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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.”
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 January episode of Nature Bats Last is embedded here
STEPHEN JENKINSON is an activist, teacher, author, and farmer. He has a master’s degree in theology from Harvard University and a master’s degree in social work from the University of Toronto. He is a former programme director and medical-school assistant professor. He is the subject of the documentary National Film Board of Canada documentary film, Griefwalker. He teaches internationally. With Nathalie Roy, Jenkinson founded The Orphan Wisdom School is 2010, which convenes in Tramore, Canada, and in various places in northern Europe. He is the author of How It All Could Be (now translated into four languages), Money and the Soul’s Desires, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, and, most recently, Come of Age: The Case of Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. With Gregory Hoskins and band, Stephen has offered Nights of Grief & Mystery to sold-out houses on three continents, most recently during the 26-city Nights of Grief & Mystery North American Tour 2018.
As mentioned in the show Stephen will be returning to Aotearoa NZ on a speaking tour and will be speaking in Auckland at a venue still to be determined. I will be assisting with the public talk and more details will be added here as they are determined.
During the show sometime host on Nature Bats Last Pauline Schneider spoke. Readers can follow Paulines epic cinematography here; subscribe to Pauline’s channel for notifications of new work.
A link to Stephen’s books is embedded here
The late great Albert Bartlett in his seminal presentation titled ; The Exponential Function said “One of the greatest shortcomings of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”. Most people know the expression but don’t truly grasp it’s full implications. The “Feedback Loops” that the large NGO’s used to warn of, have now arrived en-masse, the silence from them on this topic is deafening.
We are now in the non-linear stage of the unraveling of the biosphere and we are witnessing cascading events that are and will domino across the entire biosphere at an ever accelerating rate. I will list below, with numerous corroborating evidence embedded, why I believe this is our last decade on this beleaguered planet. Personally I shall be very surprised if we are still here in 36 months after another three melt seasons in the Arctic and Antarctic. Having considerably less time than that is entirely plausible!
Previously I have written on this blog about the consequences of the loss of Arctic Sea Ice; “Losing the remaining Arctic sea ice and its ability to reflect incoming solar energy back to space would be equivalent to adding one trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, on top of the 2.4 trillion tons emitted since the Industrial Age, according to current and former researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.”
“At current rates, this roughly equates to 25 years of global CO2 emissions.” Cascading Consequences of the Loss of Arctic Sea Ice
It is entirely feasible that we will have entered that uncharted territory on or before the end of the 2020 melt season in the Arctic, assuming the melt season still has an end and the long predicted burst of methane from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf hasn’t already been ejaculated into the atmosphere!
President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’
All of the above information covers just 1 of 6 dozen feedback loops documented in this ‘Piece de Resistance’ Climate-Change Summary and Update
“New research shows that the loss of biodiversity can increase the risk of “extinction cascades,” where an initial species loss leads to a domino effect of further extinctions.The researchers, from the University of Exeter, showed there is a higher risk of extinction cascades when other species are not present to fill the “gap” created by the loss of a species. Even if the loss of one species does not directly cause knock-on extinctions, the study shows that this leads to simpler ecological communities that are at greater risk of “run-away extinction cascades” with the potential loss of many species.” The full peer reviewed paper is embedded here; Biodiversity loss raises risk of ‘extinction cascades’
The official UN statistic in 2010, which will be terribly conservative, states that we lose 150 to 200 species every day. Naturally it has accelerated in the subsequent 10 years. It stands to reason that sooner or later we will hit the point where the loss of keystone species will trigger the final cascade of extinctions. “What we are seeing today is a total disaster,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, the secretary-general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. “No country has met its targets to protect nature. We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. If current levels [of destruction] go on we will reach a tipping point very soon.” Protect nature for world economic security, warns UN biodiversity chief
This presentation on collapse is equally prescient; Why Everything Will Collapse
On the October episode of Nature Bats Last on the Progressive Radio Network my co-host Professor Guy McPherson and I interviewed Robert Hunziker about the great unraveling we are all witnessing and are a part of.
