As Australia continues to burn millions of potential Climate Chance refugees cast their gaze across the Tasman Sea. The logical conclusion of people threatened with what could already be a never ending fire season is to seek refuge. One of the first places they will choose is Aotearoa New Zealand, for cultural, geographical and logistical reasons, not to mention it’s slightly lower latitudes and the mitigating, cooling effects of the island chain being surrounded by oceans that help reduce the apparent warming.
Dangerous’ weather conditions in southeast Australia prompt more evacuations.
“Fires in Australia have incinerated 15 million acres, claimed at least 25 human lives and killed upwards of a billion animals.” One and a quarter billion infact.
Australia is quickly becoming uninhabitable with millions of acres burnt and effectively sterilised of any life.“Firenados” have been burning at incredible temperatures of 2000F or 1090 C.
“Climate-heating emissions from Australia’s devastating bushfires are now nearly on a par with those caused by fires in the Amazon rainforest last year, scientists have calculated.”
“Australia’s bushfires, from September to Jan. 6, emitted 370 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to the European Union’s ECMWF Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS).” Carbon emissions from Australian blazes near Amazon fire levels
“The wildfires raging along Australia’s eastern coast have already pumped around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further fueling the climate change that’s already intensifying the nation’s fires.”
Very soon it will be impossible to obtain fire insurance in Australia. No insurance…. no mortgage. The aware will sell up early and ‘scarper’ as they say in Oz.
Every single one of the millions of trees that have immolated have released their stored carbon back into atmosphere in a vicious feedback loop. One of the reasons the trees have burnt is Australia is in the grip of the worst drought in 800 years
The sky rivers these forests formerly generated are gone and will not be returning. The worst drought in 800 years is about to get a lot worse. Mega droughts engulf countries written by Robert Hunziker a former guest on Nature Bats Last.
Until recently the majority of refugees moving to Aotearoa have been the wealthy, millionaires and billionaires who have constructed bug out bunkers. Very shortly that trickle will become a torrent and then a tsunami as the wealthy rats abandon their sinking, burning ship.
“Naturally” the poor and indigenous will be left to burn.
“Billionaire hedge-fund honcho Julian Robertson owns a lodge overlooking Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown, the South Island’s luxury resort destination. Fidelity National Financial Inc. Chairman Bill Foley has a homestead in the Wairarapa region, north of Wellington, and Titanic director James Cameron bought a mansion nearby at Lake Pounui.”
“The Investor Plus Visa, which requires a minimum investment of NZD$10 million ($6.7 million) over three years, attracted 17 U.S. applicants in fiscal 2017, after President Donald Trump’s election. Previously, it averaged six applicants a year.” The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan
What measures have the government in Aotearoa taken to deal with these refugees? What has been done to guarantee our Pacific Island neighbours a habitable place to live?Nothing has been done because the regime in Wellington fits the definition of being “Abrupt Climate Change Deniers” and for final proof of the cognitive dissonance, ignorance and outright lies from James Shaw NZ Green Party of Aotearoa co-leader look at this level of ignorance he just posted on Twitter:
Shaw saying that he can ‘solve’ climate change exposes his intellectual bankruptcy and delusion. The cognitive dissonance surrounding the Seventh Great Extinction is a case study in itself.
I’m editing this post on the 21/01/2020 due to this development from the UN:
“It is unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by the climate crisis, a landmark ruling by the United Nations human rights committee has found.
The judgment – which is the first of its kind – represents a legal “tipping point” and a moment that “opens the doorway” to future protection claims for people whose lives and well being have been threatened due to global heating, experts say. Climate refugees can’t be returned home, says landmark UN human rights ruling
So what’s your position on these refugees? Leave your comments below.
I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.
Kevin Hester 
The youth are the climate refugees of the future…oh wait, they already are!
A cut:
Nearly half of the (California) youth surveyed said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily lives and functioning, and 75% described the future as “frightening.” More than half of the 10,000 youth surveyed — 5,566 — agreed with the prompt “humanity is doomed.”
https://www.codastory.com/rewriting-history/grieving-california
And it’s going to get so much worse so much faster than anybody really expected. The next El Nino in the Pacific is going to…shall we say, heat things up to broil?
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Selkirk Range weather:
Overcast, -10C, little dustings of snow at night but the predicted snow is due tonight and through tomorrow which will then shift cloud cover east and temps will fall to roughly to about -25C at night and -12C clear sky daytime. It’s about to get real cold here. Not looking forward to it.
I’m about to go deliver a Christmas food bank box to a single mom with a 4 yr old. I promised a dying granny friend (the mom’s granny, g-g to the kid) I’d help look after them, so I do what I can. Granny lived a week after the baby was born and did get to hold it in her arms before she let go and stepped out.
Winter Solstice is coming which I do celebrate since I was born at sunset on a Leap Year’s Winter Solstice. I used to like Summer Solstice, too, until it started being 120’F fucking degrees…now I get to complain about how freaking cold it is this year! Extremes, Kevin, that’s all we have to look forward to. If I was a youth facing all of this I really don’t know how I would deal with it.
sealintheSelkirks
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In all honesty, I think New Zealand should pick and choose who comes into the country and who cannot. Send the other ones to South America or the Falkland Islands.
New Zealand needs to protect the natural beauty of the land and allowing people in that will just rape the land is not going to help anyone.
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3.4 Million Adults in U.S. Were Displaced by Extreme Weather Last Year: Census Bureau Survey
https://www.ecowatch.com/extreme-weather-displacement-climate-migration-2022.html
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And look what this winter is doing to the US which is of course not immune from climate collapse and fleeing internal refugees just like New Zealand is getting hit with. We’ve had a winter full of tornadoes roaring, bomb cyclones, never before record-breaking winter storms. Floods. Heat waves. And all of this will cause even more refugees I’m sure. And then there are the southern borders from all the people fleeing climate disasters in Centro America along with murdering governments like Honduras (installed by the US) and roving gangs of cops and government soldiers…so the US is already doing what you are thinking about. Stopping the refugees that are running.
Maybe you can start by keeping out the wealthy US citizens that have build all the mansions and bunkers in NZ the last few years. You really don’t want the autocrats flying in to escape what they have created by their greed and hubris. I can think of a few right off the bat…
Good luck with that by the way!
sealintheSelkirks
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Another article on this happening in the US:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/27/2155206/-Climate-migration-in-the-states-is-underway-and-we-are-not-ready-for-what-s-to-come
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Notice that the upper half of the US is freezing winter weather and the southern/eastern half is under overwhelming heat with TORNADOES in FEBRUARY ripping through states like Oklahoma (RWNJs) and Texas (more RWNJs) to whom their god obviously has a beef with? Funny that you pull somebody out from under a crushed house alive and they give thanks to their god WHO CAUSED IT IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Why don’t their heads explode?
There are too many out of state plates on the roads here, wrong time of year for that…
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Snowing again tonight, another low pressure is landing on us out of the NW Pacific and will send more tornadoes to where they hit yesterday by probably Thursday. Their god really doesn’t like them much.
sealintheSelkirks
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