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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TideGlider who wrote (58945)	2/9/2009 8:48:38 AM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224750

Firing up for more - blaze risk has gone from bad to worse, says expert Marian Wilkinson and Ben Cubby February 10, 2009 THE number of days with a very high or extreme risk of bushfires has begun rising, with climate change playing a role, a leading CSIRO scientist has said. "We observed a large increase in fire-weather risk from about the year 2000. So part of this increase in risk has begun and has been observed," said Kevin Hennessey, who was attending the 9th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography in Melbourne yesterday. "The extreme dryness over the last 12 years may be due to natural variability but it may also be partly due to an increase in greenhouse gases; it's too early to tell." Mr Hennessey co-wrote a report on the increased risk of fire weather due to climate change, which was cited in the Garnaut climate change review. The report found the number of days in which bushfires present an extreme danger will creep up as temperatures rise. Fire seasons would also start earlier, end slightly later and be "generally more intense", and this would be seen by 2020. A lead author with the United Nations scientific body, Kevin Trenberth, also attending the conference, said the drying of southern Australia was consistent with global warming. "One of the things with global warming is that you have this increase in greenhouse gases and they provide a blanketing effect so there is more heat available. The heat has to go somewhere. Some of the heat goes into evaporation, into the drying of the land. Where it's not raining, things dry out quicker, droughts set in a little quicker and become more intense." Rain and storm activity is also expected to increase in the tropics and subtropics."That moisture that's being evaporated has to go somewhere, so it rains harder and you get stronger floods in the places where it does rain." smh.com.au

To: TideGlider who wrote (58945)	2/9/2009 7:57:11 PM
From: lorne	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224750

Islam group urges forest fire jihad by Josh Gordon, The Age (Australia), September 7, 2008 westinstenv.org AUSTRALIA has been singled out as a target for “forest jihad” by a group of Islamic extremists urging Muslims to deliberately light bushfires as a weapon of terror. US intelligence channels earlier this year identified a website calling on Muslims in Australia, the US, Europe and Russia to “start forest fires”, claiming “scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels’ forests when they do the same to our lands”. The website, posted by a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network, argues in Arabic that lighting fires is an effective form of terrorism justified in Islamic law under the “eye for an eye” doctrine. The posting — which instructs jihadis to remember “forest jihad” in summer months — says fires cause economic damage and pollution, tie up security agencies and can take months to extinguish so that “this terror will haunt them for an extended period of time”. “Imagine if, after all the losses caused by such an event, a jihadist organisation were to claim responsibility for the forest fires,” the website says. “You can hardly begin to imagine the level of fear that would take hold of people in the United States, in Europe, in Russia and in Australia.” With the nation heading into another hot, dry summer, Australian intelligence agencies are treating the possibility that bushfires could be used as a weapon of terrorism as a serious concern.