One Day Soon, When The Earth Is Barely Habitable, Will People Hunt Down Today's Politicians And Hang Them? Will There Be Trials First?

It’s 3,350 miles from Canberra, capital of Australia, to Jakarta, capital-- for now-- of Indonesia, a little less than 7 hours by air.

Air quality index (AQI) readings above 200 are considered dangerous to human health. A reading over 300 means no one should go outdoors. This week in Canberra readings were over 3,000-- sometimes double that. And some of the Canberra suburbs like Monash and Florey were even worse. There are cities around the world you’ve probably never heard of where breathing the air is deadly-- Linfen, Pingdingshan, Luohe, Zhengzhou, Dongying, Jining, Xinxiang, Anyang, Jinan and dozens more in China, Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, Al-Ahmadi in Kuwait, Barisal, Gazipur and Narayangong in Bangladesh, Nagpur, Jodhpur, Lucknow, Patna, Faridabad, Kanpur and dozens more in India. And speaking of India, the capital city, Delhi is basically unlivable-- as is a hip and happening suburb, Gurugram-- and three the the country’s greatest tourist attractions, Agra, Jaipur and Varanasi (formerly Benares) are to dangerous to visit without a heavy duty mask. Three of Pakistan’s biggest cities are also basically uninhabitable-- Karachi, Rawalpindi, Peshawar-- as are the capitals of Mongolia (Ulaan Baatar) and Uganda (Kampala).

I was supposed to visit Hanoi over the Christmas holiday but I cancelled the trip at the last minute when the AQI readings were hovering around 700. I first visited Katmandu, capital of Nepal, in 1971 and loved it. I’ve been back several times but the last time I was there, will, unfortunately be the last time. A heavy duty breathing mask wasn’t enough.

You’ve read about the fires in Australia, right? As Adam Morton, the environmental editor of The Guardian reported last week, Yes, Australia has always had bushfires: but 2019 is like nothing we've seen before. “Record low rainfall,” he wrote, “has contributed to a continent-scale emergency that has burned through more than 5 million hectares… an area larger than many countries… and alarmed scientists, doctors and firefighters.” Over a thousand homes have been burned and at least 9 people have died-- as have hundreds of millions of animals.

The right-wing government-- which denies a Climate Crisis-- is trying to play the whole thing down as just run of the mill stuff. The firefighting agency for New South Wales begs to differ. And David Bowman, director of The Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania, says “the most striking thing about this fire season is the continent-scale nature of the threat. ‘The geographic range, and the fact it is occurring all at once, is what makes it unprecedented. There has never been a situation where there has been a fire from southern Queensland, right through NSW, into Gippsland, in the Adelaide Hills, near Perth and on the east coast of Tasmania.’“

He says one of the less explored issues, though it has begun to receive some attention in recent days, is the economic impact of having prolonged fires that affect so many Australians.”

“You can’t properly run an economy when you get a third to a half of the population affected by smoke, and the media completely focused on fires,” he says. “I’m not quite certain why anybody would want to be claiming fires have been like this before. It’s concerning as it is a barrier to adaptation. To deal with these sort of fires the first step is to acknowledge the scale of the problem.”

Ross Bradstock, from the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, points to the Gospers Mountain fire, which started in a lightning strike north-west of Sydney in late October and has now burned about 500,000 hectares, as evidence of how this season differs from what has come before.

The fire has now combined with others on the NSW Central Coast to create a mega-blaze, but Bradstock says it was almost certainly the largest single ignition-point forest fire recorded in Australia and, for mid-latitude forests, possibly the world. He says it is bigger than any in California and Mediterranean Europe. A large fire in those conditions is usually about 100,000 hectares.

“We can find no evidence of forest fires of that size anywhere,” he says. “You just don’t see fires of this size in these parts of the world because you do not usually get the extreme dryness and unrelenting nature of the weather.”

Two months in, Bradstock says the Gospers Mountain is a monster, “just unimaginably big” and near impossible to contain unless there is substantial rain.

…This season has also seen the loss of rainforests, wet eucalypt forests, dried-out swamps and banana plantations that do not usually burn because they are too wet.

Damage to the Gondwana rainforests in 40 reserves between Brisbane and Newcastle prompted the Unesco world heritage centre to last month express their concern to Australian authorities. The reserves include the largest areas of subtropical rainforest on the planet, some warm temperate rainforest and nearly all the world’s Antarctic beech cool temperate rainforest. They are considered a living link to the vegetation that covered the southern supercontinent Gondwana before it broke up about 180 million years ago.

There are also fears critically endangered Wollemi pines have burned in the fires tearing through the Blue Mountains. They were thought extinct until discovered by bushwalkers in 1994. Their whereabouts had been kept secret from the public to keep them safe.

