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You're more than welcome!

I aim to be sceptical when taking on new ideas or information, and all the questions people have are very reasonable.

It's hard to even imagine the size and ferocity of these fires.

The problem is when being sceptical twists into being dismissive. It's actually really easy to do a bit of research and contact professors - but it takes time.

When I first clicked through to the University of Sydney's statement, and clicked on Professor Dickman's profile, I was left reeling by the sheer volume of research the man has done on exactly these problems. In our emails he had an anecdote about jumping over fire fronts while researching them when he was younger.

The scariest part is that the estimates given were for less catastrophic events. They are a low bound based on previous understanding, and this is a far worse event than ever seen before. I highly recommend people reading the linked article, and follow the references therein.



Do you know how he reconciles the vastly different death rate estimates from the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires with these ones?

Black Saturday: 1M animals killed with 400K hectares burnt = 2.5 animals/hectare

These fires: 1B dead with 8.5M hectares burnt = 117 animals/hectare

I don't know how the Black Saturday estimates were done, just that the source was the RSPCA.




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