I used to think Australia was the safest place to be because it would be relatively safe if there was a limited nuclear strike in the Northern hemisphere. But I’ve rethought my emergency plans. It appears that Australia is the first continent to be rendered inhabitable by climate change.
Thousands of people in Australia’s southeastern seaside town of Mallacoota were forced to seek refuge on the beach and even boats in the water early Tuesday as deadly blazes closed in around the popular holiday destination to create an apocalyptic-looking scene of huddled evacuees under dark red skies.
As wildfires grip Australia in one of its worst fire seasons in memory, the threat is especially intense this week in southeastern states such as Victoria and New South Wales, where most of the country’s population lives…
…Fires this week have forced road closures, caused cellphone and power outages, and destroyed homes — and show few signs of relenting. The language in the flurry of alerts from local fire services is dire: “It is too late to leave. Seek shelter in a solid structure to protect yourself. Be aware of the danger of falling trees and branches,” read the bullet points of a Wednesday morning alert…
…In the capital, Canberra, the typical high temperature during December is 81.5 degrees (27.5 Celsius); over the weekend, temperatures hit 100 degrees (37.7 Celsius). The heat this spring and summer has shattered all-time records in Australia. The country had its hottest day on record on Dec. 18, when the national average maximum temperature hit 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius), beating the record, which was set the day before.
And, of course, Australians just rejected a party dedicated to tackling climate change in favor of the “Drill, baby, drill” coalition.
Happy New Year!
My comment over a decade ago that it was only a matter of how “green” Australia’s government would be (either a Labor/Green coalition or a Green/Labor coalition) really did not age well. Australia was also a bit more vulnerable than many of us to the thinning of the ozone layer when that was a genuine worry back when I was in my teens. When it comes to the only planet we can call home, there are no safe havens. We have no choice but to be better stewards. Screw our generations. We owe that to our kids and grandkids.
Not sure how likely a snap election is…probably not. That said, the opposition should be pouncing on Morrison’s tone-deafness to the climate emergency that his fellow Aussies are facing right on the front lines. He was on vacay with his family in Hawaii when the wildfires really first started getting bad. He’s been dismissive of proactive measures to deal with the climate crisis. He fiddles while Australia burns….literally.
The week before I went to Rotterdam, the high temps were over 27 degrees Celsius (over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, approximately). That’s almost unheard of, from what I understand. Thankfully, I arrived after the heat broke, and I got the standard Rotterdam experience for just past the Summer Solstice – mild, sometimes rainy and a bit windy, comfortable. If my meeting had happened a week earlier, I would have managed – I live in the South, where those temps come with the territory. All the walking would have been less enjoyable. But the thought did get me thinking at the time of just how few safe havens there really are when we think about the climate crisis. If I could move one more time, it most likely would be far to the north. My gut tells me that although affected more by climate change, the environs would remain more inhabitable, which might be meaningful to my kids and eventual grandkids. That’s the closest I have to a dream anymore.
Vancouver Seattle area is the one least effected for the next 50 or so years according to current analysis.
I’m no climatologist, so I will defer to their judgment. But that might be a fairly stable enough area for a bit. Actually called that area home a long time ago. Would not mind going back. Who knows. Just would make sure to have a/c in the apartment just in case.
Regrettably, the Northwest is also very susceptible to brush fires and forest fires. Many of the areas I would likely wish to relocate could easily be devastated. There are no safe havens. There are some places that might offer a little more shelter, but that’s all. I was looking at old photos I took on a really crappy Kodack TeleInstamatic camera in my teens of Glacier National Park around 1984 or so. The glaciers and waterfalls were incredible. So were the glaciers around Banff National Park in Canada. I have meant to get back out that way for ages. I doubt I recognize these places. If I can make a photoshoot of those areas a possibility in the next few years, I will do so, and put them side by side the shite photos I took when I was young. If I am already out that way, I will make sure to drive to the Olympia peninsula area and get some photos of what remains of a beautiful temperate rainforest. Those should be experienced before our hubris as a species destroys them.
You mean uninhabitable….
