Lab 022: This is NOT a Drill

There have been three things that I've seen tumbling down the timeline in the past couple of days.

First is the Ivy parking Adida's collaboration.

Yes, have you gotten anything? Were you able to?

No?

I thought I could at least get a pair of socks. I was able to snag a sweatshirt, which I was shocked.

Why'd you buy a sweatshirt? You know, Beyonce, gon send you a box.

I know, I'm just still waiting for it. I don't know it's taking so long. Well, Junie Ambrose got hers. Junie Ambrose got hers and slay that Liza. I was like, this is the best Beyonce Ivy park try on of all time. I'll link to it in the show notes because it's just amazing it is.

What's the second thing?

The second thing is those things on Instagram that you can set It shows you like what Disney character are you? What Harry Potter House are you? What's your next vacation? And it and you do all everybody's been doing them. Okay, I've done probably like fifty fifty at least.

Man, that's a lot. I look at that.

I don't want to do them because I don't want anybody to assign me the wrong character, and then I'm gonna be and can you do it over again? You can do it over and decide when you're going to record.

You can record and then delete it.

I can't delete the data.

I'm TT and I'm Zakijah and from Spotify Studios.

This is Dope Labs.

What's the third thing?

Third thing is everything fire related in Australia.

Oh my gosh.

Yes, have you.

Seen the videos of the animals running from the fire and people helping them?

It is awful. Is awful all the destruction that it's causing. There have been people that have died, there's you know, thousands of homes that have been lost. Yeah, it's just awful to see.

And it taught me, like, even looking at some of the information that's being spread, I realized I don't know enough about a Australia and B fire.

Yeah, and so I think we should jump into this. I think so too, because there's a lot to be learned.

So this episode we're talking about the Australian fires. We're going to give you a broad overview of what's been happening, what caused the fires, and what we need to think about to prevent things like this happening in the future.

So let's get into the recitation, all.

Right, what do we know TT I know that there was a lot of destruction. There were a lot of fires. I don't know if it was one single fire or multiple fires, but I know that it was mass fire destruction.

Another thing that we do know is that a lot of scientists are linking these fires to climate change, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAH, they just released their finding saying that twenty nineteen was the second hottest year on records, and they have a long record exactly, and so twenty nineteen was only second to twenty sixteen. So in the last five years, we've put up the hottest the two hottest year, the two hottest years on record.

But what do we want want to know?

I want to know how these fires actually started, because there are a number of ways that fires can start, right, But I want to know who is the culprit.

TZ wants to know who did it?

Yes, find that person, or it could be other things. It might not be a person, it could be.

Other factors, other factors. I think.

The other thing that I want to know is exactly, like what are the links between fire and climate change?

You know, I want to know what that link looks.

Like, what are the variables that can lead to more instances of fires like this that are out of control? Because the fire isn't new, no, So what led to this mass destruction? And has this been going on and it just got picked up in the news or like when did this start?

That's a very good question, And I want to know what we should expect in the future, Like this seems to be something that's not just happening in Australia, It's happening in other parts of the world, and I want to know what we should be expecting now that this is becoming a part of our normal everyday lives.

Fires, all right, I think we're ready to jump into the dissection.

So to help us out, we called on doctor Sarah Perkins Kirkpatrick.

So my name is doctor Sarah Perkins Kirkpatrick. I'm a research fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and I specialize in extreme events and heat waves, so I analyze how they've changed over the observational record.

Doctor Perkins Kirkpatrick says the fires occurring in Australia right now are the worst in the continent's historical record.

We have just had our worst bushfire event on record. I was going to say season, but the season isn't even over yet.

These fires have been blazing since September and many of them have been in forest away from major cities. But now the country has seen a rapid spread since December twenty nineteen.

And what we're talking about is almost two hundred fires burning at the same time. These fires are eating up everything in their path.

We haven't seen fires of this ferocity really ever in the observational record here.

In the past few weeks, the Australian government has updated this report of the area that is either currently burning or has been burned. It's now it's seventeen million hectares across all the territories of Australia.

I don't know what a hectar is, don't.

Even worry about it. From a hectare to an acre turm. Now, don't worry. You know I got you, so I basically I did the conversion for you.

