{"id":4946,"date":"2020-01-06T08:30:55","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T07:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/?p=4946"},"modified":"2020-01-27T10:37:45","modified_gmt":"2020-01-27T09:37:45","slug":"australia-is-burning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/2020\/01\/06\/australia-is-burning\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia is burning"},"content":{"rendered":"

I received an email a couple of days ago from a friend in Australia who suggested that as a start to the New Year I should focus this week’s blog post on what is happening in his country.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Interactive Map showing fires and burned areas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As you probably know Australia is suffering from the worst start to its annual fight against brush fires in history. You can find extensive coverage<\/a> in the international news media on the crisis which has eventually led the Australian government to call in the military to help with evacuation and rescue. Over 1,000 homes have been lost so far.<\/p>\n

What I have been able to understand is that the situation is due to a combination of record breaking hot weather, a devastating draught and very strong winds.<\/p>\n

Not only was last year the hottest year ever in Australia but December 18th was the hottest day ever recorded with temperatures averaging 107 \u00baF (42\u00baC). My friend said it was 48 degrees at his house outside of Sydney!<\/p>\n

The drought has been a problem in New South Wales (Sydney)\u00a0 and Queensland (Brisbane) since 2017 and this Spring (our fall) was the driest on record. The drought appears to be caused by a weather pattern called the Indian Ocean Dipol<\/a>e (IOD) which is sometimes called the India el Ni\u00f1o.<\/p>\n

The third cause of the situation can be traced to warmer air over Antartica which is causing something called Sudden Stratospheric Warming<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the questions that has scientists and activists engaged is the degree to which the current situation is caused by global warming? If you follow the links above you can get a glimpse of the debate and it seems to me that while the IOD and the draught might not be linked both the high temperatures and winds clearly are.<\/p>\n

The New York Times ran an insightful op ed article<\/a> on the situation by Richard Flanagan<\/a>, a well known and respected Australian Novelist on January 3rd. One of the things that Flanagan points out is that the current Australian Government and its Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, have not taken Climate Change seriously and even the opposition Labor Party is beholden to the country’s coal industry.<\/p>\n

According to an article<\/a> in National Geographic, Australia’s performance on climate change is very disappointing especially considering it was one of the first countries to try and implement a tax on carbon back in 2012. That effort failed spectacularly as Australian’s citizens were told that there was a trade off between economic prosperity and responsibility responsibility.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This nonsense is largely funded by the lobbies of coal, oil and gas. From an economic viewpoint, the transition to a low carbon economy has the potential to be the biggest economic boom of all time and political leaders should make sure their countries are at the leading edge of it rather than cling to fossil fuels beyond reason and common sense.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the silver lining of the current crisis will be to convince Australians that the climate issue is real and that action should be taken sooner, rather than later. In line with this thinking is David Wallace-Wells’ best selling book, The Uninhabitable Earth<\/em><\/a> where he makes a compelling case that the crisis is upon us today, not 50 or 100 years from now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australia’s brush fires are due to record breaking, hot weather; a devastating draught and very strong winds and are most probably linked to climate change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":788,"featured_media":4955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4946"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4957,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946\/revisions\/4957"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}