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 
This just the latest apocalypse in the human caused 6th mass extinction now exponential since the last ice age ended. It’s a tragedy beyond comprehension; up to 1.5 billion creatures dead. The Lucky country is now the very much unlucky country. One can only silently weep and mourn the tortured and burned alive terrified fellow creatures aka animals; their passing diminishes us to Lords of a once beautiful but now devastated World. Earth’s sixth mass extinction event under way, scientists warn
This article is more than 2 years old
Researchers talk of ‘biological annihilation’ as study reveals billions of populations of animals have been lost in recent decades https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/10/earths-sixth-mass-extinction-event-already-underway-scientists-warn
Accepting more Australians to live here will place extra pressure on a society suffering from child poverty, homelessness gross inequality and a FIRE sector ( Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) which cheers on housing speculation for self-propelled Capital Gain. New Zealand is not a healthy society but very much divided. Our young couples, the future of NZ haven’t a hope of buying their own home to start a family but are condemned to be rentier slaves until death do us part.
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We are all fucked.
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“Stand on Aotearoa” !!!
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I have already advised one fellow doomer and previous member of the NBL tribe,caught up in ground zero of the Oz fires,to get his family across the Tasman ASAP.
We could, had our politicians any brains, have been preparing for their arrival for the last decade at least.
Had we done so much of rural NZ would look like my place.
But no,we can never accept that we must now live like refugees and “standards” must fall and houses must all now be “tiny”.
So get ready for fuck ups and chaos on a grand scale, more rushed bad lawmaking and platitudes aplenty.
Damn them all to hell.
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Well, NZ could always do the same thing OZ has been doing to the refugees that have been showing up on their shores…put ’em in camps, right? Have armed Navy ships pointing guns at the escape boats, yes? Scream ‘ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS’ to criminalize them.
Then they could do what the US police state is doing here to the climate and political refugees showing up from Centro America, just steal their children and throw them in dog cages while shipping the parents back to their hell-hole countries… Oh wait, the refugees from OZ are gonna be of Euro descent and not brown faces…so far denying access to refugees has only been the non-Caucasians fleeing their burning/drought/heat/flood ravaged and dying lands.
At least that seems to be what ‘LEADERS’ all seem to be in favor of. Look at southern Europe, huge refugee camps on islands etc etc. Africa is dying, too, and they’ll all head north at one point also I’m thinking. Isn’t South Africa on the brink of having no water for their cities? That was recently I remember.
So when does NZ say enough and blockade the millions that could start pouring in, that the country cannot FEED?
And where do the 1.4 BILLION Indians, the tens of millions of Pakistani, the Sri Lanka and Bangladeshi and and…where are they gonna go? They are enduring heat waves and drought that will only get worse and we know it.
Ah hell, this is coming for the entire planet. It just boggles the mind trying to mentally grasp the picture of this. I used to have a world map on the wall and imagined arrows pointing away from the equator. High human population density places all trying to escape.
I’m already seeing climate refugees moving here from the US Deep South and southern desert states the last five/six years or so. Or at least it has become more obvious. A trickle that probably will turn into a torrent before much longer. Too much wet bulb heat and fear of the monster hurricanes for the former (their words), and too much 123’F temps and lack of water for the latter (those sand-eater folk’s words).
Can’t wait for the real loonies to start showing up from the burning desert like Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen who spoke out for letting a real estate developer bulldoze a section of forest because, and I quote, “trees are stealing all of Arizona’s water.”
That’s…so bizarre a statement but then 30 years ago Reagan said “trees cause air pollution” so…the loonies have run this country for a LONG damned time.
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And bluntly, I’m sort of a climate refugee but more by choice I guess. I moved here 15 years ago because I wanted to get farther north where it still snowed more, still had colder winters, much like it was in the Bear River Range that I lived in a decade earlier. A place with far fewer giant cities nearby and a somewhat less decimated ecology (though the hedge fund loggers are doing their damnedest to destroy these mountains these last few years). Of course to be able to do this kind of move you are either the resort wealthy group or rural poor in mountains and, well, this is definitely the latter…2nd poorest county in WA State. It was a compromise no doubt. Now the Big Insure has been cancelled and I wear N95 masks a lot during the fire season which is getting earlier and later every year…. None of us can escape this, Kevin. Even running from OZ to NZ…or me here.
But the wealthy certainly have thrown the dice at surviving in their bunkers in NZ, haven’t they? I I’ve read about sailing ships crewed and provisioned ties up waiting, jets fueled and ready to go, rich man’s toys parking in harbors and airports ready to fly to NZ! Man, it’s a whole lot of the premise of Nevil Shute’s On The Beach…last man standing eats death pills and sticks poison needles distributed by the government into their children and pets…
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In other news I just found out that I’m in the Encyclopedia of Surfing! It’s a paywall site and operated by one of the top Surfer Magazine editors, but they have a page about river surfing. They snagged a 1988 picture from my The Lunch Counter Trilogy book and when tabbed it zooms in with my name, date, and Lunch Counter, Wyoming. OF COURSE it was absolutely the worst picture in the book but I admit that it was the oldest dated pic so I think that’s why they used it. 7 seconds of fame? HA!
Gotta laugh about this shit, keep that sense of gallows humor going. Gotta go move snow and cut firewood. A foot since Saturday morning but a high cloud-blue sky Monday morning so far. Had an avalanche at Silver Mt (my other season pass hill) that killed people on Tuesday. Heavy snow on zero depth icy base and Wardner Peak slid. Steepest and deepest runs on the hill. The ski hills open with nothing, get icy frozn crap for weeks then a big heavy wet dump comes in. Of course stuff is going to slide….
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/jan/07/avalanches-reported-at-silver-mountain-shoshone-co/
sealintheSelkirks
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OK. Do i have this straight? Those who are the major cause of Earth’s biosphere collapse and resultant death of all the Innocents (animals, lifeforms), are planning to escape to NZ safe zones due to their greed, mayhem and sociopathic madness? Great, thanks for the intel Kevin. Now we’ll know where to find them.
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rogue composer: There really aren’t any safe zones regardless of how much money you have or how deep your bunker is. No place on the planet for what science is saying is still coming. What, you think those private army mercenaries hired by the rich are going to stand by and…be slaves and watch their families starve or boil? When the watchdogs turn on their masters, it will be doubtful it’ll be pretty.
Here is some humor snowing Tuesday morning. We all need some humor, correct?
Setting Aside Differences, Cats And Dogs Agree To Battle Climate Change By Eating Their Owners
https://outabouter.com/2019/09/12/setting-aside-differences-cats-and-dogs-agree-to-battle-climate-change-by-eating-their-owners/
AT LINK: Picture: Charlie, at left, says you should have listened when he said, “Ruff, ruff, ruff, stop killing the planet you fucking psychopaths, ruff, ruff.
sealintheSelkirks
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Seal: Yes, you and i and the rest here know there are no safe zones, but apparently ‘they’ don’t, otherwise why would they move where they think there is?
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We are all fucked.
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The latest on collapse from Umair Haque;
https://eand.co/this-is-how-a-civilization-collapses-b3da4e62ed94
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“As global temperatures soar, Australia could become so hot and dry that the country’s residents could become climate refugees, U.S. climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann told Reuters.” Even the conservative Michael Mann can’t cover up the trajectory we are on.
“Mann, the author of four books including “The Madhouse Effect,” said Australia could still “easily achieve” the target by shifting towards renewable energy.”
“It’s possible to grow the economy, create jobs, and preserve the environment at the same time. These are things that all Australians could embrace,” Mann said.”