And seventeen million hectares is basically the size of Florida.

Can you imagine?

No, that is insane, So what caused these fires? What started them?

For fires, we actually need an ignition. You can have the worst fire weather ever, but it doesn't mean anything really if the fire isn't ignited.

So there are two primary culprits for fires and how they start. One of them could be a natural event, like a lightning strike that ignites a dry bush or a plant and then the fire starts.

It's been really dry. We've had three of our lowest years on record in terms of rainfall over Eastern Australia. We also had our driest year on record last year, and that feeds into fuel. So the dryer it is, the more the vegetation dries out and consequently becomes fuel to a fire.

The other possibility is a man made ignition like arson, where somebody intentionally sets a fire.

So this could be either people going out and deliberately lighting fires for god knows what's reason, or even throwing a cigarette but out the car window, or leaving some rubbish which can then trap the sun and ignite the fire.

And this is all really awful to think about, you know, yeah, But the thing to remember is that fire is nothing new in Australia.

Indigenous people have been using fire management practices for tens of thousands of years, so it's not like it's anything new here.

Aboriginal fire management consisted of deliberately setting fires to get rid of some of the dry vegetation that could lead to spontaneous fires in the future. This practice is called controlled burning. Modern day fire agencies adopted these practices from the indigenous people of Australia.

And I think this is really this is a really clever strategy. If you know there is an issue with things catching on fire in a certain period, why not preemptively burn so you don't have all this dry fuel that.

Could catch fire at any moment from anything. Right In Australia actually has a fire season.

So the fire season usually follows the warmer weather. It follows summer in the southern part of Australia, and it's basically when we see the bushfires occur. So you can get bushfires in winter, it's not impossible, but we tend to see much more of them and then generally of higher intensity within the warmer seasons, simply because it's hotter and temperature is a major component to fire weather.

But what's happening in Australia. This year is unprecedented from other fire seasons for a couple of reasons. First, it's starting earlier, right.

Peak fire season is usually late January to February. But remember these fires have been happening since September, so this is really unexpected and the weather will only get drier from here. Second is the intensity of fire.

They were burning at intensity it's you know, upwards of six seven hundred degrees centigrade.

That's up to one thousand, two hundred degrees fahrenheit.

That's wild. I don't cook above five hundred what like? What does that even feel like? You would never know? I don't want to know.

You would never know.

These fires they moved extremely quickly. They have killed somewhere between half a billion to a billion animals. We've lost gosh, I think twenty five to thirty people. Thousands of homes have been destroyed.

I think the last number I saw is that there were twenty at least twenty seven people did and that's confirmed.

Right.

There are people that are missing, the people that you know you can't get in touch with because people's homes have burned, they've had to quickly evacuate. This is sure, it's just hard to make a phone call I have it go through because of this all of the an emergency.

Yeah. Yeah.

The other thing to consider is Australia's really unique ecosystem. There are many species that are only found in Australia, so this raging fire threatens the very existence of some organisms. Now we're talking about the possibility of extinction.

The other thing to consider is that this number one billion animals is a running estimate of those loss in the fire. Right now, we're not capturing the downstream effect. There'll be more death when you consider those animals who have lost their natural habitats with destroyed ecosystems, These fires have wiped out what they normally eat, where they live and are protected from predators. There's so much to consider.

Also, there's been lots of studies that have shown the length of the fire season in Southeast Australia is increasing in length.

So what we're really saying here is that there are levels to this. Right.

First of all, we're talking about earlier instances of these fires occurring.

And then when there's an instance, there's increased intensity.

And now the possibility of even longer periods of conditions that make these fires mo or likely to.

Occur, and that equation means more fire.

So now that we have an understanding of what's happening in Australia and what has contributed to these fires, when we come back, we'll talk about how climate and fire season are both changing.

And we're back and it's time to get to the root of this climate change. But before we jump into this, there's a couple of things that we really want to make clear, and that's what is climate change and the difference between climate and weather.

Greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth's atmosphere causes climate change. So as sunlight comes down on the Earth, some of it is absorbed, some of it is reflected back, and some of it gets trapped in the Earth's atmosphere. Because of these greenhouse gases, this causes the Earth to warm.

