The recent tragic bushfires reignited the argument about global warming – the science is settled – and burnt the Green-Left to a crisp.

Thanks to the sole Green representative in the federal lower house, inner-Melbourne denizen Adam Bandt and his party leader, Victorian Green Senator Richard di Natale and WA colleague Jordon Steele-John, the re-run of the debate left them totally toasted.

Unfortunately for this trio and their fellow-travelers who subscribe to the global warming cult there was a rush to the files here and abroad which showed, according to the scientific record, that the current drought, high temperatures and accompanying bushfires are nothing new.

Just as there have been higher levels of the demonised carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere over the past millennia when concurrent temperatures have been lower, even unto ice age levels, so too have there been the equivalent bushfires raging across the Australian continent.

Thanks to the National Library’s excellent online resource Trove, which permits searches of the the digitised collection of the nation’s earliest newspapers, the claims of the Greens and their repellent supporters that we have experienced ‘unprecedented’ climatic conditions have been demolished by the citizens’ army of switched-on realists.

The early voyagers cautiously navigating their clumsy vessels around the reef-strewn coastline of our continent constantly and carefully logged their observations of multitudes of fires.

The first settlers could not help noting the regular burning carried out by Aboriginals and until recently, farmers routinely burnt the stubble and conducted what are now called hazard reduction burns in the bush areas adjacent to their properties.

When I was mustering livestock on properties in the Gascoyne and Pilbara a scant fifty years ago, we were encouraged to flick lighted matches into the dry spiky spinifex bushes as we rode past. The columns of black smoke helped alert the other mustering teams to our location and the spinifex sent up tender edible shoots with the next rain. The practice was as much a part of outback culture as a waterbag, billy tea or damper. It helped that all the jackeroos smoked and were able to roll their cigarettes with one hand.

Earlier, the town of Dwellingup, where I spent my childhood, was destroyed by a raging bushfire in 1961, along with five other timber towns nestled in hamlets in the jarrah forests which dominated the Darling Ranges 110 kilometres south of Perth. Dwellingup was rebuilt though our old home wasn’t and neither were the towns of Holyoake, Nanga Book, Marrinup and Banksiadale which now are only memories.

The fires burned through the south-west of WA from 19 January to early March of that year devastating an area measuring 440,000 hectares. Fortunately, in those pre-mobile phone and smart app days, when the volunteer fire brigades relied principally on the timber mill workers crashing along forestry trails in World War II surplus blitz wagons with corrugated iron tanks strapped on their trays, no lives were lost.

What has subsequently occurred of course is the development of the rabid Greens and their insane policies of locking up wilderness areas at great cost to the environment. Vast swathes of the nation have been placed off limits in national parks and in Aboriginal reserves. The forestry trails which once were kept open and permitted regular burn-offs have long been allowed to grow over. The mills have closed and competent foresters have lost their livelihoods. The small communities those mills supported have either become ghost towns or turned over to the communes and hippy dwellers which have in turn elected Green-dominated councils which have fought against hazard reduction burns in their areas.

‘They (greenies) own it,’ Mr Balderstone told the Australian as the fire risk rating leapt to ‘catastrophic’ on 11 November, for the first time since that term was introduced after the Black Saturday fires swept Victoria in 2009. ‘The Greens have to cop it on the head, they have been obsessed with no fires and no burning.’

‘The Aboriginals say it is country gone wild,’ he said. ‘We were just blind to their knowledge.’

Along with the lethal Green policies (six people perished in the November fires in NSW and Queensland), there has also been an increase in the number of arsonists.

In NSW alone, police believe that at least twelve of the bushfires around the state may have been deliberately lit by arsonists during November’s ‘catastrophic’ fire conditions. An arsonist was responsible for the January, 1994 bushfire which swept through the bays of Western Pittwater during that fire season which saw 800,000ha burnt in NSW, 225 homes lost, most in the southern Sydney suburbs, and four lives lost.

Those numbers pale in comparison with the historic 1851 Victorian bushfire which saw a dozen people and a million sheep killed and five million hectares burned. In 1926 Victoria was hit again with 71 killed and in 1944 a further 15, possibly more, lost their lives. In the state’s Black Saturday fires which introduced the ‘catastrophic’ rating, 173 lives were lost. Tasmania has not been spared either with 67 people killed in fires which swept across the island state 22 years ago.

The Greens and the halfwits behind Extinction Rebellion cry ‘climate emergency’ when there is zero evidence that anything new is taking place. What they want, of course, is an extinction of Western civilisation. They hope for the total abolition of anything that relies on fossil fuel products. Petrol, plastics, you name it but they are absolute hypocrites because in their Utopia the Third World would remain just that, a dark and dangerous place to live with no light, no transport and no industry. Should we accede to their demands for a shutdown of coal mines, millions would suffer and as Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel told a parliamentary committee, it would have no impact on global warming. He later issued a clarification explaining that he believed doing nothing is irresponsible but the cat had escaped the bag and the so-called scientific modelling has proven to be bogus.

The science is not in despite the determined effort by the fifth column of global warmists and their useful idiots in the media to convince us all that humans can alter the temperature of this planet in defiance of all the rules of physics under our solar system’s dominating sun. Climate changes. Noah knew it. The Aboriginals knew it. Farmers knew it. Foresters knew it. Get over it.