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Bibliography of my articles selected.

Bushfires in Australia:

widespread and regular occurrence that have contributed significantly to shaping the nature of the continent over millions of years.

"The Making Of The Bush: a portrait of the island continent"

The most destructive fires are usually preceded by extreme high temperatures, low relative humidity and strong winds, which combine to create ideal conditions for the rapid spread of fire. Severe fire storms are often named according to the day on which they peaked, including the five most deadly blazes: Black Saturday 2009 in Victoria (173 people killed, 2000 homes lost); Ash Wednesday 1983 in Victoria and South Australia (75 dead, nearly 1900 homes); Black Friday 1939 in Victoria (71 dead, 650 houses destroyed), Black Tuesday 1967 in Tasmania (62 people and almost 1300 homes); and the Gippsland fires and Black Sunday of 1926 in Victoria (60 people killed over a two-month period). Other major conflagrations include the 1851 Black Thursday bushfires, the 2006 December bushfires, the 1974-75 fires that affected 15% of Australia, and the ongoing 2019–20 bushfires. In January 2020, it was estimated that over 1.25 billion animals have died in the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season.

"Australia’s ruinous fire season can be seen from space. NASA’s satellites have spotted more than a million infrared heat signatures — telltale signs of fires — across the country since the beginning of September. By January, The fires have largely been concentrated in the southeastern state of New South Wales, home to Sydney, where authorities last week declared a state of emergency for the third month in a row. At least 25 people have died, and the persistent burning has devastated forests, destroyed thousands of homes, and killed millions of animals — more than a billion, by one estimate."

"Australians have started the new year anxious and alarmed with unprecedented bushfires engulfing parts of the country, causing thousands to flee the southeastern coast under blood-red skies.

But the fires have been blazing around Australia since September, killing at least 24 people and gutting an area larger than Denmark. Over 2,000 homes have been destroyed and conditions are expected to worsen this weekend, with months left to go in a fire season that seems to get longer every year.

Our reporters have been on the ground capturing the crisis as it unfolded, whether speaking with evacuees or analyzing why it happened — and telling readers how to help.

Here are some of the highlights of our coverage."

"More than 16 million acres have gone up in flames. And it has happened in populated areas, unlike most of the world’s other blazes of this scale. Why have these fires been so vast? While Australia is normally hot and dry in the summer, climate change is bringing longer and more frequent periods of extreme heat. That makes vegetation drier and more likely to burn.

Last year was the hottest and driest year on record in Australia, and some regions have been gripped by drought for years. This season, the fires started earlier than usual — some as soon as July — and they are expected to last well into February and even March.

High temperatures, strong winds and dry forests have combined to create the conditions for powerful fires. There have even been blazes in wetlands and rainforests that have not contended with this threat before. To combat the flames, tens of thousands of firefighters, most of them volunteers, have been called on to work long days over extended periods.

Most of the fires have been caused by lightning strikes, though some people have misleadingly pointed to arson in an effort to minimize the links to climate change and the Australian government’s inaction on the issue. Others have argued that the drought is unrelated to climate change, though there is evidence that warming temperatures have been a major contributor to it, in part by pushing rain out of areas where it once fell.

“The wildfires decimating Australia, killing people, ravaging wild habitats and pushing communities and firefighters to their absolute limits are growing and coalescing into the country’s worst peacetime catastrophe precisely because of climate change,” said Paul Read, a co-director of the National Center for Research in Bushfire and Arson at Monash University in Melbourne."

The United States also sent people to combat the fire. "With dozens of fires continuing to burn across Australia, an extra 44 firefighters from the US landed in Melbourne on Friday to assist local crews."

"Elsewhere in South Australia, the Cudlee Creek fire is reported to have destroyed more than 80 homes in the Adelaide Hills region in late December.

Fires are also thought to have destroyed up to a third of the vines that provide grapes for the Adelaide Hills wine industry. Although Australia has always had bushfires, this season has been worse than usual.

The amount of land affected across the country - more than 10 million hectares - is now comparable to England's land area of 13 million hectares.The number of people killed as a result of the fires since September 2019 is higher than in recent years.

Fauna

"Some 25,000 koalas feared dead on an island being consumed by flames. Ten thousand feral camels expected to be shot and killed. And claims that a whopping one billion animals estimated to have perished across Australia.