Think of it like a blanket. The more dense the blanket, the warmer you are. Right well, because of our behavior on Earth with fossil fuels, we're knitting ourselves a blanket made of bricks.

Of all the greenhouse gases, though carbon dioxide is the worst.

Carbon dioxide is released through natural processes such as respiration and volcanic eruptions, but through human activities such as deforestation, land used changes, and burning fossil fuels, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution in the seventeen sixties.

That is crazy.

I knew it was bad, but I don't think I knew it was increased by more than a third.

It's really crazy because it's happening so fast.

Yeah, and I think one of the main things I see people doing wrong is confusing weather in climate change or weather in climate.

Yes, and that is of those two things are very different. Weather is a short term event that occurs in the section of the Earth's atmosphere that is closest to the ground, the trophosphere. Yes, and weather is different depending on where you are. So the weather here in my town could be different from where Zakia lives in her town, which isn't very far It's only about twenty five minutes away. And the factors that affect weather are things like air pressure, wind, humidity, and things like that.

Climate, on the other hand, captures long term changes, so when scientists talk about climate, they are looking at trends over a longer period. Of time and over larger regions. When we talk about climate change, we're saying the overall trend for a specific region of the world or the world in general is trending in a certain way.

So if you have a record heat wave or record snowfall in your state, that's the weather and that will be averaged out with the rest of the weather for the year to provide a data point for the overall climate for a region.

And another way of looking at is climate is your wardrobe. Whether it is the outfit you put on today. You know you've got a broad general set of outfits that that suits who you are, but what you pick that day might or might not fit into that. You know that generalized range that you have.

Australia has experienced highly variable weather over the last few years, and that's one of the ways scientists determined the climate is changing. What they do is look at extreme weather events like heat waves, and they compare those events against what would be expected with the given climate.

And what we're starting to see now is more of those extremes occur more often and they're actually starting to break records and therefore break that envelope of climate that we've measured from previous weather and that's how we can detect the change in climate.

So as the climate continues to change, what should we expect to see in Australia.

So in terms of climate change, we know that we're going to see an increase in temperature and that's what we've seen over Australia already. So even though we've only seen an increase of average temperature of about one degree celsius, which doesn't sound like a lot to most people, that actually drastically increases the number of heat waves we see in extreme temperature events that we see, and hot weather is a key ingredient to bush fire weather.

This is another case of the butterfly effect. While it may seem great to have these bursts of extreme weather events, and I'm looking at you DC with those summer days in January, it was lovely. We're seeing this happen more and more off. Our frequency is increasing.

Yes, And this is just like contractions when somebody's about to have a baby. So as those contractions become more and more intense and they get closer and closer together, that baby coming out.

And that baby is warm air, and.

Also warmer air can hold more moisture. So for every degree celsius temperatures rise, approximately seven percent more moisture can be stored in the atmosphere and it doesn't have to rain out.

So now we're talking about warmer air and no relief from that warmer air because your atmosphere just holds onto the water says I could take a little more water. You know, Normally, if it can't hold more water, it will rain.

And eventually it will rain out. But it can just sit there, and you know, because it can hold more moisture, there's more evaporation going on and that can exacerbate droughts and therefore bush fire weather too.

So not only is it warmer, is warmer and is not raining and is taking water away from from the vegetation, from the plants and creating basically starter fuel for these fires.

So if you look at maps of last year of Australia, it was our hottest year and our driest year on record, and a lot of that area, or some of that area at least, is where we've had these really bad bushfires, especially in the southeast.

Knowing this, knowing that the climate is continuing to change, we can predict that what's happening in Australia isn't just a blip on the radar. This is the new landscape.

These fires that we've seen this season will become much more commonplace when the earth is warmed by about two and a half degrees celsius.

Here's the thing to remember. Climate change is global, so Australia isn't the only place likely to be affected this way, and we've already.

Seen that this can happen anywhere else, especially Mediterranean climates. So I think the climate of California, even with wildfires in Canada, certain parts of Europe, weather like this where it's hotter and drier is projected for the future, which consequently can equal a lot more bushfires. So you know, on top of that with the bushfires, we're going to

So what can we do to help mitigate the effects of a change in climate? Doctor Perkins Kirkpatrick gave us two big things to think about.

