The Bush fires have killed 18 people.

They've killed close to 1/2 a 1,000,000,000 animals there over twice as big as the Amazon forest fires.

And they're exerting extreme political pressure on Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Earlier, he was heckled in Khobar Go in New South Wales.

They're Two people have died and many homes have been lost.

The Guardian has compared its main street before and after the fires on its residents wanted to talk to the prime minister.

You are no way.

And here he is meeting another angry resident wants to talk about more support for the rural Fire Service to get more funding.

Are so many people way okay?

The prime minister shaking a woman's hand and then walking away as she continued to talk about the help her community needs.

He then encountered a firefighter.

He was equally un infused at the idea of shaking his hand.

Okay, well after these encounters, Scott Morrison said he wasn't surprised that people are feeling very raw, and certainly this crisis is bringing incredible pressure on many Australians here.

Some of the most recent pictures, these are from Victoria and you can see the scale of not just the fires but the volume of smoke that's being generated.

Many of these is so big they're even forming their own weather events, which can then generate lightning, which then in turn sparks more fires.

These pictures, released by firefighters in New South Wales, again show us the extreme conditions in which these men and women are working.

For Scott, these pictures from a small town in New South Wales called Margot the devastation is all but complete.

And because of all of this, thousands of Australians have decided they need to leave the areas affected, in part because conditions were predicted toe worsen over the weekend with more hyper temperatures on mawr strong winds.

Because of all of this, New South Wales has declared a week long state of emergency.

That is partly because of the calculation that the threat level is likely to increase rather than decrease, another way of viewing.

The scale of this is this satellite image, which shows you the volume of smoke spreading across much of the state.

Or you can look at the crisis in terms of figures the Amazon bushfires of last year but through 900,000 hectares.

The California wildfires of 2018 went through 800,000 hectares in just New South Wales.

In Australia, more than four million hectares have been burnt in the last six months.

That's brought devastating human costs on devastating environmental costs to Ecologist at the University of Sydney, or estimating 480 million animals have been killed by these fires.

Qualities have been terribly affected.

8000 estimated to have died.

With that in context, that's around 1/3 of the koala population in New South Wales.

So let's hear more from Australians who have been caught up in this story avoidable just going through it.

About 80 Kalyan now in the house.

And then we ran into the like and the old members and everything.

We're hitting this button here a little bit and were in there for about an hour before we got rescued or something like that.

Stairs, you know, face.

It's very frightening, so I'd like to thank everybody the best something for me.

I think someone's dropped a bomb on us.

Basically, that's what it feels like.

So he have embargo on the coast, moved north in the direction of Sydney and you'll come to a town called Con Jola, also in New South Wales.

The BBC show I'm a Khalil is there the extent of the damage that these huge fires have caused here in late condolence is all around.

Homes have been ravaged.

The earth is scorched, still smoldering, still hot.

You can feel the smoke.

Three people died in the small community alone, one of them just up the street.

Over here.

This is one of the coastal towns where tourists have been given 48 hours to evacuate.

Many of them have been trying to get out.

It's been very hard for them to leave because the conditions around us are still quite hazardous.

Residents are still in shock at what happened to their town.

Some have left when the fires hit other state to defend their homes.

We could see it coming, and then it was jumping from house to house.

We had nearly I.

It houses a lot, you know.

Did we?

So to change it that we were survived?

Yeah, it's pretty traumatic.

That's one resident of Khan Jola, and this image was photographed in his town.

It's been featured on many front pages around the world was taken by the photo journalist Matthew Abbate.

He tweeted My last day of the Decade.

Felt like the Apocalypse have been covering the fires for the last six weeks.

But I haven't seen anything like yesterday's fire that decimated the town of con Jola and has been speaking to the BBC.

I came down the main street on this one.

House was on fire.

Um, you know there was what the neighbors to put the house out, you know, trying to remove garbage bins that were melting and trying to take their own properties with with hoses.

It's a dangerous job.

There are times when you know you kind of wondering, you know, shotguns road or should show hold back.

But it's very important for photographers to be able to be there and see these things as they happen on.

But this image is probably is testament to that.

It's being seen around the world on, and it is not dear, just just how serious this current cross costs his forest problems.

There's controller on the map goes south, and you get to the coastal town of Mala Kuta in Victoria.

People, they're about to take shelter on the beach.

They did so on New Year's Eve.

Incredibly, this image was taken during the daytime.

You may well have seen this image widely shared of an 11 year old boy steering his family to safety in a boat there.

Now we know that dozens of homes have already been destroyed in this town, and it's also becoming hard to get help into the people who were there.

There's only one road in Mala cuter that gets you in an ouse and its cut off.

