A series of Comments and Correspondence have recently been published in Nature Climate Change and the legacy alarmist media has gone into overdrive to spin the false narrative once again that climate change ’caused’ the devastating Australian bushfires. This is obviously very important to them; they simply must establish the link between the fires and man-made climate change in the public consciousness, totally regardless of whether that link can actually be robustly, scientifically demonstrated. It’s too good an opportunity to miss in order to spin the catastrophe narrative.

The BBC of course spins the alarmist narrative shamelessly:

‘Australia fires were far worse than any prediction’

The Australian bushfires were more catastrophic than any simulation of our changing climate predicted.

This is the conclusion of researchers who described the devastation as a “fiery wake-up call for climate science”.

Bushfires in south-east Australia have left 33 people dead and burned an area of land the size of South Korea.

“This [was] worse than anything our models simulated,” climate scientist Dr Benjamin Sanderson told BBC News.

Translation: ‘It was much worse than we thought, so the models were right, but they were not right enough.’ Here’s what the abstract of that ‘study’ says:

To improve climate resilience for extreme fire events, researchers need to translate modelling uncertainties into useful guidance and be wary of overconfidence. If Earth system models do not capture the severity of recent Australian wildfires, development is urgently needed to assess whether we are underestimating fire risk.

This is just so irritating. Instead of admitting that the climate models got it wrong and investigating why they might have got it wrong, the knee-jerk response by climate ‘scientists’ is to immediately assume that the models have underestimated catastrophic impacts. It doesn’t even cross their minds that the models might simply be wrong because other factors totally unrelated to climate change™ might be at play.

Dr Sanderson, who is part of the French government’s ‘Make our planet great again’ program, said climate science needed to “do a better job” to avoid being caught out in future by wildfires, or by other catastrophes fuelled by climate change.

From his office at the European centre for research and training in high performance computing (CERFACS) in Toulouse, he explained: “The faster [the planet] warms, the more likely we are to be taken by surprise.”

This is nonsense and just pure ideological preachy afactual prattle from a supposed ‘scientist’. He then goes full climate retard by claiming that models should be supercharged to churn out all possible nightmarish futures – no doubt using RCP8.5 or its SSP equivalent and the very highest climate sensitivity models that can be mustered from the CMIP6 arsenal.

Dr Sanderson agreed: “Rather than running one simulation that looks as close as possible to the real world, we need to start creating thousands of different versions of the future.

“Those thousands of versions should span the full space of how bad this could be.”

This is a fanatic, not a cautious academic. He is unhinged, he’s high as a kite on the intoxicating fumes of catastrophe weed plus the promise of ever more lavish funding from billionaire business executives and government grants.

The other Comment on the Nature Climate Change series on the Oz bushfires sounds even more loopy:

Catastrophic fires have generated intensified public responses in favour of transformative climate change action. Realizing the potential of this moment requires us to understand and puncture the cultural and emotional politics of our collective denial.

The BBC informs us of a Correspondence article in the same series:

Another paper, published in this same issue, confirms that the extent of the Australia fires vastly exceeds previous wildfires – both within Australia and elsewhere in the world.

Their direct link to climate change is still being investigated . . . . .

As I’ve pointed out, this eagerly awaited attribution study of the Australian wildfires, to be jointly authored by whinging Aussie climate scientist Sophie Lewis and colleagues at World Weather Attribution is due any time soon. Judging by the publicity being generated by the current ‘studies’ which are reinforcing the climate change narrative in the public consciousness ahead of the next round of BS, I expect very soon.

The Graun chooses to concentrate on the supposedly ‘unprecedented’ extent of forest destruction by the latest wildfires in order to convince its readers that it ‘must be climate change wot dunnit’:

More than 20% of Australia’s forests burned during the summer’s bushfire catastrophe, a proportion scientists believe is unprecedented globally, according to new research.

As we know, in terms of total land surface area burned, the Australian bushfires are nowhere near unprecedented, as Bjorn Lomborg demonstrated. A much higher percentage of land area burned in the 1970s. So forest area burned might be unprecedented (in the record) but that’s because of the geographical location of the drought which is the most direct cause of the wildfires (after the sources of ignition of course).

