The dangers of climate denial

As the blame game for Australia’s bushfires begins, truth is fading into the background. Speaking on Sydney radio on Friday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said: “There has been a lot of misinformation running around, that’s been very disappointing. People have been looking to make political points in many cases, that’s disappointing.”

Arguably adding to the misinformation — and the politicisation of a national catastrophe — he added: “The suggestion that there’s any one emissions reduction policy or climate policy that has contributed to any of these fire events is just ridiculous, the conflation of those two things, I think, has been very disappointing.”

Morrison’s conservative Liberal Party had been criticised for its lack of action on climate change long before the bushfire season took hold. Last year was Australia’s hottest on record, and the country’s carbon emissions were the highest ever. Yet the government approved construction of Australia’s largest coal mine. Coupled with a reduction in funding for firefighting services and infrastructure, and refusal to even meet with emergency and fire chiefs to discuss the impending threat of climate change, Australia did not head into this bushfire season equipped with the policies to cope.

Morrison’s assertion that ineffective climate policy and the current disaster are unconnected isn’t the only untruth.

One of the first erroneous claims to surface amid the ash is that “greenies” are in part responsible for the severity of the fires because of their alleged resistance to hazard reduction burns — these are controlled fires, which are purposely set in order to burn away potentially hazardous material before the start of the bushfire season. Among those flying the flag for this conspiracy is the Volunteer Fire Fighters Association. An article on their website from March last year was clear: “The real culprit is green ideology which opposes the necessary hazard reduction of fuel loads in national parks and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation around their homes.”

Similarly, former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said on television last Wednesday: “There are too many caveats that have been placed on people, let’s call them ‘green caveats’, that impede people’s capacities to fight fires.”

Professor Ross Bradstock, Director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, told the Guardian Australia early in the fire season: “It’s simply conspiracy stuff. It’s an obvious attempt to deflect the conversation away from climate change.”

New South Wales Rural Fire Service commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons clarified on Wednesday: “Hazard reduction burning is really challenging, and the single biggest impediment to hazard reduction burning is the weather.

“And with longer fire seasons, earlier starts and later finishes to fire seasons like we’ve been experiencing in recent times, you get a shrinking window of opportunity for more favourable hazard reduction burning periods.”

Similarly, former Fire and Rescue New South Wales commissioner Greg Mullins had explained in November that it was the hotter and drier conditions that were inhibiting hazard reduction burns. “Blaming ‘greenies’ for stopping these important measures is a familiar, populist, but basically untrue claim,” he said.

A second claim is that arsonists, and not climate change, are responsible for the severity of the fires. Tragically, arson does play a role in Australia’s fire season, however, the number of arson arrests has been greatly exaggerated. On Wednesday, Rupert Murdoch’s the Australian newspaper lead with the headline: “Firebugs fuelling crisis as national arson arrest toll hits 183.” When tweeted by Donald Trump Jr, it was accepted as an alt-right fact.

After criticism, the article was amended to state that the arrests were for all of 2019 and not the current fire season, as the paper had originally claimed. Further examination brings the figure into further disrepute. It includes no Victorian data from the current fire season, just the year prior. Out of the 183, 101 are from Queensland, though this number is not arrests, but rather police enforcement actions for a broad range of offences beyond just arson. At the time the article was published, in New South Wales, 24 people had been arrested .

Arson is a disgrace, but so is climate change denial.

The fire coverage by Murdoch’s News Corp and its standard-bearing national broadsheet the Australian drew the attention of the New York Times on Wednesday. It noted that the Murdoch press had been pushing the two false claims outlined above. Murdoch-controlled media had “also repeatedly argued that this year’s fires are no worse than those of the past — not true, scientists say, noting that 12 million acres have burned so far, with 2019 alone scorching more of New South Wales than the previous 15 years combined”.

For the New York Times, this was a continuation of the Murdoch media’s efforts, also deployed in the United States and Britain, to “shift blame to the left, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change”.

On Friday, News Corp was attacked from within, when a senior employee sent an all-staff email addressed to the executive chairman Michael Miller. “I have been severely impacted by the coverage of News Corp publications in relation to the fires,” the employee wrote. “In particular the misinformation campaign that has tried to divert attention away from the real issue which is climate change to rather focus on arson (including misrepresenting facts).

“I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies. The reporting I have witnessed in the Australian, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun is not only irresponsible, but dangerous and damaging to our communities and beautiful planet that needs us more than ever now to acknowledge the destruction we have caused and start doing something about it.”

The greatest misinformation is the simplest: that climate change is not a factor in the current crisis. What is not misinformation is that 28 people are dead, 2,000 homes are lost, 10 million hectares are burnt, 1,000,000,000 — that’s one billion — animals have been killed, several species are extinct, and yet still people doubt climate change.