Series: Lenore Taylor on politics

Bushfires: Coalition deploys straw man against burning issue of climate change

Government is desperate to keep bushfires and climate change apart for fear its emissions reduction policy will be found wanting

The Abbott government is desperately constructing a straw man to help it fight the potentially big political problem of rising public concern about climate change and scrutiny of its Direct Action policy.

The straw man is the contention that anyone making a perfectly reasonable and scientifically justifiable point – that climate change is likely to cause a higher prevalence of the weather conditions that pose a bushfire risk – has actually been making the unreasonable and scientifically unjustifiable point that climate change has caused a particular fire.

And once the straw man contention has been ridiculed, the Coalition quickly skips over the justifiable connection and contends that fires are “part of the Australian experience” and that nothing different is happening.

The straw man was wielded most recently against the executive secretary of the United Nations framework convention on climate change, Christiana Figueres, who said in an interview with CNN there was “absolutely” a link between climate change and bushfires.

She did not say that climate change causes bushfires. She did say climate change causes increasing heatwaves – in other words, bushfire weather.

After Tony Abbott airily dismissed Figueres as “talking through her hat”, the environmnent minister, Greg Hunt, wielded the straw man defence against the UN executive in this interview on the BBC.

Hunt said he had spoken to Figueres and “she indicated clearly and strongly that she was not saying that these bushfires were caused by climate change … She felt that that had been misrepresented.”

Whatever she said to Hunt, she wasn’t backing away from the idea of a connection between climate change and bushfire weather in a statement she subsequently issued, in which she said: “The IPCC’s conclusions are that unless deep and decisive action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions the world will experience more extreme and more frequent weather events over the coming decades.

“In its earlier fourth assessment report released in 2007 the IPCC stated that: ‘Climate change is known to alter the likelihood of increased wildfire sizes and frequencies … while also inducing stress on trees that indirectly exacerbate disturbances. This suggests an increasing likelihood of more prevalent fire disturbances, as has recently been observed.’”

But Hunt moved quickly from the straw man defence to the nothing-different-to-see-here “Australian experience” argument.

“The point we are all making is that Australia has since European settlement had a history of bushfires … That is the Australian experience,” he explained.

There is a very good reason the Coalition wants to stamp out any link in the popular debate between climate change and an increased prevalence of bushfire weather.

They remember all too well the way concerns about weather events in 2006 and 2007 forced the then Howard government to take action on climate change that it otherwise probably would not have.

As Howard wrote in his autobiography Lazarus Rising, “in the space of several weeks, commencing in October 2006, four separate events came together to push the climate change concerns of the Australian community to higher levels than ever before. In Victoria the bushfire season started early; the drought affecting large areas of eastern Australia lingered on … from outside Australia came the contributions of Al Gore … and Sir Nicholas Stern.

“These four events coincided and dramatically increased the focus on global warming in Australia … I concluded that the government would need to shift its position on climate change.”

This was apparently primarily a political consideration, since Howard says later in his book that he is “an agnostic rather than a sceptic on climate change, instinctively I doubt many of the more alarming predictions”.

The Abbott government says it accepts climate change is real and that its Direct Action policy is the best way for Australia to reduce emissions by the minimum target of 5%.

Despite extreme doubts being raised about that policy by economists, scientists and many experts, the Coalition has so far managed to avoid much public scrutiny of it. But in government, particularly if public concern was rising because of a confluence of events like those that confronted Howard, that scrutiny will intensify.

And scientists have an inconvenient habit of not being diverted by “straw man” arguments.

After interviewing Hunt, the BBC spoke to Professor Roger Jones from Victoria University, who took the same history of disastrous Australian bushfires Abbott had listed to make his “it’s all part of the Australian experience” argument and pointed out how many years had elapsed between them.

“Twenty-nine years, 14, 11, nine, six, four … you might detect a pattern in that in that the gap between the fires is getting shorter,” he noted.