Scrub fire continues spreading out of control near Canterbury’s Twizel
Evacuations have taken place in the Mackenzie District overnight as a significant scrub fire continues to spread.
Nearly a dozen crews were called to Lake Pukaki shortly before 8pm Wednesday evening, forcing officials to close a stretch of Mt Cook Road (State Highway 8).
Due to dry and windy conditions, Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) was unable to actively fight the blaze – instead, monitoring its movement throughout the night.
It said six helicopters would be operating to tackle the blaze on Thursday morning.
“Firefighting operations have remained limited overnight due to weather conditions but will ramp up as soon as dawn breaks.
Welcome to our new reality.
Modelling shows with drier spells we will be far more prone to devastating forest fires in areas previously resilient enough to stop them exploding out of control.
Rogue Pine Forrests have been ignored for such a long time because they rarely threatened mass fire events, climate change will change that.
Currently National are looking to slash the coms budget of regional civil defence which is problematic because NZs bullshit under regulated under funded services opt for coms over actual capacity, the idea being it’s cheaper to warn people last minute to flee than have the services required to rescue or save.
National will cut those services.
Global warming was a theoretical threat that would impact us sometime in the future.
We were wrong.
What we are seeing in the Northern Hampshire with extreme forest fires and extreme flooding alongside extreme heat waves is looming large now in the Southern Hemisphere.
…in barely 300 years since the Industrial Revolution we have generated a level of co2 that would take hundreds of thousands of years to generate through natural causes.
We know that tipping points built into the biosphere can flip and cause vast differences of temperate from during hot to freezing cold within decades.
We are past any chance of preventing what is already baked into the climate and radical adaptation is our only hope.
It seems bewildering that as the Planet boils, New Zealand is about to elect its most climate denier Government ever promising more gas and oil exploration.
ACT and National aren’t climate deniers, they are Climate Criminals!
We know now that the oil companies lied to us…
Inside Exxon’s Strategy to Downplay Climate Change
…while those who profit from pollution do everything to pretend climate change isn’t a legitimate concern…
Groundswell NZ to hit the road again
Groundswell NZ co-founders Bryce McKenzie and Laurie Paterson will be climbing back on tractors for another nationwide trek, but this time their message is for voters.
The pair led the major Howl of a Protest journey in July 2021, opposing the Government’s rural sector regulations and policies, followed by another nationwide event, the Mother of All Protestsin November that year.
Nothing had improved since then, McKenzie said.
“There hasn’t been anything wound back – and they’re still coming at us with new regulations.’’
…Farmers are like students, feminists and Antivaxxers, in that they are never happy.
As the climate deniers and climate minimalists continue to bleat that climate change is a socialist hoax, or pretend we can’t do anything, or factiously claim ‘the climate always change’ while they continue to spread spiteful disinformation and malicious lies, the planet is melting…
World registers hottest day ever recorded on July 3
Monday, July 3, was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction.
The average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit), surpassing the August 2016 record of 16.92C (62.46F) as heatwaves sizzled around the world.
The southern US has been suffering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks. In China, an enduring heatwave continued, with temperatures above 35C (95F). North Africa has seen temperatures near 50C (122F).
And even Antarctica, currently in its winter, registered anomalously high temperatures. Ukraine’s Vernadsky Research Base in the white continent’s Argentine Islands recently broke its July temperature record with 8.7C (47.6F).
…as the world melts, National, ACT, Groundswell and Federated Farmers are promising to do everything to undermine the very little the Greens/Labour have managed.
The level of denial over what is happening and where this is all going is beneath the challenge of the moment…
Damning report finds more than 400,000 New Zealand homes at risk of flooding
Newly released research has found more than 400,000 homes around New Zealand are at risk of flooding.
The report by NIWA and the University of Auckland found 441,384 residential buildings were in flood-prone areas, with a hefty estimated replacement value of $218 billion – a massive 12 percent of New Zealand’s housing value.
…The Biggest Lie in NZ Politics is that NZ Dairy is the cleanest and greenest in the world when the reality is that it’s a cherry picked nonsense that leaves out pollution so NZ Dairy can get to the numbers to pretend to be clean and green.
