Grazier stopped from fuel reduction burns at Callignee
by Jane Metlikovec, Herald Sun, February 18, 2009 [here]
A FARMER says he could single-handedly have saved much of his township from being razed - if the Government had let him.
As Premier John Brumby toured Gippsland yesterday, Lindsay Pump slammed the lack of controlled burning and fuel reduction.
Until three years ago Mr Pump, 54, routinely burnt off around the Callignee hall and dozens of neighbouring houses. Now they lie in ruins after fire destroyed 90 homes in the area.
The farmer, who lost almost 40 cattle and 50 goats in the blaze, said he was often pulled up by the Department of Sustainability and Environment for illegal burning.
He was given a final warning when three fire trucks showed up at his last burn-off.
“I was always burning it off, and they wouldn’t let me. They’d come here with fire trucks and put it out. I could have saved a lot of places around here, but there were too many greenies stopping me,” Mr Pump said.
“It’s just disaster now. A lot of this is the Government’s own fault for not burning it. … [more]
Bushfire death toll has climbed to 208
Herald Sun, February 19, 2009 [here]
THE bushfire death toll has climbed to 208, as a blaze at Wilsons Prom claimed a quarter of the land in thick bushland.
Police have just revised the toll up from 201 to 208.
The official number of people killed in Marysville was increased from 39 to 45, making it the town with the highest toll.
The five worst hit towns have been Marysville (45), Strathewen (42), Kinglake (37), St Andrews (22) and Steels Creek (10).
Meanwhile, the Wilsons Promontory National Park fire has grown to more than 13,000ha in size, but light winds have allowed firefighters time to strengthen containment lines around the blaze.
The fire has burnt through more than a quarter of Wilsons Promontory and is still out of control in thick bushland.
Firefighters are unable to access the fire so it can be fought only by using one air crane and two smaller water bombers. … [more]
Park Service begins culling elk in Rocky Mountain National Park
Outdoor News Bulletin, 17 February 2009 [here]
In early February, the National Park Service (NPS) began a cull of the elk population in Rocky Mountain National Park (Park), with the intention of killing up to 100 cow elk, reports the Wildlife Management Institute. The cull was authorized in the Park’s Elk and Vegetation Management Plan that was finalized in December 2007 with the Record of Decision released in February 2008.
The cull is expected to enable the Park to maintain a population at the high end of the natural range of variation, between 1,600 and 2,100 animals (600 to 800 within the Park and 1,000 to 1,300 that winter outside Park boundaries). Over the 20-year duration of the plan, as many as 200 animals could be culled per year within the Park.
The elk population within the Park reached a high point between 1997 and 2001, with estimates ranging between 2,800 and 3,500 individuals. While the number has declined somewhat from those high levels, the population continues to be less migratory and more concentrated, resulting in significant impacts to the Park’s native vegetation, particularly aspen and willows. The change in habitat has adversely affected numerous species, including beaver, songbirds and butterflies, other plant species, and the Park’s water table. In addition, cases of chronic wasting disease have been found within the population, and residents of the Park’s gateway community, Estes Park, have seen increased property damage.
“The impacts to the habitat have been well documented, and what has been consistent is that we have agreement that the impacts are there,” noted Ben Bobowski, Chief of Resource Stewardship for the Park. “The more difficult question has been how to deal with it. While the attention has been on the culling portion of the plan, we believe that the conservation of the ecosystem is the ultimate goal and is our main focus.”
Teams that include NPS and Colorado Division of Wildlife (CDOW) staff, as well as qualified volunteer sharpshooters, will carry out the culling in the early morning hours before Park visitation increases. All cullers have been certified in firearms training, specially trained in wildlife culling and were required to pass a marksmanship test to qualify. The teams will work under the supervision of an NPS team leader to ensure humane dispatch and quality meat recovery. All culled animals will be tested for chronic wasting disease. The meat from animals testing positive will be used in a CDOW mountain lion research project and animals testing negative will be donated for human consumption. The cull will continue through mid-March this year.
