ANALYSIS
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The figures tell the story. As of Thursday, there were 1.6 million hectares on fire in New South Wales. That's more than the entire area burnt in the previous three years, according to the NSW Rural Fire Service.
It's been a bad season. It started in winter, and summer is barely a few days old. The season is getting longer. It will get worse.
In Canberra, the air was thick with the smoke from the North Black Range fire. Smoke clouds Sydney. Fires are only stopping at the coast in some places.
And there was this from just over the Tasman Sea: "Australian bush fires bring smoky haze, stunning sunsets and high temperatures to NZ," says the New Zealand Herald.
And beyond our corner of the planet, it seems like the world sees an apocalypse: "Australia suffers the largest wave of fires since 2001," the Spanish national paper, El Pais says.
The Sun in Britain was even less restrained: "DIED ALONE. Man killed in Australia bushfires warned of 'apocalypse' in chilling last Facebook posts showing him trapped by inferno."
"Bushfires, drought and heat waves: Australia prepares for tough summer," the China Daily warned. In America, the Washington Post wrote of Sydney "choking... beneath a smoky veil".
It's true that the fate of koalas sometimes seems to play stronger than the fate of humans - but Australia's bushfires resonate everywhere.
It's as though they're triggered a universal nagging question: is this a sign of catastrophic change in what we are all used to - as weather and the way we all live?
The NSW fires in figures:
- More than 2 million hectares burnt since July 1
- 7350 fires to the end of November
- 673 homes destroyed
- 4790 houses saved
It's a tribal political matter. The left points to the fires as irrefutable evidence of the way global warming threatens our economy and our comfortable way of life, particularly the future lives of our children.
The right says nonsense. NSW deputy premier John Barilaro said it was a "bloody disgrace" to mention climate change during the bushfire crisis.
Culture wars are fought on the burnt ground: Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack spoke of "all those other inner-city raving lunatics" who made politics out of fire.
What do the experts say about global warming?
Despite the hot air from that bloke with opinions in the bar (and some right-wing commentators), there is an overwhelming consensus among the best scientists that global warming is happening and that humans burning carbon fuels like oil and coal are, at least partly, causing the rise.
As the American Academy of Sciences put it: "The vast preponderance of evidence, based on years of research conducted by a wide array of different investigators at many institutions, clearly indicates that global climate change is real, it is caused largely by human activities, and the need to take action is urgent."
The Australian Academy of Science is made up of scientists who are recognised as the country's best. Many of them have global reputations.
Its information sheet says: "The number of extreme fire risk days has grown over the past four decades, particularly in south-east Australia and away from the coast.
"Future hotter and drier conditions, especially in southern Australia, are likely to cause further increases in the number of high fire-risk days and in the length of the fire season."
The cause is twofold. Firstly, higher temperatures probably mean drier plants - the fuel for fire (though in some areas higher temperatures may mean more, rather than less, rain, which could mitigate the risk of fire).
And, secondly, the Academy's experts say plant-growing seasons may well lengthen because carbon dioxide fertilises plants, and the more carbon fuels we burn the more carbon dioxide gets pumped out.
"This is known as the CO2 fertilisation effect, and it will ultimately create more fuel for a potential fire," the academy's experts say.
They add that "warmer temperatures at night and during winters will also lengthen the growing season of many plants".
The upshot is that bushfires are more likely to happen, and to happen earlier.
They will also likely spread further, according to Professor Glenda Wardle of the University of Sydney.
"Drier, hotter and windier conditions increase the likelihood that fires will spread. Flammable vegetation such as eucalypt woodlands in NSW will also increase the chance of fires spreading," she said.
The current drought means that "trees are dying and fuel loads are very dry, leading to dangerous conditions for fires to burn more intensely and spread fast," she added.
"Under climate change, droughts are going to get longer and come more often, increasing the impact of fires."
But haven't there been bushfires in Australia since time began?
There have.
In February and March, 1926, 31 people died in the Black Sunday fires at Warburton near Melbourne.
