By Chen Yu
SYDNEY, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) -- The eastern part of Australia has been raging with bush fire in the past several months. There were over 250 homes lost in New South Wales bush fire over the past week, authorities said Friday. The bush fire fatalities since last Friday have also increased to four people.
David Bowman, an Australian fire expert, said in a recent interview with Xinhua that since the spring of this year, the scale of forest fires in various parts of Australia has never been greater. He believes that these fires are in line with global warming.
Bowman is the director of the Fire Research Center at the University of Tasmania in Australia and has over 40 years of research experience in the field of fire.
"In my opinion, those fires are absolutely consistent with climate change but it is confusing (to some people) because this is fire season, so in one sense it is not unusual to have fires burning. There is drought but there have been drought before. There are strong wind but there have been strong wind. There is high temperature and there have been high temperature in the past. So if you look at each climate element on its own, you can sort of say, 'yeah, it is a climate event but where is the climate change part?'" he said.
Bowman said the climate change part is the fact that all of those unusual events on fire season, like unusual high temperature, extreme drought and strong wind happened at the same time and that changed the fire behavior pattern.
Bowman said now the fire fighters are most worried about the speed of bush fires. In the case of strong winds and long-term extreme dryness, the fire spreads faster and jumps.
According to Bowman, it is worth noting that there are now fires in the vicinity of rainforests in Australia. Those areas are usually very humid and not prone to fires, but there are now signs that fires also occurred in tropical rainforest areas last year due to the long-term extreme dryness and the same thing happened this year too. He said this kind of forest fire meant to be very rare, but now it has become a normal state, which is very abnormal.
Bowman said that there is now a very unusual ash storm phenomenon that happened in southeast Queensland, where a "blizzard" of millions of burning particles, which can travel very far, poses a major threat to residential buildings.
During summer, the huge amount of heat mass generated by deserts in the center of Australia may cause this kind of ash storm in the densely populated areas on both the east coast and the west coast of Australia. It may cause pollution to the water catchment of the populated area too.
Bowman warned that Australia is very vulnerable to the current extreme weather. Given the current long-term drought and other adverse weather conditions, Australia's bush fires this summer may cause unprecedented human and property loss.
"The take home message is, the climate change is expressing itself in Australia particularly through fire," Bowman said.