I’ve previously critiqued Mann and his scientific reticence in the face of early stage runaway and how he has become the corporate media go to ‘Mann’ but even he is compelled to admit we will see climate change refugees in Australia.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-bushfires-climatechange-idUSKBN1ZD2RU?utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3cJKB_SoYCeelhMiieDcynfiNQcy9Jla-sLdGeUvXh8fbYzTCj7OLX1Xk
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Start setting up humane refugee camps and let the billionaires pay.
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Been doing exactly that for well over a decade now without any need of the mega rich.
Only a tiny scap of rural NZ but a model of what could be done, should have been done, to much of the country.
Eight acres subdivided into eight acre blocks by fruit and nut and firewood trees, each with its own small house of breeding poultry and grazing for a handful of sheep, the initial food source till the gardens are established.
So I can take seven individuals or small families.
The catch is that they’re going to be my blood relations as a first choice.
The other problem is that I operate totally outside the current regulations to do what I’m doing.
The reality is that my efforts will be in vain as extreme exponential climate chaos overwhelms even my years old preparation.
Ain’t no cure for stupid except death.
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The tsunami is building and our ‘leaders’ haven’t a clue.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/20/climate-refugees-cant-be-returned-home-says-landmark-un-human-rights-ruling?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR0VDx1RJ7D5s7fgKAwydEnHeuPsDjsvinMyr6qVC_4kPGnJdpHDW0dn6fg
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I would have rather be wrong than right.
https://www.noted.co.nz/money/money-economy/australia-bushfires-economic-effect-on-new-zealand-could-be-enormous?ref_email=a2V2aW5AaWNvbmljcHJvcGVydGllcy5jby5ueg%3D%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NOTED_newsletter_28-01-2020&utm_term=list_notednz_newsletter
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Definitely a DUH! moment with that question:
“Australia has had drought after drought and at some point you have to start asking the question, ‘Is this just an incredible run of bad luck or is this the new normal?’” DUH.
Interesting that it seems the biggest worry in Oz is how many tourists won’t come spend money, but since it is an economics article I guess that isn’t surprising. And it says the tourists who generally visit the provincial areas are locals the financial hit will be other locals instead of the bankers and wealthy that own everything in Melbourne and Sidney where the international tourists spend their money… Our species has gone so urban that people fly over oceans to visit…other cities. I think the US is now nearly 80% living urban in city or town of some kind.
I’m guessing those sterilized fire zones aren’t going to attract folks who like to picnic since the dirt is so dead there won’t be much growing back. Plants don’t do well in dead soil. Besides, who wants to be a tourist in a burned-off disaster zone full of toasted animal bodies stinking in the sun when they can spend their money in Sidney having fun?
But NZ will probably be exporting a lot more food to OZ. A good thing? Well, yeah, since the freaking OZ farms and ranching areas have been drought-stricken so long they aren’t producing as much before this year’s fires. Though not that much farmland burned. In the short term, that would make the NZ GNP better but then there will be next year’s massive OZ fires…and the year after that…etc. Add the forever ‘new-normal’ drought so I’m not exactly optimistic about OZ suddenly going back to the ‘way things were’ anytime soon. Rather the opposite in fact. Do they import a majority of their food? BBQ’d Roo and Koala and baked bird-falling-from-the-sky becomes the new normal…
Yeah, I know, I’m a bit sarcastic.
What those in government refuse to realize is that they are facing nothing but continuing-to-become-worse in every category of a habitable environment/biosphere; and that pretty much forever. Just keep exporting all that coal, Aussies, keep that national GNP going strong no matter how it actually affects the climate that is causing the country to dry up and blow away when it isn’t burning. Maybe OZ can be the first continent-wide solar array when it goes totally desert.
Gotta be an upside to it somewhere, right?
Leaders down there aren’t any more intelligent that what I see in this country, that’s for goddam sure.
So, where would NZ put, say, a quarter of the population of Australia? In a trickle exodus or an avalanche of refugees, both would require very different strategies to implement. OZ turns into a death zone they can’t live in any longer so NZ gets huge rising costs on housing, far fewer jobs if any, far more expensive food, huge impact on existing infrastructure. Taxes would have to go up, too! How about the Aussies bring all their CARS? NZlanders wouldn’t be able to afford the rents and radical price hikes for basic needs because profit is profit and all the market will bear is perfectly acceptable to neo-liberal right wingers. An epidemic of Greed would ensue!
But honestly, it looks like the Indian subcontinent is flipping over into uninhabitable quicker than OZ will go belly up. The temperatures there are insane this last summer, All of those overcrowded countries, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, all are seeing incredible increases and a never-ending drought with erratic monsoons, water and soil and everything else all used up, and they keep having way too damn many babies.
Or perhaps what the US calls the ‘Middle East’ which on the map looks more like western Asia to me but what do I know? They’re seeing temperatures that humans cannot live in, too. I mean, 126’F every day?
The Equator is going to be mass death zones eventually.
I wonder if the poorest or the wealthiest will evacuate OZ first, and how long before the exodus really starts? Another few years maybe? Like the small farmers from Centro America who are the climate refugees on the US border but this time Euro-relatives.
May we live in interesting times. Fascists rising to power all over the world as quickly as the climate breaks down. What a coincidence.
sealintheSelkirks
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Happening now, not long off in the future
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As usual dial-up doesn’t work on downloading this vid but I’ve been reading some extremely disturbing articles on what is happening across a wide swath of Africa. Since I don’t read mainstream corporate news and no television is allowed in this house I’m assuming there isn’t much really being said to the general public. But the birthplace of our species is going to become/is becoming uninhabitable. Probably what this vid says, yes? The continent is gonna freaking die and so are tens or hundreds of millions of Africans because the farms are choking on dust and drought and what do people do when this happens? Do they stay there and watch their kids starve to death?
No. They invade and kill their neighbors to feed their families. That’s what killer primates have always done. And they’ll run across a border right into the starving people of that country and the survivors of that massacre with push on to the next border and run into more fleeing that country. And every person along the Equator is going to be heading north. ALL of them. Wouldn’t anybody do the same thing? Of course we would. That’s what our species has always done in an ecological crisis.
I’m reading an out-of-date book I picked up from Powell’s Books online a couple weeks ago published in 2008 by Gwynne Dyer titled ‘Climate Wars.’ Needed one more book to qualify for the no shipping bonus so…$10 retail saved me more in shipping than the cost of this book and it wasn’t even a used book which is what I usually buy from them. I can’t afford new books, not hardbacks anyway.
You ever read this one, Kevin? Holy crap! The first 16 pages were, to be blunt, brutal. He talked to everybody while reading the science, from military to those ‘alarmist’ scientists on the pointy end of the stick that nobody wanted to listen to about what they thought we were facing then. My how the baseline of what was alarmist has shifted since then.
But what I find interesting, and I’m only on page 64, is that the timelines that are laid out were so…optimistic twelve years+ ago when he was researching it. But it was of what was expected, possible, by 2047. The most gloomy assessments. Uh-oh. What is going on now is most definitely 3 decades early. Or 80 years early if you only look back at what was being said in the 90s. We are so fucked and so much sooner.
A ‘possible’ CO2 level of 500ppm…but the latest readings this month I read about say 416ppm! And he writes about the methane bomb. But it’s going off in the Arctic right now. And Antarctica and Greenland and and and. Why am I feeling somewhat overwhelmed? So I had to shift books for a few days and read a used Vonnegut that also came in the box. Whew! I needed the break from those first 64 pages!!!
And he wrote about where Africa was going to get hit with. And the entire planet’s swath of deserts at roughly 26′ latitude in both hemispheres and how quickly that would expand. And the absolute death of any humans in the equatorial zones. And the refugees that would explode out from the dying areas swamping everybody in their paths and eating the land bare like locusts.
