Submitted by MistWeaver80 t3_z1vjgq in science
Where I live in Australia we haven't had one of those stinking hot summers we used to have for years. On the other hand, I haven't seen frost in winter for years either.
Didn't most of Australia just burn over a couple of years ago from everything being dry and billions of animals gone?
Australia's land area is about 770 million hectares. What burned in 2019-20 was about 17 million hectares.
Its a lot. But not even close to a majority. It's hard to imagine what that would be like, especially given how little of Australia's land is actually colonized with humans.
With 2/3 desert that is unlikely to burn the percentage is much higher.
That doesn't change the number in any way
Of course it does. Take it as a percentage of the forests, not the grassy plains and deserts.
125 million hectares of forest total. 24 million hectares burned in 2019/2020 fires.
A much bigger deal than mr “only 2 percent of the desert caught fire” that you are replying to.
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Oh are we just throwing away data to make the results look better? Sure thing then!
"A couple years ago, 100% of Australia burned*"
^(* = measurement includes only areas that caught on fire)
Take an example island that has 100 acres. 80 acres are baren desert and literally can't catch fire, the remaining 20 acres are forest. 10 of those acres catch fire.
Are you doing the destruction justice by saying just 10% of the island burned? Wouldn't saying "50% of the island that is flammable burned" more representative of the destruction?
Yes but see, you included the words "that is flammable" and reduced ambiguity. If you were the OP you would have said "50% of the island was on fire".
Do you see the difference?
Don't be infantile. Both statements are correct, but the way you're presenting the data can be misleading and is generally less useful. When considering burned areas, what matters is what can burn.
At least my way is clearly disingenuous and might cause someone to question the statement. His "most of Australia burned" statement is just believable enough to promulgate false information and result in someone believing that most of the land mass was on fire when that's obviously not true.
If he didn't want to be misleading he could have easily done so by adding a few more words to his statement.
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We can do better than that.
"A couple of years ago, 200% of Australia burned.*"
Australias land area is also 90% desert. How many percentages of australian forest burned would be a better measure.
It isnt. Australia is less than. 20% desert. They landmass has nearly the same amount of forests as it does deserts. Yall have weird understandings of Australia.
Australia government says it has 16% landmass of forests https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/forestsaustralia/profiles/australias-forests-2016
about 35% of the Australian continent receives so little rain, it is practically desert
https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/landforms/deserts
Yes, and again, even still less than 1% of the forested area burned during the time we are talking about. I'm not sure why you are trying to be argumentative about this.
What im trying to say is that burned forest compared to total landmass is bad measure and should be compared to total forest mass.
And I'm saying even compared to just forest area (not sure how to calculate mass of forests burned) its still like 1% of the area that was burned.
So even when you ignore about 80% of the country, about 1% was on fire.
Its so incredibly far from being anywhere near a majority.
I'm not going to respond to you anymore.
Then thats what you should have been saying in the beginning. Also i think you are mixing me up with someone else, because i never said a majority was on fire.
You're literally jumping into a thread about that specific thing. I think you are perhaps mixed up about what is happening here.
Yes. 2019-2020 summer was brutal and this was the bushfire season that got the worlds attention due to literally everything being on fire. However shortly after the bushfires we've had 3 consecutive La Nina weather cycles meaning since Feb 2020 we've basically had above average rainfall and a lot of flooding.
Not most and I don't think it was billions.
Australia has been part of the Great Southern Oscillation for ever. We're in the La Niña cycle right now and the West Coast of the US is in El Niño.
Those fires were at the end of a cyclic long drought and were ended by rains and flooding.
Is this the earth starting with them because of all the industrialization? We’re all next.
Doom-posting and 'We deserve it' rhetoric does nothing to solve the problem, and in fact feeds into denialist positions by essentially encouraging people to give up.
It was just a joke, no doom posting.
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