With all the subtlety and insight of a dead kangaroo, Greta Thunberg has pronounced on the bush fires currently ravaging Australia.

"The numbers don’t lie, and the science is clear.

If anyone tells you, 'This is part of a normal cycle' or 'We’ve had fires like this before', smile politely and walk away, because they don’t know what they’re talking about." https://t.co/Avl0RATRdl — Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) November 10, 2019

If there’s one person doesn’t know what she’s talking about, it’s the pig-tailed Swedish school drop out St Greta. And if it’s another, it’s that former Australian fireman who is quoted, approvingly, in the article Thunberg cites from the left-leaning Sydney Morning Herald.

Of course, this season’s Australian bush fires are dramatic and upsetting: they’ve claimed at least three lives and more than 150 houses in New South Wales alone and a currently threatening parts of Sydney. Of course, various interested parties are trying to make political capital out of it – because that’s what activists do: especially the disaster vultures of the climate emergency movement.

But the evidence does not support the eco loons’ claims that these fires are uncharacteristic or historically unprecedented, let alone that man-made global warming or ‘climate change’ has anything to do with it.

As Andrew Bolt points out on this Sky News Australia bulletin, a recent NASA study found that in the last 18 years bush fires in terms of land burned have decreased not increased.

Jo Nova, meanwhile, wrote earlier this year that — as in the U.S. — what is really making these fires so destructive is poor management. Australian states that burn off the underbrush in rotation – such as Western Australia – experience far less wildfire damage. (In many parts of Australia, green policies forbid farmers and landowners from cutting down trees on their property because the trees on their land supposedly act as a ‘carbon sink’.)

After 67 years of fire management in the giant, hot, dry state of WA, the trend is clear — the more prescribed area we burn, the less wildfire does. In the graph below the prescribed burns declined for forty years and wildfires increased for thirty. After the Dwellingup Fire in 1961 the state ramped up the preventative burns, and reduced wildfires. As the BushFireFront team say: “We can’t control the weather but we can control the fuel loads“ Tough call — what do we do, redesign our energy system, pay billions, change our cars, our houses and our light globes in the hope that bush fires will be nicer, or do we just go back to doing what we used to do that worked?

If anyone is responsible for turning natural disasters into a tragedy, you could argue, it’s green campaigners like St Greta who treat humans as a nuisance.