” I’m afraid that there could indeed be a temperature rise of several degrees, e.g. of 3.5°C (6.3°F), a decade from now, while the rise could be as high or even higher than 10°C (18°F), depending on how the various elements will work out over the years and assuming that no geoengineering will take place.” Sam Carana.
I find it difficult to believe that there will be complex life on this planet much above 4C but definitely not humans. Flora won’t be able to adapt to the speed of this temperature increase and as global food supply collapses the Imperialists will fight over habitat.
Habitat wars my subject in the next episode of Extinction Radio.
Banner and bridge bottom left, the Volcanic Island Rangitoto top
Over 30 years ago, I alongside thousands of other Kiwis blockaded our harbours in Auckland and Wellington to prevent the Imperialist nuclear powered and armed navies of Britain and the USA from entering our ports as part of our campaign to make NZ Nuclear Free.
I can’t remember how many times I was told ” You’ll never stop those ships”. Those people were wrong and the rest is history.
It was a major victory for the global anti-nuclear movement and acted as a motivator for our like minded activists world wide. It even had us ‘kicked out’ of the ANZUS military alliance, another great result.
Then 5 years ago today a magnitude 9 earthquake struck 231 miles north of Tokyo that generated a massive tidal wave destroying the coastline for many miles particularly in Fukushima Prefecture where it destroyed infrastructure along the coast knocking out both incoming and outgoing power to the 6 Nuclear Reactors at Fukushima Daiichi.
As a cost cutting exercise when the plants were built TEPCO the operator of the 6 plants, built a much smaller sea wall than was necessary to protect the plants.
The wave swept ashore knocking out the incoming and out going power and swamped the plants sea side reactors knocking out the emergency generators that were built in the plant basements.
So began the single worst industrial disaster of all time. Worse than Bhopal, The Deep Water Horizon, Chernobyl and all others.
TEPCO knew within hours that they were dealing with multiple meltdowns and they launched into damage control mode at the plant and in the media.
They immediately began lying to us which has continued for the next 1825 days.
I firmly believe that Honshu with a population of over 100 million should be evacuated. Obviously this is impossible and hence why it hasn’t happened. Imagine what would be said and done if this type of disaster happened near a large metropolis like New York??
The glorious victory we won the day NZ was declared ” Nuclear Free” was effectively lost.
The plant has been bleeding radionuclides into the Pacific now for 5 years, day and night, with an unknown number of hundreds of tonnes of highly radioactive water entering the Ocean and an immeasurable quantity of isotopes entering the atmosphere from the escaped coriums which are now somewhere below the three plants that have melted down in what is know as ” The China Syndrome”.
Fukushima Daiichi was built on a dry river bed at the foot of a beautiful mountain range.
When the plants melted down clouds of radioactive fallout literally rained down on the surrounding countryside making it uninhabitable.
Now whenever it rains on Honshu additional radiation is washed down from the mountains into my / our beloved Pacific Ocean.
There is an extremely high probability that arterial water is also washing across the molten and highly radioactive coriums and bleeding out to sea.
The Fukemobile showing signs of wear after 3 yrs!
Today I took for the 2nd year my ” Fukushima Daiichi is Never Going Away” banner down to the Auckland Waterfront with my great mate and activist Marx Jones, renowned for being the pilot of the plane from the now infamous ” Flour Bombing Test at Eden Park” during the anti-apartheid days in NZ. We hung the banner off a bridge in the faces of thousands of Kiwis as they drove to work at peak hour.
Get the message?
I have previously done this action as part of a global campaign to raise awareness about this ongoing catastrophe and you will see people doing this world wide over the next 24 hrs.
I had a lovely conversation with two NZ Police personal who came onto the bridge, checked that I had fixed the banner securely and didn’t hassle me in any way, shape or form. They were delightful in fact.
I had a second conversation with a pedestrian crossing the bridge who addressed me with ” I see you’re back again, another year passed has it ?” he recognised me from last years action.
Our friendly ” Boy and Woman in Blue coming to visit!