In addition to the culling, the Park will use other population-control techniques including fencing, elk redistribution and vegetation restoration. Up to 160 acres of aspen stands and 440 acres of willow habitat will be fenced to reduce vegetative damage. The fencing began in October and three exclosures totaling more than 60 acres already have been constructed. Outside of fenced areas, herding, aversive conditioning and unsuppressed firearms may be used to redistribute the population and reduce densities. Throughout the process, NPS staff will use adaptive management to evaluate the success of the program and to adjust cull numbers based on current population estimates and response of the vegetation. … [more]
What do labs and politicians, dress socks and taxpayer dollars have in common?
By Krayton Kerns, MT state legislator, Western Ag Reporter, Feb 5, 2009 [here]
Do you know Molly? She has a muscular build, beautiful blonde hair, and a long nose. She also likes her belly scratched and chases cars. The Molly I am speaking of is a six-year-old yellow Lab that I see on a regular basis at my veterinary clinic. Recently, it’s been too regular.
Last fall Molly was helping with the household chores by sorting the laundry into two piles: things she can swallow and things she couldn’t. It took about a week before Molly discovered that one of the items in the “can-swallow” pile actually belonged in the “can-swallow-but-can’t-pass” pile so… Molly went to surgery. During the exploratory surgery, we found one dark, green dress sock permanently lodged in Molly’s small intestine. It was the dreaded “toxic-sock syndrome.” We surgically resected the sock plus 18 inches of Molly’s bowel. Molly and the sock recovered well and bounded home a couple days after surgery. (The story would have a happy ending if I stopped here.)
A month and a half later Molly resumed vomiting. Within an hour, we were back in surgery where again we resected a segment of bowel and removed another green dress sock. It was either the same sock or it was the littermate of the sock we had delivered previously. What could possibly make a dog do something as reckless as swallowing the same sock twice?
It is this: For hundreds of years, the Labrador retriever has been selectively bred to sniff out hiding birds and retrieve them. Their life’s purpose is focused in the front four inches of their face. If there are no birds around, absolutely everything else must be sniffed, nudged, chomped, and packed around. So it is instinct that drives Molly to chew and swallow without thinking of the consequences, and this brings me to my point.
The majority of politicians in Washington DC and Helena have the same instincts as Molly; she swallows socks, and they spend money. Molly’s weakness is the clothes hamper; the politician’s is YOUR wallet. Don’t expect either to break their bad habit anytime soon.
Scores of Animals Ravished by Aussie Fires
The Associated Press, February 13, 2009 [here]
SYDNEY — Kangaroo corpses lay scattered by the roadsides while wombats that survived the wildfire’s onslaught emerged from their underground burrows to find blackened earth and nothing to eat.
Wildlife rescue officials on Wednesday worked frantically to help the animals that made it through Australia’s worst-ever wildfires but they said millions of animals likely perished in the inferno.
Scores of kangaroos have been found around roads, where they were overwhelmed by flames and smoke while attempting to flee, said Jon Rowdon, president of the rescue group Wildlife Victoria.
Kangaroos that survived are suffering from burned feet, a result of their territorial behavior. After escaping the initial flames, the creatures — which prefer to stay in one area — likely circled back to their homes, singeing their feet on the smoldering ground.
“It’s just horrific,” said Neil Morgan, president of the Statewide Wildlife Rescue Emergency Service in Victoria, the state where the raging fires were still burning. “It’s disaster all around for humans and animals as well.” … [more]
Global warming ‘underestimated’
BBC World News America, 15 February 2009 [here]
The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned.
Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures “will be beyond anything” predicted.
Prof Field said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had underestimated the rate of change.
He said warming is likely to cause more environmental damage than forecast.
Speaking at the American Science conference in Chicago, Prof Field said fresh data showed greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2007 increased far more rapidly than expected.