That means thousands of people trapped.

That also means the Australian navy is starting to work on getting people out by boat.

So we had the opportunity today to potentially move there.

About 500 people out of Malek Oudeh.

The interesting thing about it at the moment is some people may not want to leave.

They may want to stay in their with their with their four wheel drives and their caravans until such time as they may be able to get out by road.

That could be a number of weeks that could be 2 to 3 weeks.

At this stage, meteorologists always tell you it's impossible to link a specific extreme weather event with climate change, then also reticent, though, when talking about temperatures in Australia across the last century coming from 1910 warmer and warmer and warmer in particular.

Increases in the last 25 years.

And these long term temperature increases are connected to climate change, which in turn is caused by human activity.

And we know there have been record temperatures throughout these weeks when the bush fires have spread.

All of which means some Australians argue the fires are a moment of reckoning.

Bridget Delaney is a journalist with Guardian Australia, she says.

Maybe these fires will be Australia's Sandy Hook Parkland moment.

We urge the government to do something, and if they don't create a meaningful climate policy after this epic destructive summer, they probably never will.

Now we've seen this view widely shared the idea that if this doesn't shift the debate, perhaps nothing will.

I will have to see.

But the government so far has yet to move an inch on its climate policies, and the prime minister, Scott Morrison, might argue he doesn't need to.

He says he's already acknowledged the link between reducing emissions and reducing the risks of bushfire seasons like this one.

It's worth remembering, though, Mr Morrison's deputy said of arguments linking these bushfires to climate change that they were the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies, and he's still the deputy prime minister.

Prime minister also argues that Australia is keeping its side of the bargain on climate change.

Here's more from him on this.

What we will do is insure that our policies remain sensible, that they don't move towards either extreme and stay focused on what Australians need for a vibrant and viable economy as well as a vibrant and sustainable environment.

Getting the balance right is what Australia I think it's always been able to achieve.

But right now the fighters, as I said at the outset, is to fight these fires and to get people to safety.

The prime minister is talking about balance.

Let's have a little more context on that.

Australia is the world's third largest exporter of fossil fuels.

You can see Russia, Saudi Arabia one and two, Australia third and the majority of those fossil fuel exports are coal.

In 2018 Australia exported $42 billion worth of coal.

And of course, fossil fuels are an enormous contributor to global warming.

But as the prime minister alluded to, they also create lots of jobs.

Around 50,000 workers in Australia connected to the fossil fuel industry, and we know that around 60% of Australia's electricity comes from coal fired power stations.

Indeed, last year a new coal mine was approved increased, but the way the Australians a calculating their emissions is also being challenged.

More broadly, this is all part of the Paris climate change agreement.

The government says it's not doing anything wrong, but the woman who created the Paris accord, a former French government ministers, said that actually, if the Australians are continuing to count as they do, this is just cheating their extreme pressures again.

Coming on Australia on its approach to this issue now the hottest temperatures on record in Australia.

Unprecedented bushfires.

He might think this was a guaranteed lead story in the Australian news media.

It's for some is The Sydney Morning Herald.

Escaping the red zone is its headline, but here we have the Australian newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, known to lean to the right politically.

Its main pictures about horse racing.

Its main story is about a yet to be confirmed proposal to restrict alcohol sales in Western Australia and you can see the bushfires are positioned here on the left and we saw something similar before Christmas to on the day after Australia's highest temperatures on record.

The Australian lead With Asia's cold hunger to lift exports, more evidence that these fires are more broadly climate change and how they're covered in the media are profoundly political.

In Australia, the conclusions people draw about what's causing these current bushfires will impact on how Australians view climate change, how they view their fossil fuel industry, how they want their economy to be structured.

And that's why the media, politicians, the people are all paying close attention, not just to what's happening but the conclusions that are drawn.

Here's more on that point from Atika, book correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, based here in London, Australia's well used to bushfires But this extremity, this intensity this degree Australia is not seen before, and these are the worst in in living memory.

And so while people run around in Australia saying, Hey, this is not to do with climate change.

Australia's always be in this country of droughts, off fires and floods.

That's true.

But the climate change scientists of always says that this is what would happen.

Those things would become more intense.

Those things would become more extreme.

And now people are dealing with this inferno on their doorsteps.

They're saying, their houses raised, their homes lost and in many instances, lives gone.

Scott Morrison has dealt with this extremely badly, as you can see from that footage now, he was overseas on holiday in Hawaii, when these fires really did start to get quite intense on there were lives lost.

At that point, he was forced to come back.

I think he resented that.

And now he is trying here to say to his supporters, This is in climate change because the moment he accept that this used to do with climate change.