We got talking about the lack of media coverage generally and I said ” It is one of the two biggest cover ups of all time. The severity of Fukushima Daiichi and the fact that runaway abrupt climate change is of itself an extinction event”. He replied ” Maybe that is a good thing all things considered.” Man, between the two cops and this near stranger the pragmatism was amazing. It does go to show how engaged some of us are with our unfolding climate and biosphere crisis. Over the last 5 years I have learned an enormous amount about nuclear from Sean Arclight,, Ray Masalas, John Bertucci. and Mimi German the power behind Radcast. and Facebook group No Nukes North West. and another great Facebook group. ” The Rainbow Warriors”. I would suggest if you wish to know more about these issues join them. Fukushima Daiichi is Never going away. I was interviewed on “Nuclear Hotseat” about our anti-nuclear activities here in Aotearoa N.Z. In the interview embedded here I made one mistake about meeting Peter Wilcox in the police paddy wagon after my boat was sunk by the police and I was arrested. Subsequently I discovered it wasn’t Captain Wilcox it was another Greenpeace activist name unknown.
This is a discreet photo I took of the approaching lovely ” Old Bill”.
Eight years ago today I addressed this audience on Waiheke Island.
I made one bad mistake, it wasn’t Peter Wilcox who I was arrested with it was another Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior crewman!
“In many areas of Russia the mean air temperature during the winter of 2015-2016 exceeded the norm by 4-5°C. In Siberia, Yamal and Taimyr it reached 7-8°C above normal, and on the Arctic islands in the Barents and Kara Seas – as much as 10-12°C above normal, the Hydrometeorological Centre of Russia writes.”
“Never before have the anomalies in mean seasonal air temperature been as large,” the weather forecasters say. “The mean air temperatures have been higher than normal in nearly all of Russia’s territories.”
In 25 years of sailing the Pacific Ocean, one trip from Gibraltar to Greece, a coastal voyage from Mombasa to Zanzibar and a play off the coast of Central America down the coastlines of Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, I have watched the Oceans die before my very eyes. 150 odd years ago humans mastered the art of using fossil fuels to heat and light their homes, cook their food and propel their vehicles. From very early on in the unlocking of this genie from it’s millennia of slumber, we released it into and upon our biosphere. This carbon had spent millions of years accumulating and in a century and a half we have incinerated most of it.
The ocean currents are responsible for the temperate climate that we have on our living planet and our promiscuous use of fossil fuels has heated them and thrown them into disarray, hypoxia and acidification, which has been steadily killing off the phyto plankton, the basis of the ocean food web at the very same time that we are vacuuming the survivors on an industrial scale. Half the air that we breathe comes from these species truly making the oceans, the blue lung of our planet.
Our oceans are the largest carbon sink on our planet and like the jungles of South America they are also her lungs. With our forest lungs, we rip them out and release the carbon they have spent centuries sequestering at their roots and our ocean lungs we rape and pillage,poison and defile, hence we are now left gasping for breath. This cycle of life has been running for millions of years, one species has been able to terminate it in something like 200. Every year we burn a million years of the laying down of plankton.
In 2001 I sailed the length of the Great Barrier Reef from North of Cairns to Brisbane, in excess of 800 miles. Whilst in Cairns I attended a seminar about the reef and was shocked to be congratulated by the lecturer to be one of the last generations to have dived the Great Barrier Reef while it was still alive. At the time I thought it to be an extreme position, little did I know, which has become a recurring theme, how prescient he was.
We have treated our fellow species with barbarity and disdain, now fate and natural justice has come a calling.Every second that goes by there are two more people on the planet to feed, at the very same time that our food production is collapsing along with our entire biosphere, with a population overshoot of 7.1 billion.We have morphed a coastal , family fishing lifestyle, into an industrial scale vacuuming of the oceans. After sailing across them I have a reasonable idea of how vast they are yet when I visited the Tokyo Fish Market it became obvious to me that it was unsustainable.
Our capitalist system pays lip-service to sustainability while the corporations that own our legislators, orchestrate a system of exploitation masquerading as a sustainable venture, whilst at the same time employing armies of tacticians, to game the very system that they have designed to limit others.These same scam masters have taken jobs from the former industrialized world and transferred them to virtual slave societies, predominantly in Asia with smaller outposts in Africa and the Americas.