Authorities say the smoke that has smothered Sydney, Canberra and other centres and towns in recent weeks has produced pollution up to 11 times greater than the hazardous level for human health. In Sydney, the air pollution has been hazardous for at least 30 days.

NSW’s director of environmental health, Richard Broome, last week told reporters the state was enduring “an unprecedented emergency from a smoke point of view”. “We haven’t seen conditions like this in Sydney, certainly in anyone’s memory that I’ve spoken to,” he said.

Broome said there is early evidence that the number of people turning up at hospital emergency departments needing help is higher than usual. Dr Kate Charlesworth, a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, said there was no safe level of air pollution, and that the most vulnerable in the community-- babies, children, the elderly and people with pre-existing disease-- were the most likely to be affected.

What role does climate change play?

The explanation should be familiar by now: greenhouse gas emissions do not cause bushfires, but they play a demonstrated role in increasing average and particularly extreme temperatures and contribute to the extraordinarily dry conditions afflicting eastern Australia.

Scientists cite the near absolute lack of moisture in the landscape as a key reason the fires have been so severe.

Multiple studies, here and overseas, have found the climate crisis is lengthening the fire season.

In the past, the season started in spring in NSW before moving south to Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the new year. Just as Australia’s fire season is more overlapping with that in California, making resource-sharing more difficult, it is also running simultaneously across the country.

Among other issues, that is putting greater strain on volunteer firefighting brigades. It is an issue that firefighters and some experts say the country needs to acknowledge and address. The Morrison government appeared to make an initial, qualified step in this direction on Christmas Eve.

So what does this have to do with Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, Australia’s closest neighbor to the north? Their climate crisis is very different from Canberra’s-- but no less horrifying. Yesterday, Eric Leister, AccuWeather senior meteorologist, reported that heavy rains have caused the worst flooding in years and has turned deadly and left much of the city underwater. So far there are 26 reported deaths, 62,000 have been evacuated from their homes and several parts of the city are without power. Rail and road services all around the city has been disrupted and the airport was forced to shut down.





Reuters: “Dwikorita Karnawati, head of the Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), told reporters separately that heavy rainfall may continue until mid February.”

Over 30 million people live in the Jakarta area-- which is often as polluted as Delhi (and getting worse)-- and the government has recognized that the city isn’t going to survive the Climate Crisis and is planning to move the government to Borneo, northwest of Java, the overcrowded island that includes Jakarta, which is also sinking. When will it be open season on politicians who accept bribes from corporations who benefit from denying the Climate Crisis? When?

At Some Point-- Very Soon-- It Will Be Too Late To Save Venice From The Climate Crisis, But The Right-Wing Parties There Don't Give More Than Trump Does

I used to live in Innsbruck, Austria. I was stuck there because of a medical condition. It was the most boring place I ever lived. I used to escape when I could to Munich (a 2 hour drive) and when I was up for a longer drive, to Venice (4 hours). Munich had a great art scene. Venice is a great art scene. I grew to love the city even if I wasn't the biggest fans of an 8 to 8 and a half hour round trip drive. I was horrified on Thursday when I hear that the flooding in St Marks Square was thigh deep. I can remember when planks had to be laid across it, the flooding being ankle high. Thigh deep... that's like a swim!

And the following day, CNN reported that the province's regional council flooded for the first time in its history.

And the council chamber in Ferro Fini Palace started to take in water around 10 p.m. local time, as councilors were debating the 2020 regional budget, Democratic Party councilor Andrea Zanoni said in a long Facebook post.

"Ironically, the chamber was flooded two minutes after the majority League, Brothers of Italy, and Forza Italia parties [neo-fascist parties which are climate change deniers on a Trumpian scale] rejected our amendments to tackle climate change," Zanoni, who is deputy chairman of the environment committee, said in the post, which also has photographs of the room under water.

Among the rejected amendments were measures to fund renewable sources, to replace diesel buses with "more efficient and less polluting ones," to scrap polluting stoves and reduce the impact of plastics, he said.

Zanoni went on to accuse Veneto regional president Luca Zaia, who is a member of Matteo Salvini's far-right League Party, of presenting a budget "with no concrete actions to combat climate change."

The regional council's spokesman Alessandro Ovizach confirmed to CNN that the council was flooded after discussing amendments to the 2020 budget-- without specifying which ones.

The council's Thursday and Friday meetings were moved to Treviso, which is inland. Venice's mayor Luigi Brugnaro blamed climate change for the high tides and said the flooding was "a wound that will leave a permanent mark."

Friday, the BBC reported a 6 foot inundation in Venice with 80% of the city impacted. The right-wing climate denial parties are freaking out and now denying their denialism!

I'm going to let you guess why I'm including this short clip by Naomi Klein, which she shot yesterday, in this post. No mention of Venice or Italy per se but... Just watch and spend a minute thinking about it. Want to help a movement candidate reach office? Here, bothers and sisters. We're not going to get many chances at getting this right.

