If you’re suggesting that Clive was pushing an agenda as well, well if he was it’s an agenda with a stronger scientific basis for the moment than the fuel load hypothesis at this point, even if it’s not directly testable.

If the inquiry reveals that fuel load and forestry management was a direct cause, then let it be addressed. Let the cranks, as I called them, enjoy their victory, because we’ll all benefit and lives will be saved. Until that point, however, attributing blame to the Greens is disgraceful and thoroughly unwarranted.

But as I demonstrated with the links in my comment on the Rundle story it’s not physically possible to hazard reduce all the millions of hectares of forested land, which are also water catchments. There are not enough safe low season days to do it. So it has to be done strategically. This is the expert evidence of Koperberg and others.

Then it’s an issue of buffers, planning, construction materials, siting at the human interface.

The taboo for Tuckey et al really is this: Loggers have patchworked what was a majority closed canopy high humidity forest estate so now barely 10% by proportion is majestic wet old growth. Not many people have actually been in a real moist wet old growth forest pumping water into the humidity. As I said there’s barely 10% of the forest estate left since 50 years of highly mechanised logging, D9, modern chainsaw, the woodchip maw sending 8 million tonnes in chips to Japan etc. per year. Even parks are usually post logging.

This patchworking has dried out our forests not just in blocks but across landscapes. My fear is there is no way back from this dry downward spiral. Such giant trees as shown on my blog were 400 or 500 years old in many cases, and themselves the climax stage of a 1000 year process from dry highly flammable sclerophyl. In many places they were stable closed canopies for 10,000 years to the last ice age.

Then people like Tuckey blundered in like a bull in the china shop and f*cked them and the water cycle good and proper. And that’s before even mentioning routine regeneration burns after every logging operation in native forest. You would have to be gullible to think none of those flare up even weeks later in a hot north wind. I’ve heard an eye witness report on the south coast here of just that at Deua from school teacher and greenie Peter Woof.

Germaine Greer was characteristically helpful, but my favourite was the opinion piece in the Guardian which wondered, among other things, why these people who have their houses burn down are so obtuse as to refuse to replace them with humpies or caravans at the very least. A certain kind of British leftie would be lapping it up, you just know it.

Men like Tucky piss in the waters of science for their own egotistical amusement, and the truth is lost in the cloudy broth.

Whether it’s Conroy trying to squeeze gloves onto the internet, global warming debate based on recycled blog posts, any and every form of criminal activity being labelled as terrorism, or economic rhetoric that sounds like it came from the crusades.

To quote a music man - what about the age of reason?

That Tuckey is an old duffer is not in dispute. But his argument about forestry management are an old chestnut and he does have support at least on that score.

Quite frankly, Tuckey is a more creditable than the unedifying deceit displayed by Messrs Mann and Henson.

And if you think that Governments and Environmental lobbyist haven’t promoted lock up and forget policies when it comes to land management, then tell me why I recieved a letter from a government department offering to pay me to destock my land and fence it off for conservation? I know after having been in a State Forests, risking my life fighting a fire while watching bull-dozers roaring around at the last moment pushing out firebreaks, that in many cases that the lack of hazard reduction is the result of it just being forgotten about. In the letter I received there was no mention to how the build up of fuels would be managed on this area of land, and as a private landholder I am already daunted by the complexity of landclearing laws in relation to my legal requirement to perform adequate fire hazard reduction on my own land.

In relation to Global Warming, planting trees isn’t going to do much good if they all are going to go up in smoke. If you aren’t going to implement a management process to prevent thirty year build-ups of fuel in dry schlerophyll bushland, you might as well drop up bomb on them as far as conservation goes.