Learn From The Past

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
22 Feb 2009

During the Victorian bushfires one political leader explained on the radio that both sides of politics believed in global warming.  Earlier he had claimed everyone did, although he backed off that acknowledging some sceptics.

Fortunately the fact that many people have a particular belief does not guarantee its truth.  Remember the millennium bug?  Tens of millions of dollars were spent to avoid a shutdown because of the fear that computers would be unable to cope with the year 2000.  Trillions of dollars worldwide have been lost around the world recently because bad decisions were taken based on mistaken beliefs.

Some aspects of the future cannot be prophesied with any certainty as humans are notoriously unpredictable.  Even the Old Testament prophets, who were generally unpopular and persecuted during their lifetime, were more useful interpreting their own times than they were when writing enigmatically about the future.

We cannot be sure what the weather will be next week, let alone in ten or twenty or one hundred years.  But we do know that over the decades and centuries the weather has changed, sometimes spectacularly.  My home town of Ballarat in Victoria was in drought in the 1930s, although it never seemed to stop raining in the 1950s and has now been in drought for almost ten years.

In coping with our day to day difficulties we should study the past, especially the recent past, not assuming automatically that our situation is novel and unique.  Far better to look at the reports of the Royal Commissions or enquiries after earlier bushfires than rely on computer programmes for the future, which are only as good as the assumptions of their programmers.

Computers regularly perform wonders of computation and analysis, but have one vital flaw.  They cannot think for themselves, and therefore are without common sense or "nous".  They can only do as they are told!

The largest Victorian bushfire during European settlement in Australia was not this year, but in 1851.

On Black Thursday February 6, 1851 after a fierce summer Melbourne's temperature hit 117?F (or 47?C), almost the same as the temperature on Black Saturday.  Bushfires then covered the scarcely populated state from Gabo Island on the Eastern extremity of Gippsland to the South Australian border.  Ships in Bass Strait had their decks covered with ash and dead leaves.  Some fires north of Melbourne had a front of about 90 kilometres.

Especially in Gippsland the smoke changed day into night.  One witness said the sun was like "a ball of red hot iron" while the absence of radio and television meant that rumours and terror increased together.  The heat alone killed small birds, which dropped from the sky.

Black clouds reached northern Van Dieman's Land and some there feared the end of the world was near!

The 1851 fire caused fewer deaths but burnt out ten times the area destroyed this year.