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously in climate policy,” he said.
Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, seriously underestimated the scale of the problem. … [more]
Note: The BBC got it wrong. Dr. Fields is Professor of Biology in an Ecology Department, not a climate scientist [here].
Fearless fighters storm through fire to save campers
Andrew Collard, Herald Sun, February 11, 2009 [here]
FEARLESS firefighters have stormed through fire to save 19 campers, including seven toddlers and babies.
As the firefighters led them to a river and hosed them under fire blankets, their parents begged: “Are we going to make it out of this?”
Andrew Collard, 30, and Brian Lawry, 46, who are Department of Sustainability and Environment workers, told of their extraordinary efforts to first storm through the fire in their truck and then save the eight families as flames engulfed them at a scenic park in Murrindindi at 3.30pm on Saturday.
Firefighter Brad Sexton tried to cut his way into the scenic reserve — which was destroyed by the start of the fire that later razed Marysville — with a bulldozer to rescue the group. He later learned his own house had burned down at Kinglake.
he firefighters herded the families, all campers from Melbourne, into the shallow water, parked their truck to protect them and then drove cars into the water.
They bundled the toddlers and babies, as young as six months, inside before covering them with a fire blanket and hoses.
Angry survivors blame council ‘green’ policy
by Andrea Petrie, Arthurs Creek, The Age (AU), February 11, 2009 [here]
ANGRY residents last night accused local authorities of contributing to the bushfire toll by failing to let residents chop down trees and clear up bushland that posed a fire risk.
During question time at a packed community meeting in Arthurs Creek on Melbourne’s northern fringe, Warwick Spooner — whose mother Marilyn and brother Damien perished along with their home in the Strathewen blaze — criticised the Nillumbik council for the limitations it placed on residents wanting the council’s help or permission to clean up around their properties in preparation for the bushfire season. “We’ve lost two people in my family because you dickheads won’t cut trees down,” he said.
“We wanted trees cut down on the side of the road … and you can’t even cut the grass for God’s sake.”
Later, the meeting was cut short when Mr Spooner’s father, Dennis, collapsed in his chair and an ambulance had to be called. Despite losing his wife and son and everything he owned, a friend later said he had not stopped or slept since the weekend. … [more]
Victoria fires: 80 missing, 181 dead, police chase arsonists
By staff writers, NEWS.com.au, February 11, 2009 [here]
POLICE are close to arresting an arsonist suspected of setting a blaze in Gippsland, as reports emerge that several fresh fires were deliberately lit in the Beechworth area overnight.
Victorian Premier John Brumby said he believed the 100 police officers in Taskforce Phoenix were “close to finalising investigations” into the south Gippsland fires which left 21 people dead.
He said it was virtually impossible to believe that people would be still lighting fires given the current situation.
It is believed police have a description of a car used by those allegedly responsible for the overnight blazes in Beechworth.
“There seems little doubt that these were deliberately lit. I think words escape us all when it comes to describing that deliberate arson,” he said.
Community shock and anger at arsonists have spread nationwide as the massive scale of death and destruction becomes known.
Whole towns are being treated as crime scenes as police hunt those responsible for deliberately lighting fires.
Up to 80 people are still missing in the Victoria fires as the official death toll continues to climb.
The toll climbed to 181 overnight but with dozens still unaccounted for it is expected to exceed 200.
Those missing were “people who the coroner believes are already deceased, but are not yet identified,” Mr Brumby said. … [more]
High CO2 boosts plant respiration, potentially affecting climate and crops
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Press Release, 9-Feb-2009 [here]
The leaves of soybeans grown at the elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels predicted for the year 2050 respire more than those grown under current atmospheric conditions, researchers report, a finding that will help fine-tune climate models and could point to increased crop yields as CO2 levels rise.
