I've seen this link pop up as a meme on conservative reddit forums for the past month, but with additional text using it to dismiss climate change.

Keep in mind, Australia is huge and has different climates.

While this isn't the biggest fire of all Australia, it is the biggest fire of that region in history by ~10x (according to that wikipedia link).

This is highly unusual.

And as a result of being in populated areas, it has done the most dollars of damage of any fire. This is what climate change advocates are pointing to: increased fires in areas that normally do not have them.

Also look at the history for that page. There are frequent updates/changes and later reversions to some of these numbers. Take the measurements with a grain of salt as people edit to prove a narrative.

An account with no posting history and you're pushing an anti-climate change narrative?

Wouldn't the same thing happen if new information comes in about a changing situation?

This is historically different because severe fire weather started early in spring. The dry hottest summer months are still ahead. I'm not sure how long this will go on?

Previous severe big bushfires started much later:

infographic: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/ECEF/production/...

article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50951043

Australia's summer is from December to February.

The current bushfire season started 5 September. Very early.

January and February are the hottest. December and March have similar temperatures. The seasonal weather and sea temperatures have delay relative to sun.

February is hot as hell here in Sydney. There's a long, likely dry spell to come. Any analysis of how bad the fires are historically should compare hectares burned "to this date" not "in total".

As an anecdote.. We live in Sydney. My wife was talking to her father who was being evacuated from his town in Northern California due to fire. We could smell smoke in Sydney already, despite being in the opposite season.

Bushfires are a natural part of the ecosystem in Australia. Many plants are adapted specifically to survive and thrive after bushfire conditions. However, bushfires on this scale is somewhat unprecedented.

It's a bit like 5 hurricanes hitting Florida in one summer. Aren't hurricanes normal in Florida?

I'm reading that last question as irony, experience suggests others will read it as an un-ironic rhetorical question.

So while recognising, what I believe is you're ironic phrasing, I'm addressing what I think will be the un-ironic reading others will take, you good with that.

Yes fire is a normal part of Australian ecosystems, and it is unknown whether this spread with Eucalyptus trees or whether Eucalyptus trees spread with humans using fire.

But :

The Australian climate is getting hotter:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/aus/summary.shtm...

'The national December mean temperature, 3.21 °C above average, surpassed the previous December record set in 2018 by more than a full degree.'

British conquest and subsequent settlement has ended traditional indigenous fire practices in most part of the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming

Which means that the fuel load are not reduced by smaller cooler burns below levels that would feed a catastrophic fires.

https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/bushfir...

Partisan politics has made it very difficult for many Australians to look directly at these topics. So while fire, is a terrifying but not unexpected feature of living in Australia, the scale of this year's fires are a unique horror that I believe will push enough Australians to engage with that difficulty.

I think we are going to see fast significant shifts in political discussion from this, that both the emotive calls to action, and populist denials or diminishment will we perceived as a distraction from direct sober engagement of an existential threat.

( As I first typed this I accidentally capitalised that as Australian Ecosystems, because I once worked for a company by that name that did environmental work, including controlled burning)

> It's a bit like 5 hurricanes hitting Florida in one summer. Aren't hurricanes normal in Florida?

Except if 3 of those hurricanes arrived before hurricane season.

... in NewYork.

The gum tree or Eucalyptus tree of Australia is an example of a plant that needs bushfires to propagate. The seeds are normally sealed by a resin that must be melted by fire to allow them to sprout. Eucalyptus trees make up most of Australia's forests [1].

Other examples of Australian plants that are adapted to bushfires to the degree that they require them to propagate are found in the genus Banksia [2]. Together with the genus Eucalyptus they comprise hundreds of plant species[3]. These aren't the only pyrophytic plants[3] that require fires. For example, Melaleuca quinquenervia is another pyrophytic plant of Australia [4].

Wikipedia says this of the Eucalyptus:

> Most species of Eucalyptus are native to Australia, and every state and territory has representative species. About three-quarters of Australian forests are eucalypt forests. Wildfire is a feature of the Australian landscape and many eucalypt species are adapted to fire, and resprout after fire or have seeds which survive fire.