One of them is planning ahead, So.

We need to work out as communities how it can best adapt to the conditions that are lie ahead. As well, so you know what resources do we need to throw at an emergency when it occurs. Are we best prepared to handle higher hospital missions during a heat wave, for example, or do we have enough firefighters when a push fire does occur. We really need to be forward thinking and forward planning as a society in those ways too.

The other way we can work against climate change is to start at home with us.

We all need to collectively work together to reduce our emissions, so we need to put pressure on our governments. We also need to do our bits. So choose wisely with the products that you buy. Choose wisely with what you put in your mouth, Choose wisely with how you buy and use your energy. You know, try and use green energy where possible. If you can grow some food at home, even if it's just herbs, use public transport. These all

This is a great point and it's really eye opening.

It really is, because I mean, we all feel like we know what climate change is and what it does but this really kind of like open up and shine a light on a whole area climate change that some of us in the United States don't really think about.

And this is nothing new. We have to do something different. You can think back to the fires in California in twenty sixteen, same thing, climate related, right, and today we only put fires under the magnifying glass. But if you think about it, there's a flip side to that too, when we talk about extreme events. If a fire is coming through and burning up all your vegetation, there's no root system to hold anything in place in the grain. And we saw this in California after that fire season

Right, So what the roots do in the plant systems is that they hold the ground together. They're not there just for no reason. They helped this earth stay together.

Yes, now we're crumbling.

Or when you have excessive rains later because you've held all this moisture, when your atmosphere finally does rain, it's a lot of rain and the ground's really dry and everything's dead.

There's nothing to absorb that water.

Exactly. That's what's happening in my plant currently. I haven't watered in a while. I tried to put water in and it just came out the bottom.

I think the other thing that we didn't get the chance to touch on today in this interview is about the who else is affected. It's easy to say, oh, that's happening in Australia, but it's all of us, okay, because there are even reports that smoke from the fires in Australia has drifted over.

To South America. America, do you below us?

Yes, we all have to work together collectively to stop these types of events when they happen, because we all feel the downstream effects exactly.

It just goes back to what we have said in a number of labs. It's about being a global citizen that's right, and doing your part for the overall good for everyone on this planet. You know, this is something that we've talked about, emergency preparedness and readiness.

Yes, we need to rethink what that looks like.

Absolutely, these natural disasters are becoming more frequent. We have to know ways to save ourselves when these things happen. Because the fires in Australia, they they happened, they started so quickly and spread so rapidly that a lot of people just didn't have the time to get out and to prepare.

So let's start looking ahead, let's start thinking different.

That's it for Lab twenty two. Don't forget to check out our website or a cheat sheet on today's episode. You can find it and sign up for our newsletter at Dope labspodcast dot com. Also, we'd love hearing from you.

What do you think about today's lab?

What are your ideas for future labs? Our number is two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight.

You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcast, tt is on Twitter at d R Underscore t Sho.

And you can find Zakiya at z Said.

So follow us on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Special thanks to our guest doctor Sarah Perkins Kirkpatrick. We have some links to her work and some resources she provided if you want to learn more about what's happening.

And some links on how you can help with the effort in Australia.

This episode of Dope Labs is produced by Jenny rattlet Mass of Wave Runner Studios and Elizabeth Nikano mixing and sound designed by Hannis Brown, special thanks to Masako Fukui.

Original theme music is by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Alex Harvey.

Dope Labs is a production of Spotify Studios and Mega Owned Media Group, and it's executive produced by Us and Zakiah Wattley.

Do you say toboggan her hat?

I say winter hat, winter hat?

Oh God, I've always known these little knit hats as Toboggo's. I asked somebody that and they told me I was a hundred for calling it a tobago. My mother asked me to buy her a hat while we were in Michigan. She said it's too cold outside for ladies hats. I was like, I don't know what a lady hat is. What what's a lady hat. It's a stock of fashion hat that doesn't come in the ears.

Everybody knows that.

So you and my mother are on the same page.