But it was all roughly based around 2047. Plenty of time to…die of old age beforehand, right?
Triage. When the Europeans start sinking the refugee ships crossing the Med and regular beach patrols to burn the bodies washing up; when the US gov builds a real wall like the Israeli monster that is 30 feet tall of solid concrete with guns and gas bombs on top pointing down into the mass of humanity below who will already be dying of starvation & dehydration because the Mexican border is at what latitude? Oh. That 26’N latitude in the desert zone. When the Canadians build a wall across their border to keep the US from flooding over with THEIR guns pointing down… Triage by everybody in the global North?
200,000 years for us to grow to 250 million worldwide by the Roman Empire years. Then to 1 billion by 1800 only a scant two hundred twenty years ago. To 2 billion by 1945 seventy-five years ago. And now to nearly 8 billion with the planetary ecosystem flat breaking down by overuse and compounded by the destabilizing climate which of course makes everything much, MUCH worse.
Ya know something? Ten million years in the future the planet won’t even remember we were on it. There won’t be anything left on the surface of the planet showing that we were here. A green and blue water world covered with life. My thought is that even planets practice triage.
There will be some pieces of leftover junk still standing on the surface of the Moon I’m guessing. The long-lasting fingerprint of our species in a galaxy full of planets with intelligent life that just didn’t figure it out in time and killed themselves off. I image there are a lot of those out there in the dark circling their suns because there is such a short span of time between becoming a intelligent technological species able to get off their planet before they use it all up from inventing that technology.
Just saying. Sitting here ruminating and drinking hot tea isn’t getting any chores done. Guess I should go outside and get some chores done. The sun is just beaming heat through the window in a light blue sky that’s got some kind of haze to it. Sure is muddy for February.
sealintheSelkirks
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More on this subject from the NYT, naturally they are understating the severity of the predicament
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Of course the corporate media are ‘understating’ what is already happening! Wouldn’t want to disturb the SHOPPERS from getting out there and spending money on plastic throw-away crap they don’t need that keeps the US economy afloat during a worldwide Pandemic and the ecological freaking disaster that is going off all around us! Circling the toilet bowl, Kevin, but damn it there is so much great stuff at walmart and amazon to fill the house up with still coming in by the giant container ship load! Neoliberal Capitalism will not be stopped… Maybe I need to drive to the city and go SHOPPING!!!
Oh wait! Let’s be even more of a pessimist. The US GDP was the WORST 2nd quarter economically this country has ever seen. Worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Can we say oops?
Hell, most of the ‘illegals’ on the US border are farmer-refugees from dying farms in Centro America who’s land has just dried up and died. They can’t grow enough food to feed their families, it’s getting too freaking hot in Honduras and elsewhere, so they have no choice but to head north. Oh my yes, Trump needs a MUCH BIGGER wall with land mines and flame throwers on top don’t you think?
I wrote a comment back on CommonDreams.org yesterday, on a political article, and had a huge number of people throw a ‘like’ on it. Sometimes I piss people off on that site…too much ‘democrat neo-liberal’ shit but this one somehow touched people. And you’ll notice I slid in climate collapse and ecocide/6th extinction, and STILL got hit with a bunch of positive reactions. Which I find really strange because usually my pessimism rubs people wrong.
Kevin, I think more and more people are starting to get pretty damned scared. This is what I wrote:
https://commons.commondreams.org/t/the-case-for-who-should-not-be-vice-president-joe-biden-are-you-listening/80686/4
SealintheSelkirks to jrmoffett
Agreed. Harris is another Obama, a sell-out puppet to the conservative right wing corporate owners of this world. And I consider Warren to be pretty much the same.
But then the Dimocrats have moved so far to the right since the Clintons grabbed power that the last 30 years has seen them blatantly become the Republican Party in fact and policy if not in name. That the Rethuglicans have slid even farther right is a moot point, both are owned and operated by the same wealthy oligarchs who fund both. And profit no matter who they get into power. That’s the whole point isn’t it? If one actually takes the time and LOOKS at who funds who, you can see this happening. That both faces of the One-Party State follow the same policies other than the tiny crumbs that are spread around to ideological factions in those parties…which doesn’t change the basic structure of how the policies actually work.
Kabuki theater in a pay-to-play Greek tragedy. Does anybody REALLY think anything will change with Biden? That suddenly all will be wonderful in the world? No, I doubt that many who comment on this site are that hoodwinked but we are all struggling to sleep at night because our subconscious realizes this better than our waking minds…
I don’t have answers, at least none that will ever have an ice cube’s chance in hell of becoming a reality. There is too much inertia in the system, too many very powerful people that profit from the system who would rather see the entire world collapse than change. This country has never been a democracy just like there has never been a truly communist country in the world. And those that profit from it like it that way.
And bluntly, we can’t ‘vote’ ourselves out of this fix. It won’t be allowed. The rot is just too deep and spread throughout the entire culture. It’s gangrene, folks, and it kills what it touches.
As this Pandemic and the stupids that rule us slowly crashes this country into a Depression that’ll make the 1930s my grannies raised my dad & mom through look not so bad, add in climate collapse (NOT ‘change’ a bullsh*t word) and the ongoing ecocide/6th extinction of life on this planet, and then throw in the continual rape for the last resources that power a technological industrial society (read The Race for What’s Left by Michael Klare), I find myself getting just a bit pessimistic…
sealintheSelkirks
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Everything ties together, it’s all a mosaic of deadly stupidity and greed that intertwines into a web that traps everything and everybody, Kevin. And today I face another extremely hot afternoon. It was 80’F at 9am when I closed all the windows and turned on the fans…it’s now 10:30am and I can feel the heat coming through the curtains on the windows. Big sigh.
Talk more later.
sealintheSelkirks
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Because the government and all the parties in Aotearoa NZ deny abrupt climate change nothing is being done to prepare for the coming tsunami of refugees.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/02/climate-change-migration-us-wildfires?fbclid=IwAR0J6z2IHnDENx-TexY5CEnqcGeD8I1NiEYXvA_vbM4p8o_z3572FEPoT3k
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The time is now to discuss climate collapse migration? No, the freaking time to discuss this was forty years ago so maybe as a species we could have mitigated some of the damage we had already caused!
What a boner article, Kevin. Or I should say what a behind-the-reality article. I mean, how long has the Med escape flotilla been sinking in the Med from North Africa since the freaking family farms and waterhole dried up in drought? About the same length of time that this hemisphere’s Centro America has been losing food production? It’s a freaking equator thing, and with Oz burning every year it’s just NOW the Brits notice that it’s in deep shit and where are all those people going to go….NZ! Land of milk and honey!! The Guardian is behind a lot it seems, too many articles are about things I’ve read years ago. Too much faith in the IPCC I think.
As for evac’ing people out of the southern swath of heat and wet bulb zones on this continent, I’ve bumped into a quite a few mouth-full-of-cotton Southerners around here that got out after Katrina and since then. Look at the hurricanes this year in the Atlantic. We’re at 25, Hurricane Delta, the earliest 25th hurricane ever formed aiming at the Gulf Coast. Again.
Besides being damn near a record year and we still have most of October left to count! And there are four last I looked rolling around in the Caribbean heading towards Yucatan. I don’t know why the PacNorthwest mountains seems to attract for some reason. I really hate that loser Confederate flag they bring with them, too, and their Southern Baptist hellfire version of the radical Hebrew splinter group. They are definitely annoying.
