything profoundly different from what occurred in the millennia preceding the big, bad, nasty, evil industrial revolution. Yes, I have a better explanation, it's nature and we will always struggle to survive against its all powerful forces.

The 97% consensus figure comes straight from here: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

NASA is the authority on planetary issues. They have sent probes to all sorts of solar system bodies, including a flyby of Pluto that captured spectacular pictures never seen before. If they can do all of that, then they take rudimentary temperature and atmospheric gas composition readings and describe what is happening right here on earth.

But if NASA's position on this makes no impression on you, on that same page NASA cites a whole bunch of other scientific agencies who endorse this position.

The similarity between those two charts I posted alone isn't what's impressive. It's the explanatory link between the two charts that predicts the results we're seeing. More greenhouse gases in the atmosphere = more warming. It's a theory simple enough that a 3rd-grader can understand it.

Precise predictions of what exactly will happen, by what date, and where, are not really possible in the end and aren't really the point. A warming world will see melting ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels, increased intensity of bushfires and hurricanes, increasing desertification in certain areas, and all sorts of other effects that perhaps no one has predicted yet.

The world's climate has changed in the past, indeed: and every time it did, it brought wrenching changes to the world and its species including mass death and extinctions. The one we are seeing now is happening in the blink of an eye in geologic terms. Life will carry on, as it always has in the past, and I am confident humanity will find a way to survive, but things will be very different.

Unless you have a convincing alternative explanation for the temperature rises we are seeing today, we should be concerned.

People have been arrested for arson -- as you might expect, there is intense public pressure on the authorities to find responsible parties -- but that doesn't mean they're guilty.

It also doesn't resolve the question of how these fires started, or whether there were in fact multiple causes. As I said in my OP: Bushfires can start for all sorts of reasons. Saying that it was arson just because some people have been arrested for it is conclusory.

And: even if all of this was caused by arson, climate change (drier, hotter conditions) made it worse.

You had me till "climate change (drier, hotter conditions) made it worse."

There is no evidence that this season is any drier or hotter than any other previous season. It could just be the weather. The hottest day in Australian history was in 1960 and the longest drought was in 1864-1868. The hottest summer was 1938-1939.

Dallas Texas had more snow today than any time in the last 3 years. Is that global freezing or just weather?

https://crazzfiles.com/hottest-summer-in-australia-was-1938-1939/

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-02/2019-was-australias-hottest-and-driest-year-on-record/11837312?pfmredir=sm

“2019 was Australia’s hottest and driest year on record”

Also this: “Annual Climate statement 2019” http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/aus/

2019 was the hottest AND driest year on record. Those two things don’t necessarily go hand in hand. But together, that’s a deadly combination, as we’ve seen.

Will 2020 be worse than 2019? Maybe, maybe not. It would actually be surprising if 2020 broke records set in 2019. Records do not need to be smashed every single year to prove the global warming hypothesis. Global warming is not tidy, uniform, or consistent, and you have to look at decades’ worth of data to draw firm conclusions.

Climatological records have been kept in Australia for over a century. And: 2019 just saw the hottest *and* driest year of all those years.

This isn’t just “weather.” Australia’s climate is changing.

A single-day temperature or snowfall record? That’s weather.