In this subsequent article Robert discusses the inevitably of bio-sphere collapse! (How weird it is for me to write those words !!!!!! )
In next months episode we will re-interview Stephen Jenkinson sometimes known as “The Grief Walker” when we will continue our mission to have the conversations most shy away from.
I’ve embedded the interview with Robert Hunziker titled Biosphere Collapse? and a previous interview with Stephen Jenkinson can be found at the Nature Bats Last archive at PRN.FM
“Nothing will remain on earth, or under the earth or in the waters which will not be persecuted, disturbed and spoiled, and those of one country removed into another. And their bodies will become the sepulture and means of transit of all they have killed.~” Leonardo da Vinci
From the essay titled Abrupt, Irreversible Climate Change
Anyone paying attention would have seen the fires burning since the beginning of the Australian spring. Over 12 million acres of forests and wilderness have burned. All of the sequestered carbon has been released and the former carbon sinks no longer exists, nor will the overhead ‘Sky Rivers’ ever return, these are classic feedback loops. If you think the drought was bad before these fires you aint seen nothing yet. “Australia has been ravaged by fires since September. About 12.35 million acres have burned nationwide”. Thousands of koalas feared dead in wildfire-ravaged area north of Sydney
A quick search will tell you that a handful of Firefighters and a few other people have perished. The true mortality count is nearly half a billion earthling fatalities in Australia’s fires alone.
“Ecologists at the University of Sydney estimate around 480 million mammals, birds and reptiles have been killed, directly or indirectly, by the devastating blazes since they began in September”.Nearly 500 million animals killed in Australian bushfires, experts fear. Because we rarely count the non-human death toll we all underestimate the slaughter already underway.
This long drawn out collapse has been going on for a very long time, the collapse itself will be sudden and brutal. Make the most of every day, time is much shorter than most realise.
The temperature is rising, the grim reaper beckons;
To get the most from this article I urge the reader to invest time in checking out the embedded links because it is imperative in connecting the dots in such a complex system. That complexity is at the crux of my contention that time is infinitely shorter than most would realise.
The December 2019 episode of Nature Bats Last featuring Mimi German is embedded here:
Mimi is a houseless advocate focused primarily on houseless neighbors in St. Johns, Oregon. She is known for her anarchistic shutdowns of the Portland City Council for 6 consecutive months over issues concerning houseless people in Portland. She is also the co-founder of Jason Barns Landing, a non-transitional houseless village situated on land JBL took over and occupied from Metro in Portland. Jason Barns Landing is named after a houseless friend who died on the streets of St. Johns while canning for his survival. Click on the embedded link directly above to take you to the Jason Barns Facebook page.
Mimi is also a poet, using her words as witness and as observer for a beauty unseen by most and to allow the darkness of this time to be witnessed in writing to the page. Finally, Mimi is currently helping care for her mother, who is contemplating hospice on the East Coast.
“Studies of Chernobyl and Fukushima also reveal crippling psychological fear of invisible contamination. This fear consumed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and people in Fukushima painfully associated their own experiences with those of people in the atomic-bombed cities. The situation in Fukushima is still far from physically or psychologically stable. This fear also plagues Chernobyl, where there have been large forced movements of populations, and where whole areas poisoned by radiation remain uninhabitable.” The False promise of Nuclear Energy in a time of climate change;
“A huge cluster of jellyfish forced the Oskarshamn plant, the site of one of the world’s largest nuclear reactors, to shut down by clogging the pipes conducting cool water to the turbines.” Jellyfish clog pipes of Swedish nuclear reactor forcing plant shutdown.
“The revelations come on the heels of a report last week from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the aftermath of the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. The report details how a spent fuel fire at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that was crippled by the twin disasters could have released far more radioactivity into the environment.”