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A link to read when thinking about climate refugee migrations:
What Comes Next Is Up to Us
The bulk of the chaos is simply America the Terrible emerging from the shadows: our real history suddenly visible.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/08/what-comes-next-us
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Hey Kevin, it’s Saturday 10Oct and I’ve got a lovely steady rain, lots of wind, and the world smells so much better than the ever-present dust from the recently graded county gravel road beyond my treeline. Nice wind at my elevation, clouds are going by much faster up above, and potential snow is due in tomorrow night through the middle of next week. Weather is calling it mixed rain/snow down here but we’ll see. I harvest the garden on Wednesday, the girls are all hanging upside down in the grow area of the shop for the next couple weeks. Fire Danger was HIGH yesterday, temperature was 80’F/27C. Not good for mid-October in these mountains but then I’ve said that before here!
Best,
sealintheSelkirks
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LOL
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I don’t know if it’s just my server or old computer but nothing posted in your Oct 22 or this latest Nov 23rd posting. Blank page!
sealintheSelkirks
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THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION
Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration
https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-change-will-force-a-new-american-migration?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR0dI6coWbZ-CYWq-WpUfLviGamDvCWkIpmDfceaj9eJ3rB8AFRrX5QSy2w
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I just had to start snickering, Kevin, as I read into this. I mean, how many times have I mentioned the influx of climate refugees into my inland Pacific Northwest mountain area in the last few years? Shit, it started with Hurricane Katrine with cars and trucks with Louisiana license plates that year! Then the heat that hit, that lovely ‘Wet Bulb’ effect that gets worse every year. Then the heat of 120’F in Arizona where they are growing COTTON in the desert south of Phoenix! Imagine the water being pumped from the Colorado the article mentions to keep those plants alive!
Being around a 2nd hand store full of used furniture that all these new climate refugees need for their new domiciles, I have heard many of their stories. And the strange cognitive dissonance that some of them exhibit because many still don’t buy into the ‘climate change thing.’ How bizarre is that? I always correct them on that fucking word saying it isn’t change, it’s collapse/chaos/disaster/catastrophe or something along those lines which for some reason causes them confusion! They come back with “But the climate always changes!” It’s insane, isn’t it?
The academics need to get out more, away from their labs and computers to where this is already happening and just talk to people. All the migrants on the southern border running from the droughts and heat waves, but they don’t listen to peasants. It’s only a trickle so far compared to the mass exodus from Centro American when the blistering heat waves and droughts that are destroying subsistence family farms get completely unsurvivable, but listening to the stories is enough to get a feel for the underlying theme, ya know?
Up here…it continues to be another all screwed up winter. I am not at all surprised.
sealintheSelkirks
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The tsunami is building daily and will unfold much faster that this latest article would have us believe.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/05/13/climate-migration-an-impending-global-challenge/?fbclid=IwAR0NtiW4g4CGf0O9A0r254x5wy2EtfqPJG4sJ96eEkPW2A7pHPl6pnl2EzA#.YK-7GcE4e3c.facebook
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“Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska?”
The billionaires and millionaire psychopaths are looking to ‘Bug Out’, I was asked to project manage one in Otago a few years ago. I said I’d build homes for the homeless or refugees but not billionaires.
They have a very good reason to bug out, time is short.
This article has a great audio option.
https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1
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I’m currently reading The Big Heat; Earth on the Brink pub 2018 which is a collection of short essays written over the years by Counterpunch co-founder Jeffery St Clair and Joshua Frank managing editor both being born in mountains, hiking glaciers etc etc all over the Northwest. They’ve been watching it all die and this book…well, the acknowledgements page has a pretty big list including Hunziker. And the book relates about giving voice to the thousands of activists and organizers who are fighting the ultimate battle for the planet’s survival. Though, to be honest, I’m about 50 pages in and it’s more like a listing of how it is dying of a thousand cut…
It calls Phoenix Arizona Hell on Earth where “1.5 million residents in their spiraling cul-de-sacs meekly await a reckoning with The Great Thirst destined to resemble the ruins of Chaco Canyon…with crappier architecture.” (written in 2015)
Which pretty much fits what’s coming don’t you think? Or will they all suddenly load up their Winnebagoes, grab their guns and their purse accessory dogs, and head north at one point joining the Great Migration that will empty New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California?
There are going to be millions of very hungry, VERY thirsty, and very scared neoliberal/Fascists primates loaded with guns at one point heading north probably pretty damned soon the way things are looking… That’s not a migration but a locust horde, Kevin.
Big sigh. And I buried the old blind husky this morning out in the west treeline doggie graveyard so I probably shouldn’t be reading this book today…but I’ve got 22 large glass jars with 18 different strains of medical cannabis to help with that. The ground I dug in, after a Spring of 15% normal rainfall, was incredibly dry.
This says it all:
The Most Colossal Planning Failure in Human History
We have built up civilization to a scale that can temporarily be supported by finite and polluting energy sources, and we have simply assumed that this scale of activity can continue to be supported by other energy sources that haven’t yet been developed or substantially deployed.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/05/19/most-colossal-planning-failure-human-history
sealintheSelkirks
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The great migration gains pace.
https://thewalrus.ca/stranded-by-the-climate-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR2rgb2PZvdddZo8l2vpV_creuTLDLws7ZgBA9gToIidh8_VTW8dBpSUMWg
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https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2017/01/28/super-rich-building-luxury-doomsday-bunkers.cnn
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What we are reading here from The Guardian is the corporate spin on the unfolding collapse.
It’s getting impossible to deny the obvious so they put a positive spin on the prospects of somewhere, in this case NZ having a better outcome, making us a target of conquest in a world already wracked with war and conquest, we haven’t seen anything yet.
The reality is that when the collapse runs it’s full course, no where will be habitable shortly after as a result of a myriad of compounding feedback loops like the loss of the aerosol masking effect, that’s another, circa 1.5C of instant warming and then of course the melt down of 450 nuclear power stations and another, possibly 100 nuclear powered ships with no support services.
Much worse than the nuclear melt downs is the 1200 spent pool fires that will erupt when the power goes off and the diesel runs out.
The billionaires are in the process of racing off to Mars because they know this planet will soon be uninhabitable.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/28/new-zealand-rated-best-place-to-survive-global-societal-collapse?fbclid=IwAR3PWS3ED8jvwp9ylYZIzZpcS80-WQoSemFeWWopwzRAzKstN1bSX_NxqOI
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I’m confident that we will be invaded and fought over.
https://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/new-zealand-best-placed-survive-collapse?fbclid=IwAR3r3XTiCrx7U1owpX4jSfPOObx6L4ha6BJWIlZqs8slJ9iodP3smLVDIMk
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Oh hell, Kevin, you’ve already been invaded by the wealthy and their bug-out bunkers. I remember reading at least back a couple of years ago about pre-fab concrete bunkers being built in Texas and shipped to NZ and then lifted by cargo helis to their ‘secret’ locations to be lowered into the pre-dug pits on remote properties. No doubt it will get worse as they buy off your politicians.
There visible flow of people moving here to the PacNW from the southern sections of the US through license plates and speaking accents continues. Even as we’ve been buried in heat and fire smoke and the driest conditions ever new faces keep showing up. Long-time residents have been burned out in the last two months have been unable to find anywhere to live as rents on the very few available have risen. A broken-down single-wide trailer is double what it was five years ago, and those just absolutely suck to live in. I keep getting ‘adjustment’ notices on property taxes…upwards of course.