The study, from researchers at the University of Illinois and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Plants draw CO2 from the atmosphere and make sugars through the process of photosynthesis. But they also release some CO2 during respiration as they use the sugars to generate energy for self-maintenance and growth. How elevated CO2 affects plant respiration will therefore influence future food supplies and the extent to which plants can capture CO2 from the air and store it as carbon in their tissues. …
The results were striking. At least 90 different genes coding the majority of enzymes in the cascade of chemical reactions that govern respiration were switched on (expressed) at higher levels in the soybeans grown at high CO2 levels. This explained how the plants were able to use the increased supply of sugars from stimulated photosynthesis under high CO2 conditions to produce energy, Leakey said. The rate of respiration increased 37 percent at the elevated CO2 levels.
The enhanced respiration is likely to support greater transport of sugars from leaves to other growing parts of the plant, including the seeds, Leakey said.
“The expression of over 600 genes was altered by elevated CO2 in total, which will help us to understand how the response is regulated and also hopefully produce crops that will perform better in the future,” he said. … [more]
Note: see also the discussion at Watts Up With That [here]
Taking a Time Machine Ride Back to the 1960s or 1800s?
By Joe D’Aleo, Intellicast.com and ICECAP, February 9, 2009 [here and here]
Note: please visit the links to view the excellent graphs.
There are signs our weather is taking a time machine ride back to the regimes of the 1960s or even the late 1700s early 1800s.
Our climate operates in cycles, which favors different regimes of weather. We have come out of a few decades that thanks to a warm Pacific resulted in a dominance of El Ninos and its typical southern storm tracks and warm, dry western North America.
The Pacific has cooled and now favors La Ninas, which have dominated the last two winters. This has resulted in a more northern storm track (and as we reported in earlier stories), record monthly or seasonal snows.
The Atlantic is cooling too. The AMO has declined from its 2004/05 peak. The sum of the PDO and AMO we have shown correlates well with US annual temperatures.
In earlier reports, we have shown how the solar cycles also have a profound affect on climate. An active sun through direct and indirect factors leads to warming oceans and through them the land, and a quiet sun to cooling of oceans and land.
Longer term the sun is behaving like it did in the late 1700s and early 1800s, leading many to believe we are likely to experience conditions more like the early 1800s (called the Dalton Minimum) in the next few decades. That was a time of cold and snow. It was the time of Charles Dickens and his novels with snow and cold in London.
David Archibald has estimated that if indeed this early 1800s analog is real, a significant cooling is possible.
During these cold modes, more La Nina winters like this occur, El Ninos occasionally develop, and they tend to be briefer and weaker and thus colder and snowier than the El Ninos of the warm eras. If a major volcano occurs, the cold deepens
U.S. intel alerted to threat of ‘Forest Fire Jihad’
World Tribune, Tuesday, January 15, 2008 [here]
U.S. officials monitoring terrorist web sites have discovered a call for using forest fires as weapons against “crusader” nations, in what may explain some recent wildfires in places like southern California and Greece.
A terrorist website was discovered recently that carried a posting that called for “Forest Jihad.” The posting was listed on the Internet on Nov. 26 and reported in U.S. intelligence channels last week.
The statement, in Arabic, said that “summer has begun so do not forget the Forest Jihad.”
The writer called on all Muslims in the United States, Europe, Russia and Australia to “start forest fires.”
Islam group urges forest fire jihad
by Josh Gordon, The Age (Australia), September 7, 2008 [here]
AUSTRALIA has been singled out as a target for “forest jihad” by a group of Islamic extremists urging Muslims to deliberately light bushfires as a weapon of terror.
US intelligence channels earlier this year identified a website calling on Muslims in Australia, the US, Europe and Russia to “start forest fires”, claiming “scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels’ forests when they do the same to our lands”.
The website, posted by a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network, argues in Arabic that lighting fires is an effective form of terrorism justified in Islamic law under the “eye for an eye” doctrine.