“The nuclear fuel in three of the plant’s six reactors melted down and released radioactive plumes that contaminated land downwind. Japan declared 1100 square kilometers uninhabitable and relocated 88,000 people. (Almost as many left voluntarily.) After the meltdowns, officials feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. By a stroke of luck, that did not happen.” This story continues here; Spent fuel fire on U.S. soil could dwarf impact of Fukushima
La Luta Continua;
The January episode of Nature Bats Last will feature another interview with Stephen Jenkinson author of many books including the best seller “Die Wise”. Stephen’s website is Orphan Wisdom;
Feel free to leave your comments below and to subscribe to the blog as we chronicle the great unraveling.
“Climate change could punch a hole through the financial system by making 30-year home mortgages — the lifeblood of the American housing market — effectively unobtainable in entire regions across parts of the U.S.” “Climate change could end mortgages as we know them”
“Natural disasters are being recorded more frequently than ever before. “Since 1970, the number of disasters worldwide has more than quadrupled to around 400 a year,” and “there are six times more hydrological events now than in 1980,” The 10 Most Costly Natural Disasters of the Century
“There is a logistical hurdle: when a catastrophe bond experiences a so-called loss event, the capital in the investment is suspended until the full cost of a disaster is pinned down. The phenomenon of “loss creep”, where initial estimates of a loss balloon months or even years after the event, has also spooked some investors. The cost of Typhoon Jebi in Japan last year rose from initial expectations of $6bn to $15bn.”
“Over two years, natural catastrophes caused a record $225bn of insured losses”. Why climate change is the new 9/11 for insurance companies
“For the insurance industry, global warming has advanced from a future ecological challenge to a present financial shock. Together, total losses to the economy from natural catastrophes and “man-made disasters” reached $165 billion in 2018; that followed a 2017 that, at $350 billion, cost more than twice as much. As a result, according to the Swiss Re Institute, the company’s research arm, 2017 and 2018 were for insurers the most-expensive two-year period of such catastrophes on record, requiring them to fork over $219 billion globally in checks.” Climate Change Is Hitting the Insurance Industry Hard
“Regulators are starting to worry about climate change.”
“Jenkins points out that the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority is leading the way on stress-testing insurers against the risk that the world misses its carbon reduction targets.”
“In such a scenario, insurers, especially in the U.S. where price increases are restricted by regulators, may find it increasingly unattractive to offer coverage,” he writes. “Greater lay-off of risk to reinsurers is one option. But more restrictive policies or wholesale withdrawal of cover are also possible. At some juncture underwriters will need to remove their blinkers and acknowledge that a world awash with worsening climate change risks is not necessarily just bad for the planet. It could be bad for the insurance industry too. A bit like 9/11.” Climate Change Tops List of World’s ‘Extreme Risks’
Clearly the cost of disasters is on the same Hockey Stick trajectory as our climate crisis yet “Business as Usual” carries on as if nothing has changed. All ponzi schemes eventually implode and this one will be no different except in scale. There is no previous analogue to remotely compare with the coming collapse.
Nature Bats Last co-hosts Kevin Hester and Guy McPherson were joined on this months show by Canadian psychologist Peter Miller. The discussion included our individual psychological responses to abrupt climate change and its outcome. Peter is a parent and combines his professional experience with the emotional, to try and navigate our predicament. As we ride this roller coaster Guy and I want to explore the psychological dichotomy, in this episode we continue that journey; The latest episode of NBL is embedded here;
During the interview I asked Peter what role his music played in managing his grief. His music, available on Soundcloud is embedded here
Peter has conducted a series of interviews with people navigating this, the perfect storm based on us all being in hospice. They can be found at the Peter Miller You Tube Channel
Jem Bendell the author of the “Deep Adaption” paper that has recently become the most downloaded science paper ever, spoke on the issue of ‘Hope in a time of climate crisis’. Interestingly he hasn’t accepted our imminent extinction and declined an offer to be a guest on Nature Bats Last on The Progressive Radio Network, A commonality is that many people like to say that Professor Guy McPherson and I are alarmists but won’t debate in public with us.