Ain’t this fun?
sealintheSelkirks
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Oh Look, Another Billionaire Is Getting Residency in New Zealand in Case of Societal Collapse.
https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/travel/billionaire-larry-page-new-zealand-residency?fbclid=IwAR0sWyUZ9SQhhuAYlzixiQFp6fY8FTdL8WfjlYbrZXUzQ95lNH_NWjlAr5o
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The uber wealthy can hear the pitchforks being sharpened, time to ‘Get out of Dodge’.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2020/03/27/billionaire-bunker-owners-are-preparing-for-the-ultimate-underground-escape/?fbclid=IwAR08RwKAx2muWtL1_GGngRPBrSs6JVuLHAwamKmDvJfqJGVUTS9Ya8o03nc&sh=1582792c4e12
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And what kind of world do they think these sociopaths are going to find when they finally do run out of food and have to crack the vault door open? On a burnt-up crusty dead from climate collapse world they’ll just pick up where they left off, check their bank balances and stock options? Do they think the ruling totalitarian warlords are going to welcome them back? Maybe the cannibals will unless of course Nuclear Winter has the world under 100 years of black cloud & dust-filled sky because people got even more pissed off and…
Oh wait, it’s all about ‘civil war’ between the have-everything vs the have-nothings! The second article interview bluntly states this as he’s decided on a 6-month supply to see his family through…or as he said the New Madrid Fault in the middle of this country throws a repeat of the three monster 8+ quakes in the 1800s… Can you imagine being in a steel & concrete box buried in the earth when it starts heaving like that? Oh my!
But with all their wealth these people can only think of using it this way instead of CHANGING the system that brought them all this wealth on the backs of people who continue to struggle to feed themselves and pay their high rent at the same time?
Oh wait, they can’t change anything because then they’d go…broke as their fortunes are all based on keeping the Status Quo even though it is what is causing this expected ‘civil unrest’ (I love that term!).
Which means six months underground with his ‘hidden solar array’ powering it all (how hidden could a shitload of panels be to power that monstrosity he’s put in?) if the grid down. Playing board games and watching his 7 boxes of Blue Ray movies? And comes back to pick up right where they left off. He has an amazingly optimistic picture in his mind I think. Somehow I doubt it’ll work out like he plans…
sealintheSelkirks
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(from counterpunch Roaming Charges Aug 20):
2,700 wells across California are projected to go dry this year, and if the drought continues, another 1,000 more next year.
“The scope is much larger than I think anything we heard about before,” said Joe Karkoski of the State Water Resources Control Board (https://calmatters.org/environment/2021/08/california-groundwater-dry/). “People are still going to lose access to drinking water. And we don’t really have a new plan for addressing that”
Julian Lopez, owner Café Beaujolais in Mendocino:
“We’ve grown up in this first-world country thinking that water is a given. There’s that fear in the back of all our minds there is going to be a time when we don’t have water at all. And only the people with money would be able to afford the right to it.”
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Oops. That cafe owner is talking truth I think. It’s GOING to happen. Oh wait, the ones with the money to own the water will be in New Zealand!
My hippy anti-nuke anti-corporate younger brother lives on the North Coast of Mendocino, town of Ft Bragg, but is still the Hog Farm concert volunteer/barter crew coordinator about a 90minute+ drive inland (just north of Laytonville). Not that they are holding concerts with Covid at the moment but the commune property is dependent on well water and being inland and drying out in this ‘drought’ of the last twenty years I’m sure they are seeing a reduction in available water.
Take a look at the Colorado River, or what’s left of it. Lake Mead is drained, Lake Powell is drained, and it certainly isn’t looking like that is going to change anytime soon. Now why did the Anastazi abandon their cliff dwellings 1,200 years ago? Oh, that’s right, it was because of a drought. Anthropologists have found human bones in old firepits cracked open for the marrow…
So maybe the Cali folk will be running north for water pretty soon? Sure are a lot of new faces showing up around here already.
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But this aquifer drain is happening up here in the Selkirks, too. We are NOT getting the snowpacks of even just a few years ago so the re-charge rates I’m sure are in the negative and have been for years. I know of one family whose well has run dry this year. Others have mentioned lower pressure… Not surprising as they are higher up in the mountains and it’s the valley alfalfa & hay animal feed farmers that are draining the hell out of all the aquifers so the water table up high is dropping… Gotta keep those cows fed for them junk food hamburgers, eh?
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Local conditions:
The ‘Ford Corkscrew Fire’ wildfire on my ridgeline south of me is still blazing and is now over 15,000 acres and they can’t fight it, just let it burn and try to protect homes… Still running 6 bombers and a crew of about 250 people plus local volunteers on the lines…
I’m about 4 air miles n/w of the Evac Level III (get out stay out) boundary and if we get a south wind and it jumps the state hwy 292, I’m 10-15 minutes from being burned out. Everything is so badly dried into dusty tinder that stepping on a broken-off weed stem will put it through your foot because they’ve turned into little spikes.
The borrowed big cargovan is half loaded and staying that way for the time being. It rained a little last night, not anywhere near enough, but any is better than none I guess. Ground is still damp around the property this afternoon and more clouds are coming in. One can rub their lucky rabbit’s foot I guess (but it wasn’t so lucky for the rabbit!).
So far I’m not a refugee.
sealintheSelkirks
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Very, very soon we’ll all be refugees, it’s way past time to grow and have a heart.
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I haven’t heard about Denise a fellow student woman I knew in the ‘underground’ crowd (meaning a non-mormon fun person) at USU from the mid-80s to early 90s who’s family home burned in the Camp Fire. Have to ask my Utah friends about her next email… Last I read about that town was that there were a huge number of unpaid insurance claims backlogged including ones from the large corporate Washington State insurance that cancelled mine a few years back. State Farm, Farmer’s, etc etc did people in around this area because we, too, live in a burn zone. And we have nowhere else to go. And to be a bit more blunt than this author is, there are some really fucking stupid people like was mentioned in this article. Kinda sorta since she didn’t really want to piss anybody off.
Four evacs this summer, Kevin. Four fires with smoke filling the sky and clouds of choking smoke like fog at the beach swirling through the trees filling eyes with grit while watching water bombers maybe a hundred twenty feet at treetop level roaring overhead. This has been one hell of a stressful fire season and it started in early April maybe March. It’s not over yet. Not until it snows. I’ve still got packed totes, zipped duffel bags, boxes, stacked & ready. So do some of my neighbors. If the winter actually happens and it snows more and good rain in Fall and Spring and and and…
How does one wrap their head around the idea that next year it’ll be worse. And the year after, worse yet. If not you or someone in your family or in close association, but for somebody that is supposedly a fellow citizen of your town/county/state/country/continent/world. We are, after all, one species that arose in the Olduvai Gorge of Africa…so far as we know.
And like the Camp Fire that started a mile away from this Dixie one (1 mile?!) and the three that were 2 1/2 miles down the dirt road from me and the monster Ford-Rattlesnake Fire that really scared the piss out of us, there’s always more forested ridgelines and canyons to burn. The latter is still burning here by the way but over the ridge to the southeast. I can see smoke above the hills.
There will be a point where local/state/federal just won’t have the capacity to deal with all the weather disasters going off at once. They will be, combined, too damned big, Overwhelming. If nothing else it will be due to finally just flat running out of bodies to throw at the problem; having nobody much less well-trained personnel and gear or supplies or transportation; literally nothing left to send where the latest screaming dying people are. And the rest of the counties in the world will be do the same thing with THEIR multiple climate disasters going on. Hardly anybody sees how interconnected this is and the ones that do are socially ostracized.
Existential danger. But our species evolved with responses tuned to the rattlesnake, the lion or tiger coming to eat us, the fire in the forest coming this way. Then this E word was invented.
