Australia’s Devastating Wildfires Were Not Inevitable

Blue Mountains, Australia—“There is no one in this current federal government that has any semblance of a sense of crisis,” Mark Greenhill tells me as we sit in his mayoral office in Katoomba, a small town some 100 kilometers west of Sydney. It is December 19. For over a month, three massive bushfires have plagued this small mountain community, a UNESCO World Heritage site, ravaging its ecosystem and laying waste to residents’ homes. I could smell the smoke in Sydney that morning; the haze descended on the city at least a dozen times in the past month, casting a sepia-toned pall and tripping office fire alarms. But it was nothing compared with Katoomba, where my eyes began to burn the moment I stepped off the train.

The country was once actually poised to lead on climate politics, and now, it burns.

As Greenhill speaks, his eyes dart to the window behind me. “Oh, fuck,” he says. I turn to look. A thick gray plume is billowing up from the trees just north of us. He jumps up and rushes to the window. “That is a cloud of fire,” he says. “That’s climate change right there.” A moment passes as the two of us stand in silence. “So, so,” he continues, picking up his train of thought, “there’s no sense of that national crisis. And that’s what we’re missing.” He points back to the fire cloud—“I’m just going to find out what that is”—and begins texting furiously. 

The technical term for what we saw that day is “pyrocumulonimbus,” or “pyroCb” for short. PyroCbs are weather events generated by wildfires. They can produce dry lightning storms, high winds, even full-blown tornadoes. (An aerial photo of the Hiroshima bombing, long thought to capture the distinctive nuclear mushroom cloud, was only recently reidentified as an image of the pyroCb from the ensuing firestorm that swept through the city.) In recent weeks, “pyroCb” has become a household term in Australia—a literal manifestation of the fires but also a symbol, nudging us to see what is happening to the country in the terms of armed conflict. As the fires tear through town after town with ruthless efficiency, pyroCbs lend them the look of an airborne attack: climate blitzkrieg. When Prime Minister Scott Morrison called in the navy to evacuate thousands of people stranded on beaches and mobilized the Australian Defence Force to help fight the fires, the symbolism became reality. Australia went to war with itself.

Read the story from The Nation by Daniel Judt - “Australia’s Devastating Wildfires Were Not Inevitable.”