Eucalyptus trees survive fire so they can be classified as a pyrophytic plant; they benefit from fires that destroy competitive plants. The Giant Sequoia trees of the US also survive fires and are are considered pyrophytes. However some plants are considered to be active pyrophtes because they encourage fires or the spread of fires. The Eucalyptus is an active pyrophyte because it produces inflammable oils.

The carniverous Byblis genus of plants and cogongrass are other examples of fire adapted plants found in Australia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksia

[3] https://www.britannica.com/list/5-amazing-adaptations-of-pyr...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melaleuca_quinquenervia

Two things to note when looking at that list:

1. Bushfires may be more frequent in some parts of Australia than others. So two bushfires of equal size, but occuring in different regions, may not necessarily be equally common.

2. The list on Wikipedia is referring to final surface burned, after the fire is contained, or has burned out. However the 1.5M Acre figure mentioned here seems to be only the current surface burned - presumably it will continue to expand and burn more.

Keep in mind the article is talking about individual fires rather than the all the fires going on simultaneously. So far 26M acres have burned in this season and in populated areas unlike most other bushfires.

Exactly: the combination of size and proximity to populated areas makes this unusual. Unbelievably there was a bushfire in 1974/75 Central Australia which consumed ~117M hectares yet went UNNOTICED until after it burned out.

Unnoticed by whom?

The mega bush fire was much larger and 50 years ago and therefore could not have been validation of a climate change feedback loop.

So today's fires are weak ammunition for reallocations of public resources towards climate change efforts, compared to existing arguments that can't gain consensus. I can see how it isn't budging consensus.

edit: removed bad news regarding arson

It takes one exceptionally dedicated team of super-arsonists to burn a million hectares of cold wet forest. Such a thing has never occurred in history.

Weather patterns (hot and dry summer) create the conditions for a fire, an arsonist merely provides the ignition source. In the right conditions a single errant spark from a power tool can set off a giant bushfire. Or an arsonist with a single match.

Do you have a reliable source for the claim that “many of today’s Australia fires are arson”?

Well as I looked it up all of today's headlines are refuting prior days headlines about arson. So now I'm synced up.

These headlines were only ever in dodgy conservative media sources (generally conflating people being warned for campfires, BBQs and angle grinders outside with "arsonists deliberately setting fires"). You should check the ownership of the news sources you previously used and stop reading them.

  24 people have been charged over alleged deliberately-lit bushfires
  53 people have had legal actions for allegedly failing to comply with a total fire ban, and
  47 people have had legal actions for allegedly discarding a lighted cigarette or match on land.

https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/news/news_article?sq_content_s...

Source: NSW police official website

That sounds about right - but the bits of the media with a vested interest in portraying this as an unusual arson wave have been saying 180+ people arrested for lighting bushfires.

This police report only notes 24 arrests for alleged arson, not which fires were set, how big they got or whether this was unusual. It could well be that this is a typical (or small or large) arrest haul and that the fires involved were easily controlled or small. What we can tell with certainty is that NSW is only one state and so this report doesn't say anything at all about fire ignition sources in the other states: WA, NT, Vic, SA, Qld.

A reasonable assumption might be that fires in unpopulated areas in central Australia were probably not arson (no people there to set them) and these are the largest fires (no people there to fight them).

But rather early for any broad conclusions. All we can say is - there's been some arson but we lack the context or details to really understand the relative importance. Currently arson doesn't seem like a major factor and it is probably over represented in densely populated NSW relative to the rest of the country.

I would say there's little evidence to support a hypothesis of an "unusual arson wave".

That's right.

The authorities (don't know if this is RFS or police in this case) seem to pretty confidently attribute fires to causes for the most part. The percentage attributed to arson is lowish but disturbing (20%?).

I imagine lightning strikes and ember spread from existing fires are fairly easy to diagnose. I'm not sure how you tell "fires spread from sparks from roadway incidents" from "arson" but I'm not an expert.