The posting — which instructs jihadis to remember “forest jihad” in summer months — says fires cause economic damage and pollution, tie up security agencies and can take months to extinguish so that “this terror will haunt them for an extended period of time”.
“Imagine if, after all the losses caused by such an event, a jihadist organisation were to claim responsibility for the forest fires,” the website says. “You can hardly begin to imagine the level of fear that would take hold of people in the United States, in Europe, in Russia and in Australia.”
With the nation heading into another hot, dry summer, Australian intelligence agencies are treating the possibility that bushfires could be used as a weapon of terrorism as a serious concern. … [more]
Fire plans no help in killer Victorian bushfires
News.com.AU, Feb. 9, 2009 [here]
VICTORIA’S Premier John Brumby said the state may need to review its bushfire policy of “stay and defend or leave early” in light of the appalling death toll from the bushfire disaster.
Mr Brumby said the Government would this week initiate a royal commission into the Victorian bushfires and the lead-up to them. “It will look at everything,” his spokesman said this afternoon.
He said the Government and authorities’ long-standing approach of advising people to have a bushfire plan ready to either stay to defend their homes or leave well before the fire became a threat had in many cases not saved people at the weekend.
“I think when the time comes to examine in-depth all of the issues that occurred on Saturday, obviously fire policy will be one of those areas,” Mr Brumby told Fairfax Radio Network.
“People will want to review that, examine that, it may be right, it may not be. It’s served us well for 20 years or more - that is, if you decide to leave, leave early and if you decide to stay make sure you’ve got a fire plan.
“But there is no question that there were, you will talk to them there at Whittlesea, there is no question that there were people there who did everything right, put in place their fire plan and it wouldn’t matter, their house was just incinerated.”
Mr Brumby said in the Boolarra fires at Gippsland last week, everybody who had stayed to defend their homes with a fire plan had saved their homes and survived.
“It’s not true to say that of the fire on Saturday. There were many people who had done all of the preparations, had the best fire plans in the world and tragically it didn’t save them.”
He had spoken to one couple from Kinglake who were ready to defend their home but had to flee at the last moment, saving their family but losing their house.
“They put their fire plan in place, they did everything right, 30 metres of grass, water in spouts, everything, and they were going to save their house and they said it just came over, like a sun almost, a fireball just came over.
“Their kitchen just exploded and they left in the car and miraculously they survived.
“But how else do you describe that, it is, it’s like hell on earth.”
Australian Fire Death Toll May Reach 230
131 people dead, 750 homes destroyed in worst bushfires in Australia’s history
News.com.AU, Feb. 9, 2009 [here]
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd said arsonists in Victoria had committed mass murder as the death toll in Australia’s worst ever bushfires rose to 131 this afternoon, with the final toll expected to be much more.
Authorities are being warned to expect a toll of 230, The Australian quoted sources inside state emergency meetings as saying.
Fires were still burning out of control and putting towns at risk in the Beechworth and Yackandandah regions in the state’s northeast. Shortly after 4pm (AEDT) a third town, Toolangai, was also put on alert.
Amid speculation some of the fires were deliberately lit - and with reports yesterday that people were returning to relight blazes after fire crews had left an area - Mr Rudd said: “There are no words to describe it other than mass murder.”
At least 750 homes have been destroyed and 3733 people have registered with the Red Cross after evacuating their properties. The number left homeless is expected to be far higher, the Red Cross said.
It was confirmed that at least four children have died, but that figure would also be expected to rise as full details emerged.
A two-year-old girl was among 13 in intensive care in hospital. Twenty-two people with shocking burns were admitted to the Alfred hospital, the state’s main trauma centre, where staff ran out of morphine trying to ease patients’ pain.
Most of the damage was done by two massive fires - one that virtually wiped out towns northeast of Melbourne including Kinglake and Marysville with a 100km front - and a second inferno that raced across Gippsland. … [more]
Large gallery of fire pics [here]