Russel Norman’s take down of this Dairy propaganda on The AM Show recently was just ruthless…
“NZ is the biggest seller of a simple commodity called dried milk powder, the cheapest of the cheap, and if you look at what is happening in food production around the world they are looking for more environmentally sound food products.
They are looking for higher value products.
We’ve gone down the pathway of the lowest quality commodity you can produce in the world.
NZ is mid range in terms of its environmental cost per kilogram of milk solids, there is nothing special about it, and we do feed a small number of people compared to the billions on the planet and the economics is very clear that you can be just as profitable if you pull back on the stock rate, pull back on the amount of fertiliser and actually produce a higher product.
Organics is in fact doing incredibly well globally, so why don’t we become a producer of dairy rather than the producer of the cheapest commodity on the planet which results in us trashing our water ways and being big climate producers, that’s a better pathway isn’t it?
…he’s so right!
We always ignore that the 40million number is based on us selling milk powder as a base line ingredient filler for the manufactured food industry. The PR spin pretends it’s wholesome NZ cheese and milk and meat those 40million are eating when the truth is the vast majority of what we export is basic bitch milk powder used as a filler ingredient!
The Climate Crisis was some event we feared at the end of the century, what we are seeing is an unleashing of heat events well beyond what we feared.
There is just no plan to adapt to this new reality when it should be the driving force to begin immediate and radical adaptation for what is coming.
We have no comprehension of what is coming and we are simply not prepared for the age of consequences.
Watching National, ACT and Corporate Farmers use their economic and political muscle to avoid responsibility for what comes next can only be resolved by civil unrest and a campaign of civil disobedience against those interests.
Just consider how the Corporate Farming Lobby have managed to avoid any tax on their pollution since mid 2004!
They have pushed and pushed and pushed it off for 20 years!
National have already promised ANOTHER 5 year extension which will mean the agricultural industry have managed to stop any tax on their pollution for quarter of a century!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Claiming that NZs emissions mean nothing in comparison to China and India isn’t a justification to do nothing, it’s an acknowledgement that radical adaptation is the only move left because those Goliath economies have already doomed us to a dangerous climate change future!
The Left must force a bargain with Farmers for strategically essential reasons.
They are going to feed us when the famine comes.
A recent report on food security found NZ had incredibly low food security because it was so open market driven and refused to subsidise farmers.
Which is where we on the Left must drive the debate.
We should absolutely consider subsidising food grown by NZ farmers and horticulturalists and our seafood and meat and dairy that generates a 15% price reduction for all NZ produce consumed here.
Rebuilding a direct link between the harvest grown here, the people who grow it and a grateful local market who enjoy the product WITH a 15% price reduction.
Climate change will kill global free market supply chains, we are locked into hyper-regionalism. We need to build new economic structures, subsidising NZ kai for the domestic market would lock in certainty for producers while strengthening food security for the population.
We have to find new ways of working together to ensure we can survive what’s coming.
We are a nation of fatherless children raised by angry solo mothers, a low imagination horizon juvenile settler culture built upon stealing indigenous land and polluting it without restraint. A rugged individualism dependent on exploiting a low wage economy and rigging under-regulated capitalism for the rich.
The old greeds, the old hates and the old exploitations will no longer hold the system together if that system is melting in real time.
Super-rich warned of ‘pitchforks and torches’ unless they tackle inequality
Global elite told at London’s Savoy hotel of real risk of ‘civil disruption’ if more is not done to help struggling millions
This is the age of consequences.
They won’t be pleasant.
Welcome to your new Forest Fire Reality New Zealand!
BTW – the planet is melting…
South-east Australia marine heatwave forecast to be literally off the scale
Australia’s south-east could be in for a marine heatwave that is literally off the scale, raising the prospect of significant losses in fishing and aquaculture.
The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast a patch of the Tasman Sea off Tasmania and Victoria could be at least 2.5C above average from September to February, and it could get hotter.
Oceanographer Grant Smith said the colour-coded scale the bureau uses to map forecast sea surface temperature anomalies stops at 2.5C.
