“Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico may offer a preview for Americans of one of the most jarring potential consequences of global warming: the movement of large numbers of people pushed out of their homes by the effects of climate change.” Christopher Flavelle, writing for Bloomberg
Americans are watching in horror as record wild fires in California spread out of control with rising death tolls daily. In the Caribbean, people are dying and suffering, not only from the reality of the storm’s devastation and aftermath, but the willful misconduct and malfeasance of Donald Trump and other climate change enablers. The images and videos we have witnessed this September and October is what climate change collapse will look like, but becoming even more intense as time slips into the future.
These climate change enhanced catastrophes are happening worldwide, especially to poor countries and to people of color. They may be the first to experience the deadly consequences of inaction and our relentless burning of fossil fuels, but those of us in the first world will join them soon enough. No one will escape this terror. Count on it.
David Wallace-Wells writes a must read piece for NY Magazine. He explains that what we have been witnessing is not the “new normal”, but in fact is just the preview of what normal will become. Please read the full post.
It’s been a terrifying season for what we used to call natural disasters. For the first time in recorded history, three hurricanes arose simultaneously in the Caribbean. Harvey and Irma ravaged a series of islands then turned north and hit the U.S. mainland. Days later came Maria, the third storm this season to register among the top-four most devastating hurricanes in dollar terms to ever make landfall in the U.S. (Maria seems likely to be remembered as among the worst humanitarian disasters America has ever seen, with 40 percent of Puerto Rico still without running water, power out for likely six months, and native agriculture devastated for a full year.) For years, we’ve conceived of climate change in terms of sea level, meaning it was often possible to believe its devastating impacts would be felt mostly by those living elsewhere, on the coasts; extreme weather seems poised to break that delusion, beginning with hurricanes. And then the unprecedented California wildfires broke out over the weekend, fueled by the Diablo Winds, killing 17 already and burning through 115,000 acres across several counties by Wednesday, casting even the sky above Disneyland in an eerie postapocalyptic orange glow and lighting up satellite images with flames visible from space. The smoke was visible from there, too.
It is tempting to look at this string of disasters and think, Climate change is here. Both hurricanes and wildfires are made worse by warming, with as much as 30 percent of the strength of hurricanes like Harvey and Maria attributable to climate change, and wildfire season both extended and exacerbated by it. As the journalist Malcolm Harris put it blithely on Twitter, “There didn’t used to be a major natural disaster every single day.”
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What that means is that we have not, at all, arrived at a new normal. It is more like we’ve taken one step out on the plank off a pirate ship. Perhaps because of the exhausting false debate about whether climate change is “real,” too many of us have developed a misleading impression that its effects are binary. But global warming is not “yes” or “no,” it is a function that gets worse over time as long as we continue to produce greenhouse gas. And so the experience of life in a climate transformed by human activity is not just a matter of stepping from one stable environment into another, somewhat worse one, no matter how degraded or destructive the transformed climate is. The effects will grow and build as the planet continues to warm: from one degree to one-point-five to almost certainly two degrees and beyond. The last few months of climate disasters may look like about as much as the planet can take. But things are only going to get worse.
The Donald Trump-Kaiser Wilhelm parallels are getting scary: http://ow.ly/lGbP30fRn2g(emphasis mine)
We are leaderless at this critical point in time of human history. We must prepare ourselves for mitigation and adaption in order to stand a fighting chance against climate change, but we find ourselves in a serious quandary. Not only should we be doing more for Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, we need science based emergency plans on the books for FEMA to avoid such appalling ineptitude (as witnessed in PR) going forward. But we can’t prepare if a know nothing racist lacking empathy, occupies the oval office. Donald Trump and his deplorable enablers just may kill every last one of us.
A tempting taste from Foreign Policy on Donald Trump-Kaiser Wilhelm parallels:
Here's another hint: “[he is] superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success—as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday.”
Give up?
The two quotes above, by a German Army Chief of Staff and distinguished historian Thomas Nipperdey of Cambridge University, respectively, both refer to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II—who comes across as a spoiled teenager, prone to rash and bellicose remarks that undermined his country's image and international position.