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Did Arsonists Cause Australia’s ‘Crisis’?

Posted on | January 7, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

TV news is full of scenes of out-of-control wildfires in Australia, where it’s been a dry, hot summer. Fortunately, the forecast this week in Sydney is for cooler, rainy weather, but we continue seeing televised scenes of people fleeing the catastrophic fires that have destroyed their homes. While environmentalists claim these fires prove the dangers of “climate change,” in fact criminals are making a significant contribution:

More than 180 alleged arsonists have been arrested since the start of the bushfire season, with 29 blazes deliberately lit in the Shoalhaven region of southeast [New South Wales] in just three months.
The Shoalhaven fires were lit between July and September last year, with Kempsey recording 27 deliberately lit fires, NSW Bureau of Crime and Statistics and Research data shows.
Police arrested 183 people for lighting bushfires across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the past few months. NSW police data shows 183 people have been charged or cautioned for bushfire-related offences since November 8, and 24 arrested for deliberately starting bushfires.
Queensland police say 101 people have been picked up for setting fires in the bush, 32 adults and 69 juveniles.

One of these arsonists was arrested last week:

A 79-year-old South Australian man has been charged with intentionally lighting four grass and scrub fires in the state’s southeast in recent days.
Police will allege the man lit fires on December 30 and January 2, and then two on Saturday, all in the Kingston area.
He has been refused police bail and will appear in Mount Gambier Magistrates Court on Monday.

There was this report in December:

Almost 100 firebugs have deliberately started blazes across Queensland that have destroyed homes and consumed thousands of hectares of bushland. . . .
A 16-year-old boy found to have started a fire that razed 14 homes in central Queensland and dealt with under the state’s Youth Justice Act.
Two more teens, 14 and 15, were charged with endangering property by fire over a blaze that destroyed two homes and forced hundreds to flee.

In November, there was this report:

NSW Police have charged two men with stealing firefighting equipment during [a Nov. 12] bushfire crisis, as they probe several “suspicious” blazes around the state.
In a separate incident, officers also charged a 19-year-old with impersonating a firefighter and stealing equipment in Sydney’s south.
It comes as police investigate seven “suspicious” fires across the state on Tuesday. . . .
Five people have also faced penalties over breaches of the statewide total fire ban for either using barbecues with an open flame or burning rubbish over the past 24 hours.
Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said it was hard to understand why people would take such risks in catastrophic conditions.
“Unfortunately we know there are some broken individuals out there who will maliciously light fires and we also have people out there who are just plain idiots and will try and light a barbeque on a day that it’s catastrophic,” he said. . . .
NSW Police and fire investigators made a public appeal for more information regarding fires that may have been deliberately lit.
“It’s awful. It angers every firefighter and angers everybody in the community,” RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said.
“Clearly we are looking at those as suspicious, particularly the one in Loftus were there were multiple ignition points in the Royal National Park there.”

Whoa — “multiple ignition points“? Clearly, this is evidence of deliberate criminal activity, and we know that dozens of people have been arrested since November for arson. What we don’t know is the identity of these “broken individuals,” or what their motives might have been. In the absence of such information, however, some Australians have begun to suspect that some of these arsonists may be environmentalists (“Greens”) trying to manufacture a crisis to dramatize their cause. We don’t have any proof that this is the case, so it is irresponsible to speculate, and Arthur Chrenkoff advises using common sense:

Most people (I hope) understand that trees tend not to spontaneously combust, no matter what the air temperature is; when we talk about bushfires starting naturally, we are talking about lightning strikes igniting tinder. The climate change argument posits that the more extreme weather conditions — higher temperatures, drought and so forth — make fires, however started, much more destructive and much more difficult to control and extinguish. These are debates to be had between climatologists, forestry experts and firefighters.What is painfully clear, however, that Australia has a firebug crisis. It will no doubt be up to future royal commissions and inquiries to calculate exactly what proportion of the current loss and destruction can be attributed to human action, but I suspect it will be a significant one. Mankind may be causing climate change, but man is most definitely making fires start.

Various leftists have declared that it is a “conspiracy theory” — a “coordinated misinformation campaign” spread by “climate denial traitors” using Twitter “bots” — to call attention to the role played by arsonists in the Australian brush fires. The facts are still the facts, however, and indisputable facts are never “misinformation.”



 

Category: Australia, Crime, Global Warming

Comments

One Response to “Did Arsonists Cause Australia’s ‘Crisis’?”

  1. This week in reaction. - Dark Brightness
    January 10th, 2020 @ 7:02 am

    […] the suppression of the nefarious acts of firestarters in Australia for the sake of the current narrative sticks in my […]