Like what Covid’s 2nd Wave mutations is doing right now, it’ll be a matter of battlefield triage on a mass scale. That is starting up in US hospitals again, and even being talked about fairly openly since I’ve read it. Even triage with the caveat attached saying those that refused to vaccinate, the unvaxxed, are at the back of the line. Look at what France just did. Mandatory vaccination for their entire population and the ones that don’t can’t get into a store or a bus or…wow. Totalitarian rule by proxy of a pandemic!
Climate disasters very likely will hit that same battlefield medical need in terms of which town is more important and it’ll become political and economic all too quickly.
People haven’t grown much except technologically, better weapons sure, ya know? But as our surrounding environment becomes less able to support our numbers I’m quite sure that the bottom layer of our brains, the Amygdala, is going to do what it’s always done in much smaller civilization ends. Sorry, I’m not much on it’s getting ever more unlikely that a large percentage won’t suddenly find their centers. There was a pretty good article about community
Homeless refugees with nothing left. Some of what is stacked is camping gear, excellent internal frame backpack full of stuff from fire starter to knife to…stuff. Also one large & one single-person backpacker tents/bag/pad/air matteress & foot pump, towel, water bottle cases, dog bowl and 50 pound bag of food, hand tools, etc etc. If it all burns down I hope to still have a roof over my head other than the old 4Runner or Toyota pick-up.
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Raining tonight, not hard pounding but steadily with water runnels off the roof out the window.. Maybe it’ll last a couple days like the weather weenies hope it will. That would be nice.
Nothing else.
sealintheSelkirks
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“Climate change will create wars on Australia’s doorstep and a global refugee crisis, according to a former director of the Department of Defence who is calling on the country to address global warming as a security threat.
Cheryl Durrant, a specialist in intelligence analysis and scenario planning during her military career who is now an academic and councillor with the Climate Council, said if climate change continues unmitigated Australia may be dragged into war.
“What drives conflict is resource insecurity. We’ve seen this in the Syrian conflict, in which climate change was partly a driver,” Ms Durrant told The New Daily.
Her warning comes as a new report from the Climate Council reveals Australia has fallen well behind the US, UK, Japan and New Zealand in its analysis of climate and security risks.”
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/09/14/climate-change-threat-defence/?fbclid=IwAR0WLTSbMqz6uKvIxjwe3aUWB1rIGhcpMmk32thYLtAWGMjrEMn19-OLWcc
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Does this policy expert not realize that a nuclear war over resources just between Pakistan and India the dust cloud produce could absolutely cover the entire Northern Hemisphere for years?
That CoVid is the canary show how trade can be disrupted…well, yeah. That she wants to shift from fossil fuel exports is a good thing, but just exactly what do they have to replace that enormous number that those Asian countries are going to want? Truthfully, they NEED the coal to produce electricity that their factories run on don’t they?
That the OZ government is really going to shift from their main export to…whatever…just isn’t all that likely, is it? And as the wealthy continue to scrape off the $$ into their own pockets the odds of there being enough push to do so becomes even more chancy.
So they are expecting an absolute flood of drowning refugees from SE Asia because the ocean is rising 4x faster there…oh my.
Doom I tell you, doom is coming! Bring out your dead (watched Monty Python last night).
How to Tell Your Civilization is Corrupt
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/13/how-to-tell-your-civilization-is-corrupt/
sealintheSelkirks
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“More than 200,000 people crossed last month, bringing the total this fiscal year to more than 1.5 million.”
Wrap your head around those numbers !!
Imagine the suffering and worry and lets remember that this is only the beginning of the great refugee migration.
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With the heat in Centro America destroying small family farms because it’s too hot for food plants to grow, and the growing worse damned hurricanes, there isn’t anywhere else for these people to go. Sit and die, watch your kids starve to death as you do as your country dries up and blows away? Nobody is willing to do that.
And Kev, there’s already hundreds of kids including babies that still haven’t been reunited with parents during Trumpie’s separation of families policy and probably can’t be at this point. Babies can’t point and say ‘that’s my mom’ ya know?
But then Obama (our so-called progressive sorta black guy president) deported more people than any other president in his term of office.Far more than Trump, and built prison holding camps for them. I guess my definition of ‘progressive’ is quite a bit different than that neoliberal corporate warmonger defined it.
As I keep saying, we ain’t seen nothing yet. And honestly, I can’t even see it in my head how bad it will get. If I’m even anywhere close to what the reality will be my brain just stutters on the visualization.
Trump’s wall was/is a joke. What I’m surprised is that the US didn’t take a page out of Israel’s book and build the monster 30′ concrete wall along the border. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of that one…
Collapse means huge piles of corpses rotting in the sun making sure that crows and buzzards and rats get fat.
sealintheSelkirks
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I started laughing about four minutes into this vid because this thought popped into my little pointy head: who is going to fix all this stuff when it starts breaking down? I mean, it’s all cheaply made in freaking China and we all see crap breaking down all the time that we have to fix or replace. Won’t be any stores to have your handyman go buy another, right? So… when the dvd player in the movie theater quits working who fixes it? When there’s an electrical short in the lighting? When the plumbing clogs up? When the doorknob quits turning because the cheap metal it’s made of shears off a piece? What if the compressor in the refrigerator goes out, you think Jeff Bezos knows how to replace it much less FIX the damned thing? Or any other wealthy vulture capitalist con man thief banker/lawyer/businessman who’s only claim to great riches is a talent for ripping off other people by pushing papers around on a desk and exploiting tax loopholes by paying a crooked lawyer to find newsays of doing it or buying a politician to legislate new rules for the lawyer to exploit for him?
What about when the pool filter clogs? Who is going to clean it for them? What about their toilets; who will clean the shit off the sides of the bowl for them every morning? THEM? Not likely! Can you see Ivanka Trump on her knees scrubbing daddy’s doo-doo with some Ajax cleanser and a scrub pad? Do rich people even know how to use a plunger correctly or run a snake when their teenage daughter stuffs her tampon down it? Who will wash the laundry, cook their meals, clean the fucking bunker of their daily filth? Just the daily hair and skin cell shedding will have the place filthy within a month. Somehow I’m doubting they’ll be bringing the maids and nannies with them.
Or shoot the ‘starving invader horde’ with the weapons in that armory of theirs? Oh wait, their GUARDS will do it…until the guards ask themselves why are they protecting these useless sacks of shit and realize all of this could be theirs! Oh wait, what happened to the guards’ families? Did they get left up on the surface to be eaten by the hungry cannibal gangs?
Machine guns and grenades are illegal for private citizens to own and the ‘developer’ of this tomb blatantly admitted in this vid that there were grenades in their armory. That’s a federal felony, why isn’t the government knocking on the door of that fortress missile silo with a warrant to search it for illegal weapons? And just how did a private citizen get hold of grenades anyway? Shouldn’t who they bought them from be found and prosecuted? If not, I’d like a crate!
Mental illness Russell says, capitalism showing its hand and the wealthy is going underground to avoid what they have created so they can continue to exist in exactly the same way that created this disaster. What’s not to laugh about? It’s so absurd that one can’t do anything but chuckle at the blatant stupidity expressed here. We on the surface may be dead or dying but these ‘safe’ bunker dwellers will live on in their luxury?
And the builder sits down on the couch in front of a tv and talks about enjoying Armageddon while watching a show. Ummm, just exactly who is going to be making new shows when everything 20 feet above is burning, irradiating, and dying of heat? And just exactly who will be broadcasting at this point? And just how long do they thing their power supply will function? The electricity use in this place has got to be enormous!
Extreme mental illness. Mind-boggling example of being completely disconnected from reality in every way possible. And the people buying these fucking places are THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT, INDUSTRY, BANKING, MILITARY. WHO OWN US!
