Greens ramp up climate war as fires burn

Dr Di Natale said for decades it has been known that burning climate changing fossil fuels would lead to more frequent and intense bushfires.

"Yet with Queensland and New South Wales burning, the Coalition government refuses to acknowledge this scientific reality and instead wants to use taxpayer dollars to fund new coal-fired power stations." he said in a statement on Sunday.

"Every politician, lobbyist, pundit and journalist who has fought to block serious action on climate change bears responsibility for the increasing risk from a heating planet that is producing these deadly bushfires."

His climate change spokesman Adam Bandt made similar comments on Saturday, drawing a scathing attack from Deputy Prime Minister and Nationals Leader Michael McCormack, saying it was "despicable".

Mr Bandt had said the prime minister bore some responsibility for the bushfires.

A fired-up Mr McCormack said people who have either lost or are about to lose their home, don't need to hear politicians coming out and starting to play the blame game.

"Adam Bandt should start thinking very much about that before he makes such stupid and absolute callous comments like that," he told reporters after being briefed on the bushfires in Queensland at the Fire and Emergency Services Deployment Centre in Warana on Sunday.

"Comments coming from a little Melbourne apartment from a little individual with a little mind should not be accepted or tolerated at this time."

But Dr Di Natale compared that sort of response to one frequently made by the US gun lobby.

"Just as lobbyists for the US gun industry trot out calls of 'too soon' after every mass shooting, so too are the pro-coal advocates attacking anyone who dares connect these fires to the climate crisis," he said.

"But to be silent now is to endanger the lives of Australians."

Australian Associated Press