The author Lisa Cox appears to come over all faint after this though and she actually becomes a journalist again by relaying some sensible comments from a sensible scientist:

Andrew King, a lecturer in climate science at the University of Melbourne, co-authored another piece examining the role of climate variability and drought. He said the consequences of extreme drought, heat and bushfires had been well-documented, but the collection of articles in Nature Climate Change was intended to “provide informed commentary on this summer’s severe weather”.

There was a lot “we don’t fully understand yet”, King said. “While we can say with confidence that human-caused climate change has amplified the extreme heatwaves that have been observed this summer, the influence of human-caused climate change on drought and fires in Australia is much harder to disentangle and natural climate variability plays a very large role in both.”

He said the climate models used to make projections had “deficiencies in simulating both drought and fire such that we cannot yet provide robust guidance on how these extremes of Australian climate will change as the world continues to warm”.

But the Graun is not letting on about the details of this study. The Conversation, surprisingly, does. The article itself, authored by King, is cunningly not headlined as having anything to do with the Australian bushfires, but it is all about the Australian bushfires – and how they are most likely a result of natural variability in weather, not climate change.

There has been much discussion on whether human-caused climate change is to blame. Our new study explores Australian droughts through a different lens.

Rather than focusing on what’s causing the dry conditions, we investigated why it’s been such a long time since we had widespread drought-breaking rain. And it’s got a lot to do with how the temperature varies in the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

Our findings suggest that while climate change does contribute to drought, blame can predominately be pointed at the absence of the Pacific Ocean’s La Niña and the negative Indian Ocean Dipole – climate drivers responsible for bringing wetter weather.

Rather than blame El Nino and the very strong positive Indian Ocean Dipole for the drought and hot weather, the author does the complete opposite and suggests it is the lack of a negative Indian Ocean Dipole plus La Nina conditions that has created the dry conditions:

The problem is we haven’t had either a La Niña or a negative Indian Ocean Dipole event since winter 2016. Our study shows the lack of these events helps explain why eastern Australia is in drought.

For the southeast of Australia in particular, La Niña or negative Indian Ocean Dipole events provide the atmosphere with suitable conditions for persistent and widespread rainfall to occur. So while neither La Niña or a negative Indian Ocean Dipole guarantee heavy rainfall, they do increase the chances.

Whatever the actual case may be, it’s clear that climate change played only a bit-part in the events of Dec 2019 and Jan 2020 in Australia.

While climate drivers are predominately causing this drought, climate change also contributes, though more work is needed to understand what role it specifically plays.

Drought is more complicated and multidimensional than simply “not much rain for a long time”. It can be measured with a raft of metrics beyond rainfall patterns, including metrics that look at humidity levels and evaporation rates.

What we do know is that climate change can exacerbate some of these metrics, which, in turn, can affect drought.

The Conversation aside, to give you a brief taste of the BS being propagated in the media right now, here is Wired:

Today in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers are publishing a series of articles as a kind of postmortem of the Australian bushfires. The series is both a diagnosis of what happened as flames swept across the continent, and a call to action for researchers the world over: Climate change is a crisis for people, the natural world at large—and for science itself.

In particular, some of the research is making a staggering argument: This season’s bushfires were so catastrophic, they caught modelers off guard—way off guard. The models not only hadn’t predicted that bushfires of this magnitude could happen now, they hadn’t even predicted that bushfires of this magnitude could happen in the next 80 years.

The Fail, failing typically, shouts at its readers:

‘A fiery wake-up call for climate science’: Australian bushfires caused an ‘unprecedented’ amount of damage and destroyed a FIFTH of the continent’s forests.

Recent research looked at scale and cause of the devastating Australian fires Found that 21 per cent of the nation’s forested area was destroyed by fire Fresh analysis has called the amount of damage and loss of life ‘unprecedented’ Experts say the disaster ‘would be impossible without anthropogenic influence’ and say the climate change played a significant role in the bushfires



OMG, the end is nigh. Well, actually, it’s nigh on impossible apparently to say when the end is nigh (because it’s always ten or twelve, or twenty years in the future) and ‘experts’ just can’t seem to agree on how it’s going to be nigh – be it drought, flood, fire, storm, mass crop failures, catastrophic sea level rise, or whatever. But fire is a very popular theme at the moment and alarmists are determined to exploit a natural catastrophe in Australia to the fullest possible extent. Next up – the attribution study. My guess is it will be far from conclusive but will be hyped like mad across the mainstream climate alarmist media.