Climate extremes and victims happen everywhere
"Gang-busters" mining economy means "biosphere-busters" for our planet. Which one can we afford to "write-off"?

It is getting easier to find articles about regular global heating impacts from everywhere, because it is impacting everywhere. In Europe, impacts include increasing drought in the south. Where it rains, it rains too much. Permafrost melt accelerates over northern Russia. In Australia drought and bush-fires nearly all year round.

We have a general movement of global heating refugees, away from the equator, and growing continental droughts and interior deserts. They get called the pejorative term "economic refugees" by Australian politicians, and in the media. Bureaucratic rules, and Count Dracula's border forces are set up to deny residency rights, as part of ongoing persecution by industrial civilisation.

Do we really understand that most refugees are fleeing the global impacts of our fossil-fuelled economies? Or the impacts of wars for the "blood acquisitions" of industrial civilisation?

Massive impacts eventually force changes of lifestyles and outlook of everyone, and will eventually change governments, unless the growing denial despotism continues to black-out the meaning of climate news everyday.

The world will need to agree that keeping hydrocarbons in the ground is essential. Fracking, tar sands, and opening yet new sources for oil and gas in the Arctic will have to halt. Solar, hydro, and wind power will need to be expanded, and some very basic parts of the economy re-examined.
-- Coll Hallinan

Affecting Australian weather now, and possibly the rest of this year, is a record large mass of "super - warm" air above the Antarctic. It will be influencing the weather from high up in the stratosphere, part of changes in the South Polar vortex wind patterns, which will mean ongoing prolonged dryness in the Australian Spring. The event and explanations warranted Australian meteorologists, to write this article in "The Conversation". The good news is that the regular spring "ozone" hole is suppressed by the new conditions. The article finishes with the praise of the latest supercomputers that can predict these sort of things.

We have already had similar problems in the Northern Hemisphere, with its "Wandering polar vortex" issue. 

What drives these strange new weather patterns? Even the meteorological article authors did not mention global heating, nor relate it the greenhouse gas emissions of industrial civilisation. That would constitute political opinion. They did not mention or relate to the "Sudden Stratospheric Warming" that is already known from the Northern Hemisphere behaviour. Large land masses in the adjacent mid-latitudes are getting hotter,  their air masses can move up to the poles, and disrupt the stable polar vortex winds. In the southern hemisphere, Australia, South America and South Africa are the big land masses, with Australia having the biggest east-west spread. Although southern oceans exist at the same sort of latitudes as the most northern of north hemisphere land masses, global heat redistribution happens just the same.

But how is global warming to blame?
The answer is simple: because the phenomenon that causes the polar vortex to break down is known as sudden stratospheric warming, where the upper layers of the atmosphere increase in temperature by approximately 30–50 °C (54–90 °F) over the span of only a few days. The fact that there are land masses located where they are in the northern hemisphere means that as those land temperatures increase, they transport their heat to even more northern latitudes.

Even the term "sudden" is tantamount to calling it "without cause" or "spontaneous", which isn't the sort of attitude to science that I like to hear from meteorologists.

We are experiencing changing weather patterns, caused by global heating, caused by our industrial civilisation, but few dare mention it, in case it causes "panic", or worse still, some drawing of conclusions. Pardon us for trying to compensate. The flows of refugees, and the flows of weather patterns, the sixth great mass extinction now underway, are coming from the accumulation of our own impacts that we fail to recognise and abort. This is a finite and interdependent world. Consumption and waste go all the way around and into the future.

Meanwhile in Australia, after prolonged warm and dry winter, on top of drought, there is plenty of alarming news of extreme bush fires, whipped by strong winds, very early in the season.

There is plenty of talk of aid,  support for hardship and losses of victims, from sitting major-party politicians, but no one dares to mention the worlds "global heating" or "climate change" in connection with widespread extreme fire events on live media. Tony Abbott, former politician and prime minister, actively denied it. On my car radio I heard a politician describe the bushfire victims as "worthy people", obviously as owners of valuable property and also citizens, not like those unworthy victims of industrial civilisation fleeing other lands.

Why is the global heating connection missing? Apart from the common media-grown garden variety denial, both major parties are entirely stuffed to the top with cash and influence from foreign mining industry. There is much pushing and bullying of State governments by Federal Government,  in favor of massive Gas Fracking operations the Northern Territory, and new coal mining in the Queensland Galilee Basin. Both sets of projects, non-coincidentally, involve large amounts of disregard, displacement and dispossession of many communities of original inhabitants, who seemed to be easy targets for our mining-industry-mates-in-government (MIMIG) complex. Their aim is to increase Australia's already massive exports of hydrocarbons, the exact opposite of what should now be being done to mitigate the future extreme impacts of global heating.

Often parroted as justification is to give increased consumption lifestyle and "economic growth" of Asian Nations. We also consume their goods and services in trade. It boosts the profits of corporations, and Australian government maximises its subservience to corporate exploitation powers. It appears to be working well for some, as global heating impacts are going feral, while Australian government lapses into end-stage dementia, if not completely deaf and dumb about global heating. The Australian "Balance of Payments" has gone positive for the first time in around 40 years, with corresponding high rates of resource flows extracted out of the country. It appears that genuine concern for the biological future of life in Australia has fled our political systems. Ditto to all those other child-nations of the industrial revolution. All are victims of the show-runners for industrial civilisation.


author:
MIchael Rynn
description:
Global Heating impacts and victims happen everywhere. Australian government and media are deaf and dumb to it.
keywords:
Global Heating, extreme weather, bushfires, coal and gas exports from Australia.
og:title:
Climate impacts and victims happen everywhere

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