ABC TV News24 particularly Joe O’Brien has been shamelessly milking this story from NT making a wink wink connection to “climate change”. Spontaneous combustion in haystacks is a well known phenomena as explained by the ABC’s own Dr Karl. There must be mass sackings in the GreenLeft AgitProp machine that is the ABC.
Warwick,
Good use of the link to the Dr Karl story. Natural sponcoms occur more frequently than most people realise. As Dr Karl’s story points out it is just a case of right conditions/right time. It is effectively an incubation process not really an ignition one as most academics would have you believe.
Quite often things can fall over in the incubation stage, so no ignition ever occurs. Hence the smouldering lawn clippings or wood chips, which often contain too much moisture to reach ignition. Always looks impressive though when they do ignite. Not so good if your in an underground coal mine of course.
cheers, Basil
When I was younger we lived on some property in southern Oregon . The property was once an old saw mill mostly grown over except an area about one acre that still had large amounts of sawdust mixed in with the soil. Every summer when the ground would warm up, there would be patches that would spontaneously combust and smoulder / burn . Some of these areas would burn out and other patches would get quite large. Didn’t really make a connection with that phenomenon with climate change back then.
I was taught about spontaneous combustion in hay that had been baled or stacked too green, when I was a child. That was in the 1940s and early 1950s.
Anyone who has worked in fire surveillance as I have, is aware of this phenomenon. Nothing new or getting worse here at all.
Basil Beamish:
> ” Not so good if your in an underground coal mine of course”
Or a large stockpile that has sat a bit too long waiting for an increase in market price.
[Both Basil and myself know this scenario has occurred often enough. The cleanup mess it makes is wondrous]
O/T, but the BoM have released ACORN2, minus error bars or anything approaching full documentation, but inexplicably lowering earlier temperatures which fortuitously increases the recent warming rates. Cue now, Defenders of the Realm.