There are 600 million containers transiting our oceans mostly filled with things we are told we want, not really what we need. A single ship can transport an entire forest, thanks to the oceans and these scammers, no forest is safe.To quote Tim Garrett and Guy McPherson” Industrial civilisation is a heat machine”, nothing we can do will prevent this catastrophe now, with the forty year lag in the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the disastrous meandering of the polar vortex and the unraveling of our biosphere is well under way.
Methane is at the wheel of our ship now, released from warming ocean depths and melting permafrost with a greenhouse effect of between 40 and 100 times that of carbon. In the nearly two decades since the inception of the IPCC we have been warned of the danger of the release of this millennia old gasses, yet in the latest projections of the IPCC the mention of methane has been removed.Not because it is no longer a danger but because they don’t want to address the issue.If a meteorite were heading towards earth with certain extinction the consequence, would you expect to be informed?It is happening and your not being informed except by a few of us citizen journalists trying our best.
On December 09 2015 I was interviewed by Libbe HaLevy from nuclearhotseat.com
The nuclear nutcases are using our climate catastrophe to promote their genocidal industry. Nuclear power, the toxic spawn of the military industrial complex.
My first interview on Nuclear Hotseat is embedded here
I made a bad error in the interview saying I was arrested with Peter Wilcox, I was wrong about which Greenpeace skipper was on the vessel on the day we were capsized by the cops!
Another interview with other anti-nuclear and myself is embedded below.
” It happens to be just that area for which climate models predict a cooling when the Gulf Stream System weakens (experts speak of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation or AMOC, as part of the global thermohaline circulation). That this might happen as a result of global warming is discussed in the scientific community since the 1980s – since Wally Broecker’s classical Nature article “Unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse?” Meanwhile evidence is mounting that the long-feared circulation decline is already well underway.”
More evidence that the AMOC is slowing down. The consequences of this have been well documented by Professor Guy McPherson on his blog guymcpherson.com and Paul Beckwith @ PaulBeckwith.net.
In 1984 my brother Noel and I were chosen to represent HART,Halt All Racial Tours the NZ anti-apartheid movement at a U.N.conference in Canberra hosted by the Australian government, discussing Namibia and it’s independence struggle from the apartheid regime. The racist government of Rob Muldoon who were supporting the apartheid regime failed to send a representative.
When I registered for the conference I was asked “Who is the NZ government representative” and I replied I am representing HART and the Government so I was given cross representation to the two organisations in a stupendous error for the Australian government!!!!!!!
When I spoke I supported the right of indigenous people to use armed struggle against a foreign oppressor/ invader. I likened the Namibian situation to that of Angola, South Africa and Ireland and reiterated that these armed struggles were in defense of the people and had no offensive nor imperialist component.
Gareth Evans, the Australian foreign minister accused me of ” Politics 101″ whatever that means and verbally attacked me for supporting armed struggle.
It caused quite a stir in the Australian media at the time and I was interviewed for the first time on Sydney’s Triple J Radio station where the interviewer said ” So you think you have the right to kill people”?
I answered “Yes if their intention is to kill me, my family or any other innocent victim” !!!!! The shit then hit the fan!
That night I went out with the ambassador of Mauritius and the delegates from Swapo, the ANC and the PAC and they thanked me for calling ‘a spade a spade’ and speaking truth to power.
Since that formative time in my young life Imperialism has murdered 10’s of millions of people.
Fight racism, smash apartheid, crush imperialism. Sometime in March I will be interviewed by Eric Draitser for a CounterPunch (official) podcast on the convergence of Imperialism and our climate crisis.
Gareth Evans went on to be a large part of the rape and pillage of East Timor and to be a supporter of draconian regimes world wide as you will read in this article from John Pilger
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By John Pilger, ‘Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.
The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.’
This is it. It is with great pleasure, that I announce the inception of my webpage, KevinHester.live. The domain is being processed, so you will not quite see the registered domain, yet.
We have warmed the atmosphere to 1.5 degrees above baseline in the last 150 yrs. 20% of that warming has happened in the last year. This constitutes runaway abrupt climate change.
Dr. James E. Hansen’s storms of our Grandchildren are here and now banging on our front door and kicking down our Polynesian neighbours homes, villages and nations. What does my P.M. John Key think about it? He doesn’t care.
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 