OH MY!
sealintheSelkirks
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Hungry and desperate: Climate change fuels a migration crisis in Guatemala
Starving and in debt, farmers whose land has been destroyed by climate-related weather events are becoming migrants.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/hungry-desperate-climate-change-fuels-migration-crisis-guatemala-rcna2135?fbclid=IwAR2JR6fl1sdbN5HTxbIFyfcxPnJkfeRiDMHTp7xwk7SB96ANDtxi7-5d7hU
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At 12:52 he says it’s ‘FUN’ to be around all these rich people with their toys and tools like MRAPS armored vehicles (and by default the military-grade weapons they have managed to assemble I’m sure).
Fun? That’s not exactly the term I’d be using in this context.
So all the Bunker Buddies around him in Texas including that billionaire are all going to band together to help one another if one family bunker comes under attack…because it will be fun.
Instead of dumping the politicians, going after the wealthy assholes that put us in this dilemma of a dying ecosystem so they could add to their fossil fuel profits (like this Texas billionaire he mentions?), they’ll band together if any starving hordes come calling. And I’m sure when the starving hordes have collapsed into wandering small bands of cannibals they’ll also band together to come out and raid for whatever resources they can gather. Ghouls who will survive off the remnants of this collapsed industrial society because the land will be stripped completely bare with not an animal or edible plant left anywhere.
Because these bunker buddies won’t have a stable climate to live in, and certainly won’t have enough slaves to grow the food even if somehow the climate magically re-balanced itself in the years they stay underground. Which I seriously doubt could even possibly happen.
This kind of thinking is far too prevalent in our species. Our governments are just different forms of this mental disease this bunker builder is talking on, as are the militarism the politicians continually fund upwards as more deadlier is always better. And profitable.
I’m done. I can’t watch any more of this laughing chuckling smiling jackass. The rest of this vid I’m just not willing to listen to.
sealintheSelkirks
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This is a man I’ve respected for years as I’ve read of his work before. If I had the wealth to do so I think I’d already been gone from here years ago. Well, at least of some of the good people are getting away, ya know?
Why I’m Leaving America
After six decades fighting for social justice and enjoying the embodiment of the American Dream, this couple are moving on from a lost nation.
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Unfortunately the rats aren’t leaving this sinking ship, the best people are. Of course that is until all the rich folks start running for their luxury bunkers in other countries! Wonder, if it’s all taken a dive into madness, how well those are going to be welcomed flying in? A billionaire flies in will they be welcomed of arrested and everything confiscated for the good of the State? i know what I’d do.
sealintheSelkirks
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This entire fucking video is a joke. Thank god these structures are still here says the ‘host’ of the place??? Really? Has he actually thought this through well enough to be able to say that? And applicants must be ‘vetted’ for acceptance into the community. Hmmmm. I didn’t look up the list but I’m betting, being in South Dakota, there is a lot of requirements not being put on that public list, ya know? But living in a community of ‘bunker-dwelling suvivalists’ doesn’t sound like much of a community. You know, where would be the meaning of commune fit in here?
“I still don’t subscribe to the total armageddon” then the vid cuts out whatever else he said and continues with “on a personal level that doesn’t sit well with me” which is interesting because I’d really like to hear what was cut. He clearly doesn’t have the imagination to understand what Blue Water Event in the Arctic and the subsequent methane releasing would do to the planet.
I’m doubtful he ever listened to Sagan in the vid link below on nuclear winter from even a “small” one..
He wouldn’t be doing this if there wasn’t the interest and market for “this kind of solution.”
What fucking solution? This ISN’T a solution though it’s being sold as one!
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So a family manage to get from wherever they live 100 to 100s or 1000s of miles away when what scares them the most makes them run for cover. There obviously isn’t all that many decent job opportunities in that neighborhood that I can see in the vid and I’ve been through S. Dakota, There really isn’t much there. Under a million total population, biggest city is 190,000 and the next is 60,000 and the third largest is 27,000 and it goes down from there.
At a starting cost of $35,000 I doubt most of the buyers would be local in that low income state I’m guessing. Except the ones that are already living their bunkers that probably are also from somewhere else.
In the case of nuclear war with 20 minutes warning IF the government bothers to sound air raid sirens…which have been getting dismantled for decades. I mean, think of the panic and that would cause massive traffic jams and then the politicians wouldn’t be able to get out! So why announce the end of the world to the rabble, eh? Rule #1, only you and yours count.
I somehow doubt there’s an app on the cell phone that says when to ‘bug out.’ At the moment Russia is now emptying their Kiev embassy as the US and other NATO countries started doing earlier but, of course, the US is saying that this means the RUSSIANS are planning something. But the US started it first so shouldn’t that same thought apply to the US? The hypocrisy is thick in the US corporate media…. Are people heading for their bunkers right now I wonder?
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In the case of a sudden climate collapse (we’re watching for this this one, eh?), civil war, a general breakdown of services of society and/or a Fascist government take-over declaring martial law none of which all that far-fetched in this country at this point; a general lock-down like a prison riot would keep the owners penned in the cities and towns they live in with armed road blocks by vigilantes and/or some type of gov forces. Curfews and travel ‘passes’ would quickly be instituted along with bank closures and gasoline rationing also for that matter I would guess. Patterns we’ve seen all around the world all our lives, ya know?
So they survive a year before they Open The Door. Then what? Your supplies are used up, the generator broke down months ago, and you are in the middle of a desolate wasteland without even a tree to cut down to burn for heat. You are a LONG ASS way from even the dinky towns that dot the highway of South Dakota, and 60 of these in ‘F’ block are sold so those that didn’t make it have left supplies for those that did to loot the unoccupied bunkers. Which probably started happening months earlier as shit started running out…
There is so much wrong with this video I can’t go on with it. I’m not going to watch the 2nd half when this optimistic van-living couple go interview those that are already living there. The Lakota called this home but they knew how to live off this land. Not so much these bunker dwellers. It’s like Hawai’i, nearly all the food they eat is imported and the US Navy has polluted the main aquifer of O’ahu (south shore) with toxic jet fuel. You can’t get toxic shit out of an aquifer so…I’m glad my old partner is living on Windward Side because their water comes from other sources.
So this was from ‘The Day After’ nuclear war Discussion Panel (I think the British version ‘Threads’ was more accurate though still too ‘nice’) with famous war criminals Kissinger and Scocroft and McNamara and right wing nut jobs like Buckley. With Carl Sagan, and Elie Wiesel who starts off with “I’M SCARED.”
1 hr 20 minutes, the last 40 are questions from the audience…
Sagan’s replied at 12:26 to Buckley’s bullshit. Then is allowed to respond to McNamara at 36:15 again but he was of the opinion that it would take 1,000 bombs going off to start nuclear winter. We know better now. Just a hundred was the last number I read if detonated over large cities…. He was completely outnumbered by insanity on this panel.
What I heard listening to this was that…not very damned much has changed for the better. Actually, I can’t think of a single thing that has when it comes to collapse by any of the possibilities we have facing us. As Scowcroft said, the LOWER the numbers (of strategic nuclear weapons) the most unstable the situation is. What has changed with that foreign policy?
On that note, I’m heading outside into the warm Spring sunshine…oh wait, it’s only Feb 13th!!!
sealintheSelkirks
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“Penis-shaped rockets and private planes that will transport them to their New Zealand luxury bunkers when shit hits the fan, never mind. Most likely, you’re not on their save-worthy list, and frankly, I’m not sure why you’d want to keep company among such sociopaths.”
John Key’s mate Peter Theil comes to mind.