“We didn’t account for anomalies that high when we developed this … it could be 3C, it could be 3.5C, but we can’t see how high it goes,” he said.
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Yes, let’s plant more pine trees.
Yes well they’re the ones that are burning. Makes sense
Hey, but at least we will have a fully funded , fully resourced , with modern equipment Fire service and volunteer fire service to fight these fires.
I am sure Luxon said in the debate he will increase funding with inflation. As part of climate adpatation.
Probably overgrown DOC land , or pines grown to absorb Co2 , so we don’t have global warming and wild fires…
It’s in those pines near the bottom end of Pukaki by the look of it.
The burning trees are Wilding pines which are growing like weeds .They are not looked after grow closer than forest pines and the ground is not cleared so fire spreads easily with no fire breaks .Millions needs to be spent on this problem which has not been handled well by either party when in power
You are right Trevor. I live in the Mackenzie so I’m well aware of the wilding problem.
A large part of wilding pine eradication is done by volunteers, like most things in the rural sector.
Thanks Andy .Is that the same rural sector that this government and the Greens are constantly slamming as poor carers of the land
Definitely part of the problem
We grow cows, trees and ignorant white muthafuckas.
And that ‘melting system’ is the Westminster model of liberal democracy that every day proves it is no longer fit for general purpose.
We need a re-evolution and re-introduction of indigenous traditions, but only the ones that serve the greater good.
3 waters, co- governance and taxing the rich more is a start.
Go figure the Native Americans used to practice slash and burn but as usual white man knows best. Just saying.
Can I just pop in here for a mo’? Nothing really.
“…National, ACT, Groundswell and Federated Farmers …”
They’re not [farmers] per se, they’re pro-establishment anti-militants. Think Anti-Christ but without the class? They’re there, where they are, to make sure fuck all happens and if stuff does happen, tractors get driven slowly. Wow! Right? That, achieves two things. Thing#1 It makes farmers look like Dicks. Thing#2. Nothing useful comes of it. The reason I write that is because to understand what’s really and actually happening to the industry that exports its produce to feed back foreign exchange so we farmers and you city people can have money with which to buy our stuff and things. You really need to have illustrative pictures drawn using crayons but I can’t do that here in this little comments box so I must grind on in as an illustrative way as possible.
National created ACT, right? I think that’s fairly obvious by now. And Federated Farmers would have definitely brain farted out ‘Groundswell’ to create a false narrative deliberately intended to go nowhere to achieve nothing.
This next point should worry you @ Martyn Bradbury. I know how you love Auckland. So do I. Auckland’s a funny little town and it has its charms but the one thing it is, is that it can’t sustain itself by itself.
Auckland’s only talent is in fiddling with farmer money once siphoned off and away from farmers via the banks and the IRD which is in and of itself a corrupt bureaucratic institution where cronyism is as commonplace as farts in a bingo hall.
Our frankly pathetic population of Urban pencil sharpeners can never stray from the false narrative that’s created an entirely fictitious and inflammable economy driven by the madness of that common saying that funny little mike hoskings sequestered from the film Wall Street. ” Greed if Good”.
I’m encouraged by the polls showing many people in our country are not silly.
The last election was “Jacinda Mania” more of a class captain vote than running a country vote.
The self appointed philosophers on this site,thank heavens, are not taken seriously.They are to be pitied they know not who they are or what they do.
‘False narrative’! It seems that Chris Trotter is looking at that right now. Does this speak to it.
https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/2023/09/failing-to-hold-back-flood-edgy.html
“The polling graphs, which had brought Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to victory, looked like bell jars with the votes heaped in the centre, and few at the extremes. This era had left a whole generation of politicians with three assumptions:
that liberal global markets were the answer to prosperity;
that prosperity would spread democracy;
and that the world would be governed by a liberal global order.”
Maybe the world’s best-selling book is onto something when it says that man will destroy the Earth, it also describes disasters as birth pangs in that they will increase in intensity & number. Keep an open mind would be my advice as world events cause mass panic.
As you can see Luxon thought ahead by having a controlled burn off. Not a hair to worry about
It’s called arson