On the subject of ‘Hope’ I’ll quote Chris Hedges from his great documentary American Psychosis; “If hope becomes something you express through illusion then it’s not hope, it’s fantasy.”
Additional material on this aspect of the predicament below;
As the climate and extinction crises accelerates our descent into the abyss, many of us are seeking a meaningful existence as we manage our own grief and more importantly that of our youth, which will very soon become our greatest pre-collapse challenge.Don’t get caught lying to them.
My co-host on Nature Bats Last and I are regularly accused of ‘Giving Up’ because we have synthesized and accepted the science that we are now in the non-linear stage of the Sixth Great Extinction. “Giving up” for me equates to co-hosting NBL with Guy, volunteering at the Rakino Island Nursery on a rewilding project for our “Little Slice of Paradise” Rakino Island and working with a group to create a “Marine Protection Area” in the Hauraki Gulf adjacent to my home. It’s important to carry on doing the right thing without being attached to the outcome.
Any cursory, unbiased glance at my and Guy’s actions will immediately dispell the accusation that we have ‘Given Up’.
Why do Guy and I do what we do? We believe that the youth deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There will be no ‘sugar coating’ of the sixth great extinction on our watch. The youth’s futures have been stolen from them,surely they deserve the truth at least? The cold hard truth is that the real ‘safe’ level of anthropogenic warming was probably only 0.5C, not 1, not 1.5, not 2C.
The recent discovery of enormous methane ‘Pingo’s’ in the Arctic being yet another example of the rapidity the biosphere is unraveling at. The cognitive dissonance being shown by our so called leaders, who within a capitalist paradigm have no clue what to say or do is plain to see. Effectively they are literally behaving like stunned deer in the head lights of a runaway train. Our one and only space ship is about to crash and burn and there is no pilot in the cockpit. Brace for impact.
Here’s an example from the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Watch her squirm whilst criticising XR activists for holding up the traffic. So much for her grandiose declaration that climate change is our ‘Nuclear Free’ moment. Dear Jacinda, this is a Climate Emergency
Because no one in power is prepared to accept the true severity of the unfolding collapse, and the large NGO’s are lying by omission, we are as a society and culture living a lie. Sending young people off to school or university to train as cogs in the wheel of capitalism which is just about to collapse is a dereliction of duty and in my mind equates to child abuse. Check out the work of my friends Oksana and Joey at The Deep Green Bush School for a rare dose of reality in the education sphere. Personally I would scrap the entire school curriculum and teach first aid and survival skills.
The “Extinction Rebellion” movement has successfully motivated many people onto the streets but they are simply begging those same delusional politicians to ‘Act Now on Climate Change’ and do what pray tell ?
The entire paradigm is being controlled and steered to make it look like something is happening when in reality it is deflecting the youth away from the true severity of the predicament we are confronted with. Guilt tripping the youth about their carbon footprints and pretending that activism will right this sinking ship is intellectually and morally bankrupt, much like the culture itself.
Their time would be better spent developing survival skills than painting banners. I’ll quote Jem Bendell of “Deep Adaptation” fame who interestingly turned down our invitation for him to be our guest on NBL: “Getting busy with action can be a distraction from full acceptance of our predicament”.
Guy and I have toured Aotearoa New Zealand twice discussing the severity of the crisis as we see it. Below is a discussion we had at the end of the 2016 tour;
My recent interview on Waiheke Radio discussing my activism and actions as we face collapse is embedded here
The photo above is of Rakino Island taken from the North. Photo credit Scott Peters.
Additional reading on this theme;
If you want to go down fighting as I do, tell the truth, surely the youth deserve that and the right to decide what to do with the little time that is left for them.
In the last few days articles have been appearing in the corporate media detailing methane releases in the Arctic with the East Siberian Arctic shelf which is close to many of our hearts and minds due to it’s shallowness and vulnerability to destabilisation of the carbon and methane clathrate reserves reported on by Dr Natalia Shakova and her colleague Dr Igor Semiletov and by the worlds leading expert Dr Peter Wadhams.