Anyhow this basically shows K Drum is right. No one anywhere left or right wants to make any of the real sacrifices that are required to actually deal with climate change.
In my opinion the only real option is to pour unthinkable sums into R&D and get ready for massive geoengineering. We should also continue to support renewables but nothing but a miracle is going to save us.
There are a few things we can do. First and foremost is to lose the Orange Turd. Then we may have a chance to reform a group of nations to fight this thing. Fuck the tariff wars. Secondly, there are people out there who track this stuff and they likely have some ideas. Even the young lady from Sweden can help. Maybe not a bad idea to gather them together to work this problem, you know like a full time job. The consequences of failing could be catastrophic. Failure means large areas of the world will become uninhabitable to human life and many species will disappear. And don’t get too comfortable about migration. It will increase as will food shortages and war is not far behind. No nation will suffer starvation for long.
The scary thing is that everything we do depends on transportation. Take that away, and we will all be wandering around in a fog, not knowing what to do with ourselves or how to function. That may lead us to exercise the other option available to us: fight some wars over water and other resources.
https://twitter.com/_SJPeace_/status/1212593737701965824
Brutal weekend coming up:
https://twitter.com/TIME/status/1212610219563462658
The mid-atlantic area (Piedmont, Appalachians) will receive more rain and temps will be more like Charleston SC than Philadelphia. The coastal plain uplands will be ok but lowlands will receive much more flooding. While that is not great, it’s better than most.
A few years ago I sat in on a graduate-level public policy course on climate change. You could sum up the collective wisdom of the numerous guest speakers/experts about the projected impact of increasing atmospheric carbon levels in five words: “More extreme weather, more frequently.”
More, and more intense, heat waves, droughts, deluges, cold snaps, snowfalls, hurricanes, blizzards, cyclones, etc.
As the first continent to have its ecosystem completely destroyed by man-made climate change, it will be interesting to watch how the “debate” in Australia evolves vis-a-vis denialism and reality. Australia was always going to be one of the first places to go up in the human Pyrocene Era, and had been trending massively hotter in Summer for decades now. The bill has now come due, time to pay up. Unfortunately the major death toll will be among the completely innocent species, with over half a billion individuals likely having been annihilated (so far) in this latest round of infernos.
While the “conservative” Australian denialist movement certainly did its part to create the ongoing conflagrations, as players they were small potatoes compared to the American billionaires that funded the American “conservative” movement, which led the world in turning the (irrefutable) climate crisis into a (bogus) partisan issue, and thus gave aid and comfort to its smaller brethren in other democratic states. The American right is where the true blame for the ongoing destruction of the stable 11,000 year old climate (and ecological diversity of the natural world) really lies.
It turns out that the world’s climate scientists were wrong to gamely (conservatively!) throw out the hope that humanity had a century (or so) to modify its fossil-fuel polluting behavior. In reality we had only a handful of decades—starting from 1990, when the cause of the problem was definitely and inescapably resolved. It’s by now blindingly obvious that the planet will be thoroughly unrecognizable merely 20 years from now. (As if one can “recognize” Australia even now!)
Where to go? Away from the highly beloved coastal areas, certainly those that have any record of receiving hurricanes. The American South generally is already only habitable with the constant use of air conditioning, obviously that technological dependence will only (massively) increase, and life in the Neo-Confederacy will resemble something out of science fiction, where the colonists live on an essentially uninhabitable world and must travel from one climate-controlled enclosure to another. There is no real way to guess where the inundating “Storms of the Century” (i.e. every other year) will fall; of course they will fall everywhere that was once temperate, as the water vapor in the air climbs inexorably higher every year. Ditto severe storms and tornadoes. No escape from those, just playing the climate lottery now.
The human populace generally will flee northward in all areas of the northern hemisphere, just as adaptable species of wildlife are now doing. Canada likely should now start building ITS wall seeking to block the (armed) American barbarian hordes from migrating north. Also it will need to greatly increase its military defense budget, which will be used for ACTUAL defense! As for Australians, they at least can forget about having to deal with roiling issues of immigration, their concern about populace flows will be, um…somewhat different….