There’s been a lot of noise coming from “climate science” regarding the fires in Australia. Recently, in an act of desperation, Facebook flagged one of my Facebook posts from Breitbart about the Australian fires as being false:

The Breitbart article said:

But the desperate academic clods over at “Climatefeedback” would have none of it, promptly flagging the article as false.

Note the pea and the thimble here.

They scope of the fires was related to arson, pure and simple. Lightning also contributed. These are indisputable facts. CO2 molecules didn’t run around starting fires. The best they could claim is that the fires started by arson and lightning might have spread faster due to a dry fuel load.

Climatefeedback didn’t actually dispute that the fires weren’t started by Arsonists or lightning, they just chose to flag it so they could inject the climate change narrative:

But here’s the thing, and there’s no getting around this. In the key take-away they cite the year as the “driest on record” while also mentioning “dry and windy weather patterns”. As anybody knows, a weather event is not climate, and a year’s worth of weather is not climate.

It’s an epic fail by the supposed climate experts at Climatefeedback. If the tables were turned, and an article was citing a year of cold weather, and a cold weather event, they’d dismiss it with the wave of hand saying “weather is not climate”.

Unless of course, weather events support “the cause”.

Then there’s the data from Australia’s BoM. Rainfall over the past 60 years has been wetter.

From Dr. Roy Spencer:

To drive home the point that any given year should not be used as evidence of a long-term trend, Australia precipitation provides an excellent example. The following plot is like the temperature plot above (Fig. 2), but now for precipitation as reported by the BOM (data here).

While it is certainly true that 2019 was the driest year in Australia since 1900, likely caused by extended La Nina conditions in the Pacific, they can’t pin it on climate change caused drought, because climate is a 30 year average, and because we’ve been told repeatedly that “weather is not climate“.

Then there’s this summary from Dr. Roy Spencer:

Summary Points

1) Global wildfire activity has decreased in recent decades, making any localized increase (or decrease) in wildfire activity difficult to attribute to ‘global climate change’.

2) Like California, Australia is prone to bushfires every year during the dry season. Ample fuel and dry weather exists for devastating fires each year, even without excessive heat or drought, as illustrated by the record number of hectares burned (over 100 million) during 1974-75 when above-average precipitation and below-average temperatures existed.

3) Australian average temperatures in 2019 were well above what global warming theory can explain, illustrating the importance of natural year-to-year variability in weather patterns (e.g. drought and excessively high temperatures).

4) Australia precipitation was at a record low in 2019, but climate models predict no long-term trend in Australia precipitation, while the observed trend has been upward, not downward. This again highlights the importance of natural climate variability to fire weather conditions, as opposed to human-induced climate change.

5) While reductions in prescribed burning have probably contributed to the irregular increase in the number of years with large bush fires, a five-fold increase in population in the last 100 years has greatly increased potential ignition sources, both accidental and purposeful.

In summary, Climatefeedback is either ignorant, incompetent, or flat-out lied to support the narrative that “climate change” has it’s fingerprint on everything. As I’ve said repeatedly, it has become the universal boogeyman.

Alas, to be politically correct in attributing cause in the future, Josh has created this handy quiz: