Australia’s Black Summer Wildfires Herald a New Ice Age, Says Fire Historian

The unusual nature of Australia’s Black Summer wildfires may have ushered in a new fire-fueled “ice age” and the world appears to have “crossed a threshold” into a more dangerous future, says a world fire historian. .

Emeritus Professor Stephen Pyne of Arizona State University is a former United States firefighter who has studied the Australian fires for his 1991 book Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia.

Pyne said the 2019/2020 fires, which ravaged between 24 and 40 million hectares of brush in several states and territories, marked the beginning of a global year of fires.

“I think there will be a legacy because the fires were not limited to Australia, they continued to ravage the western United States, they were in Europe and Siberia.”

Pyne said the scale of the Black Summer fires made them different from the fires of previous years.

“While none of the individual fires in Australia or elsewhere were unprecedented, I think the scale was different because they came as a swarm.”

Previously, Pyne thought that the Black Saturday fires, which took the lives of 173 people in Victoria in 2009, had set the limit on what a single fire could do, but last year’s fire season turned into months of sustained burning.

“What made the fires different in general was the large-scale swarm effect. They weren’t discrete outbreaks for two or three days, they continued.

“I think of it as a ‘rolling thunder effect’. When they come sequentially like this, it just keeps building.”

Pyne said California has also been a spectacular example of this, with the state experiencing its fourth consecutive year of historic fires.

He said that not all fires had the same causes, the fires in the Amazon were also associated with land clearing, and those in Indonesia were related to the drainage of tropical peatlands.

“But everywhere the fires seem to be a manifestation of the breakdown of humanity’s relationship with the natural world,” he said.

“I think we have potentially crossed a threshold this year.”

A NEW ‘AGE OF FIRE’

Pyne believes that the way humans have managed natural landscapes, combined with the way fossil fuels have been treated, may have ushered in a new “ice age”.

“We are taking things out of our geological past and burning them without understanding the effects, and this is being released in our future.”

He said the growing ferocity of the fires was a manifestation of these activities, which are also changing sea levels and causing widespread extinctions of plants and animals.

“We are reshaping the planet directly and indirectly.”

In the same way that ice was seen as the physical manifestation of changes in Earth’s temperatures during the Pleistocene era, fire can become the manifestation of a new era that Pyne calls the Pyrocene era.

“For the Australian fires, it turns out that they were the leader of an extraordinary global fire year, and can also be taken as an undeniable marker of what I am considering as our new era of fire.”

Pyne believes that smoke from the fires, which darkened cities like Sydney and Canberra for days, may finally make people aware of what is happening around them, much like dust storms in the decade of 1930 spurred action on America’s Dust Bowls.

He said that action on agricultural practices began when Washington DC began to feel the effects of massive dust storms that traveled from central areas of the US.

“This changed the discourse and it suddenly became a national problem. It gave more urgency to many conservation programs and made the problem visible to the people and Congress.”

“My feeling is that the smoke will do that with this last year’s fire.

“It makes the visibility of impacts apparent to a wider audience and that could lead to change.”

Smoke from the Australian fires made its way to New Zealand and reportedly other areas of the world, while smoke from the US fires traveled to places that people thought were immune to fire, which makes it a public health problem that has not been before.

“I think people have a high tolerance for images of flames; they are dramatic but limited to particular places, but smoke can travel widely,” Pyne said.

In this way, the Black Summer fires could have an even more lasting impact.

“I’m tempted to think they are historic fires, but they can also end up being epic fires depending on our response.

Pyne said that fire was in our future no matter what we did.

“We have to control the compulsive burning of fossil fuels, but even once this stabilizes or is reversed, there will still be a lot of fires and we will have to do much more than we have historically done.

“They are not going to leave … we have a great debt and we also have to put a lot of fire back into the environment.

“Even if we reduce the burning of fossil fuels and mark our actions on climate change, there will be a lot of fire in our future.

“It can be wild or devastating, or it can be controlled a bit and pay off.

“But it’s not going away.”

With the United States still grappling with the aftermath of the presidential election, which Donald Trump has still refused to admit, Pyne said Australia was better positioned to take action.

“You really are on the front lines of this, you are well equipped with world-class fire science and wildfire fighting capabilities,” he said.

“I am hopeful that Australia can make a move and begin to respond in an engaged and informed way, in a way that the United States and even Canada cannot.

“This is something that Australia can really take the lead in, it can get involved with scenery and fire, and the cultural discussion is an interesting part of that too.

Pyne said it wasn’t just about doing one big thing to solve climate change and fix the problem, there were a lot of little things that can be done too, and these actions can be different in different areas.

“We need to decide what the problem is in each particular place and what set of treatments makes sense there.”