“There are large uncertainties about tipping points that may be ahead of us, but for some systems, especially biological evidence in the oceans, we have already evidence that the tipping point has been passed.”
“Professor Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, said the report had failed to mention the “very serious threat” of methane rising from the seabed of the Arctic continental shelf as its permafrost thaws, potentially contributing large amounts of extra greenhouse gas.”
“Unveiling the latest report in Monaco on Wednesday, panel-member Valerie Masson-Delmotte, said: “Climate change is already irreversible due to the heat uptake in the ocean.”
“We can’t go back, whatever we do with our emissions.”
“According to the new forecasts, approximately 70 per cent of the world’s permafrost will thaw if emissions continue to rise. This in turn could free up “tens to hundreds of billions of tonnes” of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, further heating the planet.”
“Scientists in Siberia have discovered an area of sea that is “boiling” with methane, with bubbles that can be scooped from the water with buckets. Researchers on an expedition to the East Siberian Sea said the “methane fountain” was unlike anything they had seen before, with concentrations of the gas in the region to be six to seven times higher than the global average.”
The primary significance of this response form Igor Semiletov saying the discharges were “unlike anything they had seen before” is a very, very disturbing development. Very few scientist have his level of field research.
“The team, led by Igor Semiletov, from Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia, traveled to an area of the Eastern Arctic previously known to produce methane fountains. They were studying the environmental consequences of permafrost thawing beneath the ocean.”
For those of us researchers following the seminal work of Dr’s Natalia Shakova and Igor Semiletov this latest data whilst not being surprising is terrifying in it’s implications.
Have a listen to this seminal presentation from DR Shakova;
Finally this sailor will give you an indication of how large there methane plumes can be;
“A TRAWLER found at the bottom of the North Sea may have sunk after being trapped in a giant gas bubble.” “Scientists from the University of Sunderland discovered the fishing boat off Aberdeen, 450ft below the surface, on a patch of sea bed known as Witch’s Hole. They think the crew were the victims of a rare and terrifying phenomenon.”Read more ›
The October episode of Nature Bats Last featured a discussion between NBL co-hosts Professor Guy McPherson, Kevin Hester and US independent journalist Robert Hunziker.
Robert discussed non-linearity in the climate system which he has covered in an article published on October 2nd, 2017 titled The Great Acceleration Death Trap “If I take 35 linear steps, I’ll barely reach the coffee stand outside of this room. What happens if I take 35 exponential steps? I’d reach Copenhagen after 21 steps. Three more steps, I’m in New York. Another two steps and I encircle the entire planet. And, if I add another nine steps to my 35, I reach planet Mars.” Not understanding or worse still willfully ignoring the nonlinear nature of our predicament ensures the failure of any and all remediation or preparation undertaken. This is a major issue I take with Greenpeace, 350.ORG and the main ‘Green Parties”, willfully ignoring this aspect of the predicament is morally and scientifically bankrupt.
Robert discussed at length the never ending nightmare that is Fukushima Daiichi. One of Roberts numerous articles on the single worst industrial disaster of all time is embedded here; “Fukushima’s Radioactive Water Crisis
I quoted Jem Bendell in the interview, “Getting busy with action can be a distraction from full acceptance of our predicament”. I respectively think Jem’s having his own struggle with ‘acceptance’. Jem discusses the issue of nuclear power plants after collapse unfolds here
Kevin Hester is currently living on Rakino Island, a small island in the Hauraki Gulf near Auckland, New Zealand, monitoring the unravelling of the biosphere and volunteering at the Rakino Island Nursery is currently developing a proposal to create a marine reserve near by. The Island has no grid tied electricity or reticulated water. I catch my own water from the roof and generate my electricity from the ample solar radiation on the island.
My Submission to the Ministry of the Environment
Kevin Hester, Dropping Anchor in an Exponential World
Kevin Hester 