"Australia fires" Climate change increases the risk | BBC English News | Everyday Big News

"Australia fires" Climate change increases the risk of wildfires | BBC English News | Everyday Big News

Now we turn to climate change the UK scientists are saying the bush fires in Australia is a warning of what may be to come around the world this is in a report from the UK's Met Office these scientists warned that if the planet increases by 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century there could be fires of the kind we're seeing in Australia in many other places.

Australia fires crews braved the frontlines in a crisis that's still escalating many of the blazes are out of control and beyond anyone's experienced its worst I've seen in 21 years this is the honestly the worst I'm saying the most of the vast,

She'd been out making it very hard especially when you got family and commitment all the rest of it in a town in Victoria,

Ghostly scene cars burned and gray with ash fires are a natural feature of Australia but record heat has made them more severe than usual something that had been predicted climate scientists knew this was going to happen at some point whether it was now or ten years from now we were going to get this perfect storm and it was going to be pretty horrible we dodged a bullet a couple of years ago

When we had a hot summer then but it was eventually going to transpire and this seems to be part of a pattern a new study of wildfires around the world from the Amazon rainforest to.

California says human activity is raising temperatures and adding to the threat including in Europe and many other regions this was Spain last year the scientists involved in the research say the key now is to cut emissions of the gases that are heating the planet in terms of the urgency it's getting worse all the time so the sooner.

We can rein in emissions this the sooner we can slow the increase in warming and increase the climate change impacts and I've been talking to David climate science like many parameters of science advances in relatively small steps and often you may feel you've heard this before but there are little nuances and changes.

So what they've done with this study is a review all recent research into wildfires and they've concluded or one the conclusion is that overall the global total of wildfires is reduced in the area over recent decades bit of a surprise.

I can see it in your face there my one reason probably the main reason are that more and more natural grasslands the natural forest has been hacked away and converted into farmland,

So that when you get there's less area for there to be a wildfire on if you like so in a sense it's quite a mechanical reason for that but they've also found that as the temperature of the planet has warmed and this is the bit that won't surprise you get more combustible conditions assuming.

There's vegetation to burn to assume other situations are as they would be to encourage a fire to start if it's hotter and if it's drier which you're going to get with global warming then a fire becomes more likely I was talking to someone no.

They were saying the amount of interest in Australia it should extraordinary exceeding almost any other story in the world at the moment I'm wondering if people in the climate science world have noticed that the world is perhaps tuning in in a way that it hasn't always done previously.

I think they are I mean that there you have a Western advanced democracy living in quite fragile conditions.

I mean if you think about much of the Australian dream is to live in a suburban house perhaps in woodland you know on the edge of a city in the stunning scenery well suddenly you start to see the dark side of that the flip side of that and I think what this new study does.

And a lot of this recent research emphasizes the critical importance of preparing as well you can for the kids of conditions that are going to become more likely in the future, in other words, more emphasis if you can on creating fire breaks now there's a long difficult back story there in Australia,

But the more than can be done the more citizens can be prepared to evacuate all of those kinds of things roads can be kept cleared will adapt the population to what could be a new situation,

But the climate scientists are very clear that they've looked at wildfires around the world each situation is slightly different,

But one thread unites them all which is hotter drier conditions and saying it again make fires more likely by more than 100 fires are still burning across Australia,

This is what some of them look like from up above this is the state of New South Wales and you can see the volume of smoke now we've talked many times about how that smoke is affecting life in cities like Sydney and Canberra,

But it's affecting Melbourne too as well I'll have a look at some of these pictures, this is the city blanketed in smoke the air quality has been described as hazardous.

The smokes also disrupted the qualifying stages of the Melbourne opened Australian Open tennis tournament one player collapsed and complained of breathing difficulty season as you can see.

She had to be helped off core smoke also isn't just affecting Australia we know it's reached South America last a week and this graphic from NASA using NASA data shows.

That the smoke is completing a full circuit of the globe now the Australian media is an important part of the bushfire story Rupert Murdoch's News Corp dominates the media landscape in Australia.

It publishes more than 140 newspapers employs around 3,000 journalists across print broadcast and online and critics say Mr. Murdoch's newspapers and TV networks have continued to publish stories,

And opinion pieces that dismiss widely accepted science about climate change which makes this story in The Daily Beast worthy of note Rupert Murdoch's son James Murdoch sits on the news.

Court Board a spokesperson for him and his wife Katherine say their views on climate are well-established,

And their frustration with some of News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well-known they are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia.

Has given obvious evidence to the contrary so strong stuff and there are different examples that we could highlight sometimes it's simply an issue of emphasis here we have the front page of the Australian newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch.

On the day that Australia hit its highest-ever average temperature the choice of the lead story well they chose to go with that story about coal exports other times things are more explicit we know that across the last hundred years Australia's climate has been getting warmer and warmer particularly in the last 25.

This is data from the Bureau of Meteorology there and meteorologists are telling us that hotter drier climate increases the risk of bushfire seasons being longer,

And more intense and you find examples of the Murdoch media questioning that so here is a quote from one columnist News Corp columnist Chris Kenney writing in The Australian newspaper.

Hysterical efforts to blame the fires on climate change continue even though we've always faced this threat and always will and here's another News Corp columnist.

Andrew Boldt speaking on his program on the Murdoch owns Sky News Australia global warming is theriot right now is in saying once again.

I heard not a single voice of doubt on the national broadcaster this morning that actually this drought no it's not caused by global warming nor of the bush fires nor will it help at all with bush fires to cut our emissions instead.

We had politicians who should know better they are out there they're feeding the fear and the misinformation by the Australian newspapers.