There Will Be No Chinese Century

The legendary, pre-historic "great flood of China," which was said to have lasted several generations. The flooded area to the east is roughly what is now called the North China Plain, one of two Chinese breadbaskets. Chinese civilization starts from this region. The smaller flooded area on this map is in the Sichuan Basin, China's other major growing region. (The circled area is thought to be the territory of China's first dynasty, the Xia, said to have rule there starting about 2200 BC.) Image credit: SY - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, link.

by Gaius Publius

It's common among a certain group of historians to call the 20th century "the American century," named for the political superpower that dominated it. Americans especially revel in the phrase.

The term ["the American century"] was coined by Time publisher Henry Luce to describe what he thought the role of the United States would be and should be during the 20th century. Luce, the son of a missionary, in a February 17, 1941 Life magazine editorial urged the United States to forsake isolationism for a missionary's role, acting as the world's Good Samaritan and spreading democracy. He called upon the US to enter World War II to defend democratic values.

Luce's 1941 editorial closes this way:

Throughout the 17th century and the 18th century and the 19th century, this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Above them all and weaving them all together into the most exciting flag of all the world and of all history was the triumphal purpose of freedom.

It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century.

That was written before Pearl Harbor, but the phrase endured throughout the post-war world of American hegemony, as Luce's dream of global freedom was snuffed out by America — deliberately and repeatedly, in Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, Chile and a dozen other countries — so that American hegemony, not global freedom, could remain the order of the day.

China, recovering from a century of humiliation and foreign domination, has risen fresh from its own colonial wounds and seeks to reverse American hegemony, to make the 21st century a "Chinese century," an outcome Americans fear, of course, and the U.S. government claims to work to avoid.

Americans should have no fear of a Chinese century. The one we're in will not be a Chinese century, any more than it will be anyone else's. In fact, I can predict with confidence that unless this species gets global warming under control, China will not even be territorially intact by the end of the 21st century. (For the same reason — its many mountain ranges — neither will the United States.)

Consider the North China Plain, one of China's two breadbaskets. As I wrote in 2015:

In a world without a climate crisis, China will win economically. The U.S. has already, as part of an unspoken national economic policy, handed China control of the world's manufacturing, in exchange for major additions to American CEO bottom lines, like Phil Knight's at Nike. Put simply, U.S. national economic policy is to make China and Phil Knight rich at the expense of most Americans. Both China and Phil Knight have taken that deal.

But in a world with a climate crisis, the North China Plain is at risk. If 45°N latitude is roughly the cutoff for livability in the latter half of the 21st century (sorry, can't find the link), Beijing at 39°N will boil, as will the North China Plain, directly south of that.

The Guardian agrees, writing just recently: "Unsurvivable heatwaves could strike heart of China by end of century."

The deadliest place on the planet for extreme future heatwaves will be the north China plain, one of the most densely populated regions in the world and the most important food-producing area in the huge nation.

New scientific research shows that humid heatwaves that kill even healthy people within hours will strike the area repeatedly towards the end of the century thanks to climate change[.]

Bill McKibben responded, adding that "the North China Plain, home to 400 million, will be essentially uninhabitable by century's end without huge emissions cuts now".

At just 50 meters above sea level, the North China Plain will also flood, as this National Geographic map, from their piece "What the World Would Look Like if All the Ice Melted," illustrates:

Asia after all the ice melts. Everything blue is water (click to enlarge).

China's other breadbasket, the Sichuan basin, will likely fare no better, as it sits even further south. Climate models predict average temperature in the Sichuan Basin will increase 4°C (7.6°F) from the start of this century to the end, with an increase in the number of extreme heat waves of the kind we're seeing this summer in the U.S. and elsewhere:

Not only has Britain sweltered in the five-week heatwave that finally ended last Friday, record-breaking heat has subjected Norway, Sweden and Finland to unheard-of temperatures – above 32C, that’s 90F, recorded 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile in Ouargla, a Saharan desert city in Algeria, a temperature of 51.3C (124.2F) recorded on 5 July is thought to be the highest ever reliably measured in Africa. And so in Japan, and so in Greece, and so in Canada: all over the northern hemisphere, record-breaking heat.

There's more on the way. You can't grow much in that heat, and you can't grow anything if you can't work safely outside.

There will be no Chinese century. Should we fail to bring our climate, and our billionaires, under the people's control, this century will be no one's century at all, not even the billionaires'. After all, those billionaires, far from planning our joint survival, are busy instead plotting their own escape.

I can't imagine why people who look into the future, seeing better smart phones, smarter door locks, driverless cars, the next big thing only bigger, don't see this, don't factor in the tsunami that even now wets their faces. But it's clear they don't. I guess the day they do is the day we might make progress. We're certainly not making it now.

GP