Here on Roger Pielke’ Jr.’s climate blog is a peer-reviewed point counterpoint about climate and vulnerability with regard to bushfires in Australia. It makes me wonder.. we’ve had a number of posts about wildland fires and the need to rethink our approaches to managing fires. The recent discussion here on the use of retardant is one of those. Question: do the Aussies have any better ideas that might be worth importing? Is the debate different or framed in such a way that different solutions emerge?
What this story says to me is that people’s vulnerability to fires is actually, at least at the current time, fairly separate from climate and yet worthy of attention.