If you've been following the bushfire crisis on social media and elsewhere, you may have seen reports of benevolent wombats herding other animals to shelter into their fire-proof burrows.

These stories went quickly viral, probably reflecting the appetite for good news after the horrors of the bushfire crisis.

However the accounts are not entirely accurate.

Wombats do not heroically round up helpless animals during a bushfire and lead them to safety. But wombats do help other animals in a different way, even if it's not their intention.

Wombats can emerge as accidental heroes during a bushfire, by providing a safe refuge underground for other wildlife.

Wombat warrens, networks of interconnecting burrows, are large and complex, and considerably shielded from the above-ground environment. Small mammals are known to use wombat burrows to survive an inferno.

One study of the southern hairy-nosed wombat, for instance, found warrens with 28 entrances and nearly 90 metres of tunnels.

What's more, temperatures deep within burrows are very stable compared to surface temperatures, with daily temperature fluctuations of less than 1 degree Celsius, compared to 24 degrees on the surface.

This thermal buffering would help a great deal during intense fires, and you can understand why other species would want access to these safe havens.

By placing camera traps outside 34 wombat burrows, a 2015 study showed a surprising variety of animals using southern hairy-nosed wombat burrows. 

Researchers observed ten other species, six of which used them on multiple occasions.

The intruders ranged from rock wallabies and bettongs to skinks and birds. Little penguins were recorded using burrows 27 times, while the black-footed rock wallaby was observed using wombat burrows more often than wombats, visiting nearly 2,000 times in eight weeks. 

They were even observed using the burrows to specifically avoid birds of prey.

But wombats aren't alone in providing real estate for other species. 

Hopping mice, echidnas, sand swimming skinks, barking geckoes and numerous invertebrates were found using the warrens of bettongs and bilbies in arid Australia.

It's also important to recognise wombats don't have "a burrow". Rather, they have multiple burrows within their home range. 

In fact, a 2012 study tracked one wombat to 14 different burrows.

While wombats are often regarded as quite sedentary, another study found the average home range size of common wombats is 172 hectares.

They spend a few nights sleeping in one burrow, before moving onto another.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-15/australian-bushfires-wombat-heroe...

Some farmers hate wombats, because of the damn holes in the paddocks where cattle can break a leg and so forth...

Celebrities and posturing greenies the world over have seized the opportunity of Australia’s bushfire catastrophe to push the dangerous myth that climate change is to blame.

“When one country faces a climate disaster, we all face a climate disaster,” Cate Blanchett declared at the Golden Globes on Sunday.

“Make no mistake. The tragedy unfolding in Australia is climate change-based,” said Russell Crowe.

“Australia is on fire,” tweeted teenage climate evangelist Greta Thunberg, decrying the lack of “political action [to combat] the climate crisis.”

“Australia is committing climate suicide,” ran the headline in the New York Times.

I’m sorry, but I lived in Australia through the past two decades of escalating fire crises and it’s not climate change that has caused today’s disaster, but the criminal negligence of governments that have tried to buy green votes by locking up vast tracts of land as national parks, yet failed to spend the money needed to control ground fuel and maintain fire trails.

Instead, they bowed to an ideology that obstructs necessary hazard reduction and prevents landowners from clearing vegetation around their own properties, all in thrall to the god of “biodiversity.”

How’s that biodiversity now on incinerated land sterilized of all life forms?

I’ve interviewed local volunteer firefighters who bitterly recounted the bureaucratic obstruction they faced in performing prescribed burns in the offseason to prevent uncontrollable summer conflagrations.

One of my guides was Australia’s foremost bushfire researcher, Dr. Phil Cheney, who has spent 30 years trying to convince authorities that if ground fuel is reduced in a scientific, systematic fashion every year, fire intensity is reduced to a manageable level, no matter what the weather conditions. A quadrupling of ground fuel means a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire. Hazard reduction won’t prevent fire but it will reduce its intensity so that it can be controlled.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/01/08/celebrities-activists-using-australia-bush...

How many times will we have to say that "hazard reduction" isn't a universal solution to all the problem of bushfires? But the Murdoch babe is still on to it, and she adds to the controversy of the arguments with nonsense:

So whether or not you believe the most dire predictions of climate alarmists makes no difference. We can’t dial down the Earth’s temperature any more than we can lock up every teenage arsonist.

