Don’t blame climate change for Australian wildfires

If all you read was the liberal press, you’d think the Australian bush fires are Mother Earth’s punishment for the heresy of allowing global warming. Reality is a little different — actually, entirely different. The current wave of wildfires running rampant across the Australian countryside certainly isn’t aided by dry weather and heat, but it’s actually the result of environmentalists’ naivete, not climate change.

The problem is the same one the United States has with forest fires: people simply not understanding how the environment works. In both cases, the countryside has evolved to deal with and prosper from frequent and low-level fires. But if these are suppressed, then the large and hot fires, taking out the canopy, for example, will eventually happen and entirely devastate the flora and the fauna.

It’s been environmentalists insisting we suppress all examples and incidences of wildfires. Therefore, blame for the current damage should be laid at their door…

The hubris is in environmentalists insisting on the management of their surrounding world without actually understanding it, to claim, as so many have for decades now, that we must suppress all fire simply because fire is bad. Disaster arrives when reality turns up to tell us different. Without that low-level burning, the fuel stock builds up — and, eventually, there will be that lightning strike, that cigarette end, that sets the entire area ablaze.

This is, of course, just Friedrich Hayek all over again and his insistence that politicians just never have enough information and knowledge to be able to plan societal matters for us. The plans that are laid go wrong when they meet the facts.