On Black Friday in January, 1939, 71 died, again in Victoria.
On Black Tuesday in February, 1967, 62 people died as fires approached Hobart.
In 1974, around 3.5 million hectares burned across Australia. This year, the figure is far short of that number - but still about the same as 1984, the next worst year in recent times.
In NSW this year, the area burned has been more than the area burned in the previous three years combined.
Are fires changing so they are more dangerous and damaging?
The experts say that the fires are changing for the worse.
According to Professor Ross Bradstock, of the University of Wollongong's Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, the 1974 fires in western NSW burned through remote land. Above-average rain had created lush grass which then dried to become abundant fuel.
It's different now in the more forested east of the state, where fires have been driven by a lack of rain.
"We are in pretty much an unprecedented drought," he told The Canberra Times.
Trees are always fuel provided they are dry - and now they're very dry. So are creeks, which in the past have acted as firebreaks, so fires are now spreading over wider areas, sometimes until they reach the sea.
"These typically wet parts of the landscape have literally evaporated, allowing fire to spread unimpeded," Professor Bradstock said.
"The most heavily populated region of the nation is now at critically dry levels of fuel moisture, below those at the time of the disastrous Christmas fires of 2001 and 2013."
What happens right now?
The Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting a hotter than average summer. With no let-up in the drought, higher maximum temperatures plus dryness don't promise firefighters much hope of an easy time.
Bushfires cost money. Destroyed properties have to be rebuilt. Burnt crops are worthless. Insurance companies pay out.
So more bushfires over a longer season means more money going up in smoke - and ultimately that money comes out of our pockets, either as taxes or insurance premiums or as hard cash blown on repairing damage to our own property.
The flames over the hill will burn our finances.
And also public funds which pay for the Rural Fire Service. The NSW RFS, which has borne the burden of the latest fires, has an operating budget (running costs, not including new equipment) of more than $500 million a year. It has a staff of 900 employees, apart from the 72,491 volunteers cited in its annual report.
Some of those volunteers are, in effect, funded by employers who pay the volunteers' wages while they are absent at the firefront. Others fund themselves, in that they work hard for no pay.
Is that sustainable as the season for fires gets longer? Will the taxpayer need to stump up more? Will employers accept longer absences from their public-spirited firefighting employees?
On the latest figures from the insurance industry, the damage from the bushfires has added up to more than $200 million over the past three months. The Insurance Council of Australia said it received more than 1500 claims in November alone, making the total for the season so far at least 2000 claims. The figures will clearly rise.
There are other costs which are harder to define. For example, the lengthening bushfire season in both California and Australia means that it's harder to share equipment, according to Dr Rachael Nolan of the University of Western Sydney. In the past, the seasons didn't overlap, so helicopters for water bombing on one side of the Pacific could be transferred to the other.
Is it just about money?
Of course, there's a cost beyond mere money. Fire has been crucial to the ecology of Australia probably since time began. It clears and renews.
But the extent of fires may now be threatening some species, particularly where the fires have obliterated previously unburnt areas of refuge for animals.
Koalas aren't threatened with extinction in Australia but they are having a harder time of it, and not just because of climate change - towns encroach on their habitat, and disease ravages populations.
But in some areas, fires are a serious threat to them. "More than 80 bushfires have destroyed thousands of hectares of good koala habitat, with hundreds of koalas feared dead," Dr Valentina Mella, of the University of Sydney, said.
"Koalas that live in already fragmented habitats and survive the fires will struggle to find available habitat to recolonise."
What should be done?
"There is no magical solution," Professor Ross Bradstock said.
He believes more numerous and worse bushfires will mean we keep doing what we do now - but more cleverly.
Many old buildings have windows which aren't very resistant to fire, for example. Better materials would help. They are available, but they cost money.
Embers enter structures under eaves. That should be looked at - and that will cost money.
There may need to be much more clearance of vegetation from areas around buildings.
"What we get now is what we pay for. We may have to spend more money," Professor Bradstock said.