why are the fires in australia so bad this year?
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A changing climate has meant an increase in temperatures in the Indian and Southern Oceans, which in turn has meant drier and hotter weather across Australia this summer. The most dangerous fire days occur when hot, dry air blows from the desert center of the continent toward the populous coasts.
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Nearly three billion animals were killed or displaced during Australia's devastating bushfires of the past year, scientists say. The findings meant it was one of "worst wildlife disasters in modern history", said the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which commissioned the report.
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Send this by. Only about 1 per cent of the land burnt in NSW this bushfire season can be officially attributed to arson, and it is even less in Victoria, the ABC can reveal. The world has been shocked by the scenes of devastation as the unprecedented destruction of Australia's horror bushfire season rages on.
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The fires had ignition sources. ... Some fires were by scumbags lighting them and some were by lightning. Then we had a combination of things that were the cause of the high voracity of the fires. We are going through a very bad drought.
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Australia's fires are 46% bigger than last year's Brazilian Amazon blazes. There are at least 2 months of fire season to go. A ghost. ... Since September, bushfires have razed an estimated 25 million acres in Australia.
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Officials In Australia's New South Wales Celebrate: 'All Fires Are Now Contained' While NSW has been the worst-affected, record high temperatures and other extreme weather conditions have also led to unprecedented wildfire devastation in other regions, including Queensland and Victoria.
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Heather Wheeler, a foreign office minister, said last week: "Very regrettably, it is widely reported on social media that 75% of the fires were started by arsonists." Richard Drax, a Conservative MP repeated the figure in the House of Commons this week. He said: "In Australia 75% of fires are caused by arson."
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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.
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The forest fires in Australia that have been raging for more than four months, show no signs of ebbing. ... The fires seem to be both a natural disaster and man-made calamity. But if extreme weather is counted as being the result of human activities as well, the fires can be seen as purely a man-made disaster.
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A state of disaster was declared for East Gippsland. Significant fires occurred in the Adelaide Hills and Kangaroo Island in South Australia and parts of the ACT. Moderately affected areas were south-eastern Queensland and areas of south-western Western Australia, with a few areas in Tasmania being mildly impacted.
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Unseasonably high temperatures and drought over the last three months have contributed to the conditions that have allowed the fires to proliferate. ... And in Australia we've just experienced record high temperatures," Mark Howden, director of the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University, told Reuters.
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The hot, dry conditions that primed southeastern Australia's forest and fields for the bushfires that have been ravaging the country since September are likely to continue, scientists warn — and climate change has likely made the situation much worse. ... But scientists say that the risk of additional fires remains high.
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Smoke generated by the fires has blanketed Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, at times giving them some of the worst air in the world. ... 14, smoke had circumnavigated the globe, returning to eastern Australia. Along the way, it caused hazardous breathing conditions in New Zealand and discolored skies in South America.
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At any time of the year, some parts of Australia are prone to bushfires. ... Bushfires tend to occur when light and heavy fuel loads in Eucalypt forests have dried out, usually following periods of low rainfall. The potential for extreme fire weather varies greatly throughout Australia, both in frequency and severity.
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Every state and territory in Australia has experienced fires this summer. But the biggest fires burn along stretches of the eastern and southern coast, where most of the population lives. This includes areas around Sydney and Adelaide.
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Australia fires: Rain finally falls on some bushfires. Australians are celebrating the arrival of much-needed rain in parts of the nation's bushfire-ravaged south-east. Though more wet weather is needed to end the fires, the rain has brought a welcome reprieve to many areas. Other parts, however, have not been as lucky ...
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The modern world has never seen anything quite like these Australia fires. About 16 million acres have burned in New South Wales and Victoria, where the crisis is centered. That's an area about the size of West Virginia. Millions more acres have burned in other parts of the country.