Sure, but that needn't connote Australia waiting for everyone else. Given our extreme vulnerability to climate change (on most accounts, we're one of the worst-placed wealthy nations), our government should be fighting like hell on every possible international front for the strongest possible action.
Our current government won't really even try, for extrinsic reasons; but even if it wanted to, it couldn't. Our piss-weak policies and decadal political sclerosis make us a laughing stock in the relevant international forums. This has only recently become apparent, as there's a lot of momentum in international affairs, and Australia did have a decent stock of political capital. But it's well and truly depleted now, at least in this area. Only serious domestic action on emissions can get our federal government positioned to actually do its job and make all possible efforts to protect the nation.
If Australia and the USA both came to their senses then climate action would very much happen.
China could also take the lead here; it's actually surprising that they aren't because it's an ideal opportunity for them to project power on a global scale and an important step in their replacing the USA as the global super power.
Climate action does not project power or offer an economic return. It's pretty much guaranteed to be the opposite - forgoing an opportunity or building things at your expense in order to not disadvantage the rest of the world.
That's not guaranteed to be true. Leading the way on fostering new cleantech is a way to get ahead of the same cleantech industries elsewhere. The question is really how good can the timing be rather than if it's going to happen.
Australia does export a lot of coal. If they stopped doing that the price would probably rise a bit. AFAIK many coal plants are already barely profitable.
> Hopefully the Australian government wakes up to the climate crisis
It's very hard to imagine, given the current crew. They're pretty hard core on the motivated reasoning front. And they've moved from outright denial to a more nuanced accept-but-deflect position, which could go on for years with nothing meaningful happening.
Expect little before the next federal election (2022).
For sure - Australian politics at all levels has long been deeply corrupted by the mining & real estate industries. In that respect we're probably not very different from many other semi-democracies. Though the Australian voting population is notably easy to scare, and tends to be unthinkingly obedient to authority (larrikins, my arse).
do we even have proof its due to climate crisis. eucalyptus is highly flammable, tourism increases, im pretty sure fires can start from some foil paper on the floor in those regions. also like the aboriginal australian use to do, you need to clean the bush and forests. we should focus our efforts onto that rather than talking about a philosophical "climate crisis" that wipes out concrete efforts that governements can lead to protect their forests.
Ignition sources are pretty much a constant so don't remotely explain a truly dramatic rise in the extent and ferocity of forest fires. Eucalyptus has been flammable for millennia. Tasmania and Queensland have seen fires in forests and forest types (rainforest!) that literally haven't burned for thousands of years. The RFS is having to redraw its boundary maps because longstanding firebreak forests are no longer firebreaks. What were permanently wet forests are now dry. My local council is having to rethink housing planning permissions because longstanding truths about which vegetation types are safe to build around are themselves going up in flames.
As for hazard reduction burns, these have been on the increase for years. The rate of increase has been hard to sustain, because the fire season has been rapidly extending, and reducing the windows of opportunity for burning. There's certainly scope to draw on indigenous understanding of cool burns, but that's not something that is likely to happen quickly at scale.
Simplistic notions of 'proof' are no more pertinent to assessing the evidence on the relationship between climate collapse and forest fires than they were with lung cancer and smoking. These are complex systems we're talking about. We just have to assess prior scientific knowledge and multiple lines of empirical evidence as best we can. University-based research, the CSIRO, and relevant on-the-ground forest management and firefighting agencies have been predicting an increase in forest fires consequent on expected climate change patterns in Australia for many years. This has now come to pass. If people have alternative explanations, these would be bolstered by, preferably, pointing out where they similarly predicted the increase in forest fires, and then making their predictions for what will happen in the coming decades.
This is not something that can be proven, the correlations are too complex and you have n=1.
You can predict that probably statistically you'll see changing patterns of precipitation with changing climate leading to dryer woods, but whether that correlation holds is only clear with observed statistics, and whether that specific instance is connected can only be quantified probabilistically.
Do you want to wait until we're reasonably sure that this specific issue is connected, let alone all the other things bound to happen? (Some more probable than others.) By then it'll be too late to roll it back or do anything but keep it from getting worse in a meaningful way.
The point that we can revisit forest management practices regardless of climate change still holds though. While yes we may be seeing more fires due to climate change, we also may be able to make it less of a problem in the short term. And doing that doesn't take off the table doing something about climate change, so why not?
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