Graham Readfearn: The scientist who predicted the bushfire emergency four decades ago

By Dilip -
From his lounge in Brunswick, Melbourne, 72-year-old Dr Tom Beer has been watching the fury of an unprecedented Australian bushfire season unfolding on his television screen. “I feel really sorry for the firefighters who’ve got extraordinarily tough jobs ahead, and it’s only going to get tougher,” says Beer. “But I feel maybe I was not enough of a prophet crying in the wilderness.”

Back in 1986, Beer was working as a CSIRO meteorologist looking at bushfires when he was asked by his boss, Dr Graeme Pearman, to go and find out what the greenhouse effect might mean for the future of fires. Beer’s findings in 1987, published in 1988 as “Australian bushfire danger under changing climatic regimes”, became the first study in the world to ask what climate change was going to mean for wildfires.

 “It seems obvious, but actually we found the correlation was not temperature and fires, but relative humidity and fires. Temperature goes up, it gets drier, and then the fires go up,” says Beer.
Australia’s bushfire season has started early this year, with fire chiefs saying the length, extent and intensity of the fires is unprecedented.


More than a million hectares has been burned, entire towns and communities have been decimated and lives have been lost. In just one week in NSW, 259 homes have been destroyed.....
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/17/what-could-i-have-done-the-scientist-who-predicted-the-bushfire-emergency-four-decades-ago

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