The only practical way to prevent unmanageable fires is to reduce the one variable we control: ground fuel.

Well spotted, but HAZARD REDUCTION had been performed in many areas that also got badly burnt. Many fields of grasses burned down, In some areas there was nothing to burn on the ground, yet the trees went up like roman candle... Why?

One of the scientific argument of global warming is that it changes the patterns of weather. Australia had a long drought, no rain to speak of, for a long time. First, winters were too warm and there was not enough water to control burning of forests (some of the back-burning — "hazard reduction" — went wild). Second, most of traditional Aboriginal people fires would have been performed in the open plains, not so much in the wooded forests — forest that were full of undergrowth and bushes, considering they were impenetrable to the early settlers. Some forests had not burned for 5 million years as far a we know.

Climate change has warmed Australia in 2019, by an extra 1.52 degree Celsius on the new average (which does not included the cooler years prior WW2). Since late September 2019, the average daily temperature would have been more than 3 degrees above the said average till about mid-January, when we finally got some rain. Since October, several hot "bubbles" from west to east over the continent, followed each others. To have heat reaching 48.9 degrees Celsius (120º Fahrenheit) in the Sydney suburb of Penrith, beating the previous record by nearly 2 degrees ISN'T NORMAL, whether you do backburning or not. THINGS AREN'T NORMAL — WHETHER YOU BURN THE FOREST in hazard reduction IN WINTER OR NOT.  MIRANDA, THE HEAT WASN'T NORMAL... THE SUPER-DRY DROUGHT WAS NOT EVEN NORMAL AS FAR AS DROUGHT GOES. The winds were not normal either as they kept shifting, TURNING THE BLAZES AROUND.

One day, you will awaken from your set views and EUREKA: global warming is a fact...

And you saying "We can’t dial down the Earth’s temperature any more than we can lock up every teenage arsonist." IS RUBBISH. DIALLING DOWN (reducing) THE INCREASE IN EARTH TEMPERATURE CAN BE DONE BY CO2 EMISSION REDUCTIONS... And yes, there will always be young (and old) arsonists, the biggest of them being all the denialists of global warming — those people who are hell-bent in preventing proper SOLUTIONS to prevent a bigger catastrophe than the one we will be facing soon. 

Have a nice day...

Donald Trump is the world’s “leading climate denier”, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has said.

Turnbull, who lost the prime ministership in August 2018 in part because of his own party’s opposition to his plans to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, made the comments to BBC Newsnight on Tuesday (Wednesday morning, Australian time).

The US president told the world’s business leaders to stop listening to “prophets of doom” as he used a keynote speech at the World Economic Forum to attack the teenage activist Greta Thunberg over her climate crisis warnings.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/22/former-australian-pm-mal...

Pity you weren't so vocal about this when at the head of the Moronic Party. Pity you also destroyed Australia's chance to have the best broadband in the world... A few mea culpas would not go astray...

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Australian PM Scott Morrison has been accused of lacking leadership during the bushfire crisis - by the man he replaced after a party room coup. 

Malcolm Turnbull, who was deposed in 2018, told the BBC that Mr Morrison had misled the country by "downplaying" the influence of global warming.

Mr Morrison apologised last month for taking a US holiday amid the fires. He has insisted his policies are adequate.

But Mr Turnbull said he "cannot explain" his successor's approach.

In a wide-ranging interview, Mr Turnbull also said US President Donald Trump was the world's "leading climate denier" and that America's lack of leadership was "extremely damaging".

• Fires 'far from over' as storms sweep Australia
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• Arson, travel and recovery - your bushfire questions

Mr Turnbull said "everybody knew we were in a very dry time" before the fire season, and that it "was likely to be very bad".

"Rather than doing what a leader should do... [Mr Morrison] downplayed it, and at times discounted the influence of climate change, which is just nonsense from a scientific point of view. So that's misleading people," said Mr Turnbull.

"Then of course [he] chose to go away on holiday in Hawaii at the peak of the crisis. So I can't explain any of that. 

"It's just not consistent with the way in which a prime minister would or should act in a national crisis like this."

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-51202534

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