Waatea News Column: Where is the climate Crisis Debate this Election?

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The Washington Post reports that there have been so many hurricanes and tropical storms this year that we have run out of alphabet to name the storms with and will need to start using the Greek alphabet.

This comes on top of massive forest fires in California, massive forest fires in Siberia, record-breaking temperatures globally and record-breaking ice melt throughout the Arctic and Antarctica.

Around the planet, we are seeing an acceleration of climate crisis events and they are being felt in NZ with intense droughts and rainfall.

The Covid pandemic we are currently facing is a symptom of global warming because species jumping virus are created by the same overpopulation and habitat destruction that powers climate change.

As the planet rapidly warms, where is the debate about how New Zealand will protect the environment we have that includes a Māori perspective which is more needed than ever before?

We are not seeing the reality for a radical redefinition of what protecting our environment requires in the future.

This election’s almost as if climate change isn’t happening!

There’s little point rebuilding from the pandemic if that rebuild isn’t preparing us for the next wave of external events that will start hitting our shores.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

First published on Waatea News.

4 COMMENTS

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/10/us-west-fire-season-california-oregon-climate-action

    … what is happening now is astonishingly worse than any previous fire season. We are in a new kind of era.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/as-smoke-lifts-on-californias-coast-it-lingers-in-central-valley-where-farmworkers-have-no-refuge/ar-BB199Esc?li=BBnb7Kz

    No refuge for farmworkers.

    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12308316.

    NZ drought: Auckland set to break record for longest dry spell

    Elections, ha ha. Voting for whom, eh?

  2. The radically changing climate is the backdrop and the stage setting for any debates. The presenters, actors and speakers studiously ignore it, even while storms are tearing the stage apart, drowning participants and washing homes out to sea, and the rest explodes in flames.

    How long can we go on pretending this isn’t happening? Pretending it will all go away? Pretending it doesn’t matter?

  3. There’s nothing we can do to stop abrupt exponential climate change, it has its own momentum and positive feedbacks happening some believe that we are in runaway* leading inevitably to a Hot House Earth; except facing this reality and preparing for sea level rise, heatwaves, drought storms and the rest anyway we can. The implications for policy are obvious.

    * Jennifer Hynes & Jim Massa recap the research- a sea that is “boiling” with methane……. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I3TyKd5JTQ&t=3888s

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