It’s gonna get very crowded in Aotearoa NZ as the worlds sociopaths bug out here as the global ecosystem unravels and war spreads further into Europe.
View at Medium.com
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Yep, don’t you just love those dildo-shaped rockets? Disney fired the illustrator of the VHS movie jacket for the Little Mermaid because of the castle towers in the background were also shaped like these rockets and now it’s the wealthy paying to sit in one. Is that irony or what?
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How many refugees are going to be loose in the US this year?
Forecasters Tap High-Tech Tools as US Warns of Another Unusually Active Hurricane Season
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25052022/forecasting-hurricane-saildrone/
We’re about to get slammed…for the 7th year in a row.
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You did catch the Pacific/Mexico tropical cyclone Category 2 almost a 3 when it hit landfall that was the strongest ever recorded for May? It just jumped across to the Atlantic and is now running across the Yucatan Peninsula? Looks like it might turn into a seriously wet tropical depression as it heads north towards the Gulf Coast states and Florida but is not expected to turn back into a hurricane. Except the ocean there is extremely warm for this time of year and, bluntly, anything can happen. None of the models fit anymore.
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As for other refugees, soon it will be too hot to live in the Middle East unless you are in AC all the time. One will not be able to sleep without it. And India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh etc will be uninhabitable due to Wet Bulb. Where are well over 1.5 billion brown people going to go? Or a better question, be allowed to settle in what country? Can we expect tens of millions of deaths across the sub-continent? Probably. I cannot conceptualize an event that big, village after town after city full of the roasted dead…mammals, insects, reptiles, all bloating in the heat…
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You know that when the Big Event happens what’s to stop the NZ gov from banning flights of non-citizens into the country and confiscating for the good of the people? US dollars won’t even make good butt wipe then so just exactly what are these billionaire sociopaths going to use for bribes? Will NZ actually want these fucks moving to their bunkers at that point? I think not. So you have my permission to reject them, and point them towards the USA the country that they destroyed for profit…along with the rest of the world.
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Weather today: 80’F and humid, big cloud masses slowly floating by overhead with very little wind at ground level. Rained the night of the supposed asteroid storm so I didn’t get to see it.
Last 1June it was 95’F and dry as a bone having not rained in months by this point. I’m guessing that tomorrow 2June won’t be like last year’s 100’F. We are also still in drought but not as bad as down south with 148% of normal water for this time of year. Wettest and coldest Spring in a decade at least. But the ground is still damned dry. Turn over a stump for worms to go fishing and find dry dirt and dust underneath instead of moist ground.
One piece of good news is that the old apple tree has flowered like I haven’t seen in years, and yesterday somehow the bees found out and have been swarming all over it. A lot of bugs died in last year’s Heat Dome but somehow the wild bees survived. Still, the air around the house is far less busy than I’ve ever seen it here.
sealintheSelkirks
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These billionaires just had their consent to build their bunker refused.
They will know that they are running out of time.
Sweet justice
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/family-stunned-consent-for-20m-mansion-overlooking-lake-wanaka-declined/GB55O7SOROFGT34YW5LDSIKL3U/?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=nzh_fb&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR32avYuqedY7oAdCnxIOTt5fNBrZT22omq6WeiFdVIddDUY6lEE49PipD0#Echobox=1656535729
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What the hell? I though all one had to do is bribe some government official, surreptitiously of course by ‘donating’ millions to some fund etc etc (save the turtles-whales-some lizard or flower) to get your gi-fucking-gantic bunker built. I’m sure their high-powered lawyers are working quite hard to find the loophole…and if they can’t find one they’ll buy one. Or buy somebody. Because that’s what billionaires do.
And being that it’s not some ‘Wanaka Family’ as repeatedly stated in the article (and they are SO surprised by this denial!) but right wing nut job Trump supporter/FaceBlech co-founder/PayPal founder and owner of the company Palantir, hatched in Silicon Valley and nurtured by In-Q-Tel, the not-for-profit venture capital fund created by the CIA who just bought himself a Republican Senate candidate promoted by Trump. Peter Thiel is a gay dude that proves even homosexuals can be very bad people. Called a ‘Truly Evil Golem’ in this article:
https://larouchepub.com/other/2022/4903-a_truly_evil_golem_billionaire.html
He’s no a New Zealander, he’s a fuckhead Fascist from the US. Being as he’s definitely linked with the CIA I’m sure he is far more in the know of what is expected than we are…but we can guess, eh?
All billionaires are Fascist but he’s an especially repugnant one… He really isn’t somebody anyone would want as a neighbor much less in a world that is collapsing into chaos. That he’s already in NZ shows a distinct lack of intelligence to some of your leaders there…but that’s true everywhere it seems.
sealintheSelkirks
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The same people who have ground the living planet into dust want to bug out in luxury. The pathology of these psychopaths and sociopaths is incredible.
The irony of them needing a plumber, electrician, dentist and doctor seems to be lost on them
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material portion of their privilege.” John Kenneth Galbraith courtesy of GuyMcPherson.com
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco&fbclid=IwAR30tZLPX-tzZmyO9_85ZcMUZzqIGj0s5Ar1UE0IM_m9hiE8xbFdOrPl-d0
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You are going to laugh at this one. It’s completely absurd. Or maybe because it is even more mind-boggling than Aussies heading south out of the fire zone continent. I’m hearing all about it from Judi in OB about her granddaughter and three great-grandkids who are still stuck there dealing with custody court after her ex stole the kids and flew them to Aus where he was from. Living outside of Brisbane they’ve been dealing with the floods for months but they really want to come home and since the youngest turned 12 so all of them are petitioning to be allowed to leave Aus…see how that goes.
But how about this fact?
The fastest growing area in the US is…Arizona!
Since people in the US can’t AFFORD to live in the ‘nicer’ zones…like me who would be completely homeless if I was trying to live on my home beach of Ocean Beach/Mission Beach San Diego. I’d be (hopefully) in an old RV or something probably. But then the politicians are banning living in a vehicle on a public street or parking lot and confiscating them leaving the people who WERE living in them sleeping on the concrete… How’s that for ethics, eh?
But Maine and Vermont are still less affected by the heat but nobody wants to live there. Ummm, I don’t get it.
But what used to be called the ‘middle class’ which is just a fancy term that means you’re still working class; these people can only afford to live where the the water is about to run out just as climate collapse is running the temperature to over 50’C and the Colorado River certainly isn’t going to provide enough water or power all those AC units in all those new subdivisions going up in Phoenix:
Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t
People are still flocking to Sunbelt regions where the housing is cheaper and plentiful — but climate change and extreme weather are worsening.
https://www.vox.com/2022/8/28/23322006/climate-change-heat-wave-phoenix-drought-housing-population
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I did post this one, yes?
GET OUT OF NEVADA NOW
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/article/get-out-of-nevada-now
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A definite WTF moment, eh?
sealintheSelkirks
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This is dystopian, macabre, fascinating and more than a little bit bizarre. The machinations and dynamics of a post-apocalyptic nuclear exchange through the eyes of youth robbed of normality and a future banged up in a bunker.
A modern version of “Lord of the Flies”. Quite genius imho.
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Yep, this was pretty darkly grim I must admit. But for some reason, I kinda liked it. Interesting play on human foibles…
sealintheSelkirks
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I’m returning the favor. Here is a short dystopian essay on what surfing will look like soon. The thing about stories is you get to see them in your head!
https://www.theinertia.com/surf/alex-haro-surfing-dystopia/
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sealintheSelkirks
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Bro that was brilliant.
I bought a 455 Buick Estate Wagon in Mexico city and drove it back to California. Epis times.
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