Australia's deputy Prime Minister has fired up environmentalists by calling them "raving inner-city lunatics" for linking the fires to climate change.
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As the smoke starts to choke Sydney, the firestorms are turning into political storms.
One-thousand protestors gathered outside New South Wales' parliament demanding urgent climate action on Tuesday morning.
People are furious that the government continues to deny climate change is supercharging natural disasters.
The protests ignited when the deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, called environmentalists "inner-city raving lunatics" for making the link.
"What people need now is a little bit of sympathy, understanding and real assistance, they need help - they need shelter... why is it wrong to ask those questions?" the Nationals leader told ABC Radio National on Monday.
"They don't need the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies."
"The only raving lunatics are the people saying we don't have to worry about the climate crisis," countered Australian Greens MP, Adam Bandt.
Australia's response to climate change has seen growing emissions, coal dependency and a lack of policy and action.
All of which, science tells us, is feeding the country's chronic drought and high temperatures.
Yet faced with all this, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has so far refused to answer questions about the climate emergency contributing to the fires.
One protestor took his message directly to the Prime Minister.
"The planet is at a stage where we must declare a climate emergency, you cannot leave it any longer," said the protester.
Many see the fires and the drought that preceded them as clear evidence of the effects of climate change.
Not just inner-city greenies, either - a growing number of rural residents are demanding action too.
"All the dams and rivers and creeks are dry and we need to look at what we're going to do about that in the future.. to deny climate change is to me a very ill-informed and uneducated way of looking at things," said Glen Innes' mayor, Carol Sparks.
"He has known what he needs to do to minimise the impact of the fires and he has done the exact opposite," said Bandt.
Perhaps the catastrophic nature of these fires could bring about change to more than just the landscape.
Newshub.