These are a few of the numbers that have emerged in recent days to capture the toll of the extreme heat and raging fires on Australian animal life. They add to the already staggering scope of the fires, which have killed at least 24 people, destroyed more than 2,000 homes and scorched more than 15 million acres.

The figures tallying the mass death of Australian critters have ricocheted around the internet, causing apprehension and grief.

Experts in biodiversity have expressed alarm at the span of scorched earth in a megadiverse country that harbors between 600,000 to 700,000 species, many which are not found anywhere else in the world."

AMAZON, BRAZIL

"Flying above the Amazon's worst afflicted state (during last week), Rondonia, is exhausting mostly because of the endless scale of the devastation. At first, smoke disguised the constant stream of torched fields, and copses; of winding roads that weaved into nothing but ash. Below, the orange specks of a tiny fire might still rage, but much of the land appeared a mausoleum of the forest that once graced it.

"This is not just a forest that is burning," said Rosana Villar of Greenpeace, who helped CNN arrange its flight over the damaged and burning areas. "This is almost a cemetery. Because all you can see is death."

The stark reality of the destruction is otherworldly: like a vision conjured by an alarmist to warn of what may come if the world doesn't address its climate crisis now. Yet it is real, and here, and now, and below us as we are scorched by the sun above and smoldering land below. Brazil has 85% more fires burning than this time last year -- up to 80,626 nationwide as of Sunday night. The task is enormous, almost insurmountable. In the areas where the smoke is most intense, the sun barely creeps through to shine off the river. I saw one bird in this natural sanctuary in three hours. Flames seem to move in a steadfast line across the savannah, swallowing whole what forest remains in their path.

There are the occasional buildings, isolated in the newly created farmland around them. But no signs of human life, just cattle, caught in the swirling clouds and flame. They are often the reason for the fires: the rush to deforest sparked by a growing global market for beef. Cattle need soy grown on the fields, or to graze on the grass, and then become the beef Brazil sells to China, now a trade war with the United States has changed the market.

The reason for the fires is disputed, but not that convincingly from this height. Bolsonaro has said that they are part of the usual annual burn, in this, the dry season. But his critics, many of them scientists, have noted the government's policy of encouraging deforestation has boosted both the land clearance that helps fires rage, and given the less scrupulous farmer license to burn."

"The Amazon — nearly four times the size of Alaska — is a vast sink for storing carbon dioxide and a key element of any plan to restrain climate change. Any increase in deforestation there would speed up global warming as well as damage an important refuge for biodiversity.

Studies show the 2.2 million-square mile rainforest in the Amazon is nearing a tipping point, at which large fragmented portions of the rainforest could transform into an entirely different, drier ecosystem, leading to the acceleration of climate change, the loss of countless species and disaster for the indigenous populations that call the tropical rainforest home. The world’s atmosphere is currently holding about 415 parts per million of carbon, and the destruction of the Amazon would add roughly 38 parts per million. The trees and plants of the Amazon forest pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as part of photosynthesis. Destruction of the forest releases carbon stored in the trees and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide used by them."

Causes:

"Most fires in the Amazon are caused by humans, set either accidentally or intentionally.

Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research found the country has lost more than 1,330 square miles of forest cover to development since January, when President Jair Bolsonaro took office. That is a 39 percent increase over the same period in 2018. July in particular featured a huge spike in forest loss, with an area larger than the city of Los Angeles lost in a single month.

The biggest economic interest groups eating away at the Amazon are cattle grazers and soybean growers. “Directly after deforestation, mostly what we see is pasture,” said Mikaela Weisse, a fellow at the World Resources Institute. Later, soybean growers expand by taking over pasture lands.

Mining, timber and development firms are also eyeing the region for expansion, encouraged by Bolsonaro’s election.

Scientists are working to discern how many of the fires are burning on the border of deforested land that had been previously cleared to make way for cattle grazing or growing crops, especially soybeans."

SOURCES:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/world/australia/fires-size-climate.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/australia/bushfire.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/australia-fires/

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/24/bushfires-death-toll-rises-to-33-after-body-found-in-burnt-out-house-near-moruya

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50951043

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/25/americas/amazon-fire-efforts-damage/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-amazon-rainforest-fires/2019/08/27/ac82b21e-c815-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/world/australia/fires-animals.html