[crispinb]

Ignition sources are pretty much a constant so don't remotely explain a truly dramatic rise in the extent and ferocity of forest fires. Eucalyptus has been flammable for millennia. Tasmania and Queensland have seen fires in forests and forest types (rainforest!) that literally haven't burned for thousands of years. The RFS is having to redraw its boundary maps because longstanding firebreak forests are no longer firebreaks. What were permanently wet forests are now dry. My local council is having to rethink housing planning permissions because longstanding truths about which vegetation types are safe to build around are themselves going up in flames.

As for hazard reduction burns, these have been on the increase for years. The rate of increase has been hard to sustain, because the fire season has been rapidly extending, and reducing the windows of opportunity for burning. There's certainly scope to draw on indigenous understanding of cool burns, but that's not something that is likely to happen quickly at scale.

Simplistic notions of 'proof' are no more pertinent to assessing the evidence on the relationship between climate collapse and forest fires than they were with lung cancer and smoking. These are complex systems we're talking about. We just have to assess prior scientific knowledge and multiple lines of empirical evidence as best we can. University-based research, the CSIRO, and relevant on-the-ground forest management and firefighting agencies have been predicting an increase in forest fires consequent on expected climate change patterns in Australia for many years. This has now come to pass. If people have alternative explanations, these would be bolstered by, preferably, pointing out where they similarly predicted the increase in forest fires, and then making their predictions for what will happen in the coming decades.