Fears Arise That Hundreds of Koalas Burned Alive in Australia Brushfire

It is feared that an out-of-control brushfire has taken the life of more than 350 koalas in a koala habitat in Port Macquarie, a coastal town in New South Wales just over 200 miles north from Sydney, according to CNN.
The fire was triggered by a lightening strike on Monday and has raged all week. It has destroyed nearly 5,000 acres and the smoke from the fire has contributed to hazardous air quality in Sydney, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The intensity of the fire made it impossible for staff at the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital to enter the marsupial's protected habitat.
"I think this is just a national tragedy that we potentially have lost an enormous population of animals in the last 24 hours," said Cheyne Flanagan, a supervisor at the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Sue Ashton, the koala hospital's president, predicted a massive lost for the local koalas.
"If we look at a 50 per cent survival rate, that's around about 350 koalas and that's absolutely devastating," she said, as The Independent reported. "We're hoping it's not as bad as that, but because of the intensity of the fire and the way koala's behave during fire, we're not holding out too much hope."
During a fire, koalas will often climb high into trees and curl into a little ball. It is a terrible strategy for survival since they will live only if the fire quickly moves on below them.
"So often the flames will just go over the top and singe the outside, but with really intense fires it can burn them alive," said Ashton, as the Guardian reported.
This fire has not moved on and it has already decimated a large part of the koalas home.
"So far over two thirds of the current footprint of the fire is prime koala habitat (or was)," said Koala Hospital Port Macquarie in a statement on Facebook. "Crunching the numbers based on koala survey work of the whole LGA (local government area) - it is looking like conservatively based on a 60% mortality that 350 plus koalas have died in the last three days in this fire."
While koalas are not listed as endangered, the marsupial's numbers have plummeted in recent years due to urbanization, habitat destruction, brushfires, road accidents and dog attacks, according to the Australian Koala Foundation, as CNN reported. There are as few as 43,000 koalas left in the wild.
The koala colony that is at the center of the Port Maquarie brushfire is notable for its health and genetic diversity. All too often in Australia, the coastal forests that koalas prefer are cleared for suburban expansion, which leads to isolated colonies that become inbred and diseased, as the AP reported.
"The beauty of this particular population is that it's so genetically diverse that it's of national significance," said Ashton, as the Guardian reported. "A lot of the koalas are being mixed and crossbred now ... so to lose a large part of that population is very devastating."
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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