David Cunningham, Castlemaine
Trevor Scott, (‘Doubtful statistic’, Opinions, September 4), casts doubt on scientific statistics and instead offers junk science as so-called evidence.
There is little to no evidence that ‘climate change’ has done anything to exacerbate this year’s NSW or California bushfires.
University of Washington veteran climate scientist Cliff Mass posted on his blog that “those making such claims are seriously misinformed”.
Look at the graph posted on the Oregon Department of Forestry website showing the decline in USA acres burned and number of fires from 1911 to 2017.
The same in Australia, where leading bushfire experts said it was ridiculous to link the current crisis to climate change when the most recent major report from the UN’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the world’s weather had warmed by just 0.89C since the start of the 20th century.
“If there is any global warming, the global warming is so slow and so small the bushfire event is totally overrun by the fuel state,” retired Monash University researcher David Packham said.
He said reducing fuel loads in the Australian bush was what was urgently needed.
Research by Phil Cheney, a former head of CSIRO Bushfire Research, has found “the effect of (increasing temperatures forecast by the IPCC) on bushfire behaviour, by itself, will be trivial”.
“Fire intensity is far more significantly affected by fuel quantity, fuel dryness and wind strength than it is by temperature,” he said.
Hansen’s 1988 address to congress is a textbook example of blatantly using twisted science as a political tool. The other bad authority Mr Scott used was Gore, whose movie, An Inconvenient Truth, proved to be far from the truth. It was prosecuted in the British High Court, and found (10/10/2007) to be political propaganda, political indoctrination, and his alarmist claims were found fraudulent on nine counts. Moreover, Gore’s forecast deadlines are all behind us now and not one of the predictions made in that movie came true.
