What the Super El Niño means politically for NZ, right-wing hate trolls and right wing corporate media
Our climate denial is no longer sustainable…
Costs of not adapting to climate change will rise along with sea levels – scientist
Earlier this week homes on the Wellington coast saw eleven metre swells knocking at their doors, while a new study revealed that Wellington’s one-in-100-year coastal floods have become roughly a twice-per-year occurrence.
We’re also in store for what experts are predicting to be the strongest El Niño weather event in a century.
So what does this mean going forward?
Graham Leonard is a principal scientist at Earth Sciences New Zealand. He told RNZ’s Saturday Morning the evacuations – though considered by some an overreaction – were a “a timely reminder of the myriad of coastal processes that turn into hazards at the coast because we live there, and they’re getting worse with climate change”.
“These coastlines, they’re kind of ephemeral, constantly changing places, and they don’t look the same for long. We’ve chosen to live at the coast for amenity, logical reasons, access to transport and sometimes floodplains where it’s a good place to grow crops and increasingly we just love the view. We love to be able to go swimming but it is one of the most unstable bits of the country.”
He said that because of the warming climate, what would otherwise have been a “normal” storm can be more damaging as the sea level rises, not to mention they are becoming more frequent.
“Climate change… has this multiplier effect on everything else that’s going on. Our mean sea level has risen by about 0.2 metres, about 20 centimetres over the last century, you know, from human greenhouse gases. And it’s projected to rapidly accelerate at the moment and reach perhaps a metre over the next century.
RNZ
…as TDB has been warning for months, the real possibility of a Super El Niño is upon us, the first in 150 years.
Last time the droughts and flooding killed 3% of the world population, this time it is compounded by the fertiliser blockage through the Strait that will miss the planting season and risk 10 billion meals a week.
This time to our collective horror, El Niño may peak over NZ…
‘Well and truly on its way’: El Niño very likely to peak over NZ summer
An El Niño that peaks over the New Zealand summer is now very likely, bringing with it the risks of drought, extremely hot days and wildfire.
…to paraphrase 1990s supergroup, Destiny’s Child, “I do not believe that we are ready for this jelly’.
The irony is that we could face some of the most extreme climate change weather JUST AS this Government disestablishes the Ministry for the Environment at the same time as the Government is embroiled in a scandal involving the 7 Biggest Polluters secretly advising climate change policy.
We will be facing extreme weather events while voting on a Government who are protecting the polluters causing that extreme weather.
For the wealthy, they will move, build higher walls and get extra air conditioning, for everyone else, they flee.
If the West is having trouble with refugees now, imagine how much more extreme it will get when temperatures get hotter and hotter.
Radical environmental movements aimed at undermining big polluter infrastructure is on the horizon as well as a shattering of the political spectrum.
And then there are the polluters writing the rules
Look at the current scandal exposed by activist Mike Smith where Big Polluters allegedly lobbied for legislation designed to shut down his case.
Those who create the most climate-changing pollution are nervous that the political class won’t be able to keep the people chained into subservience and might use politics as a means to constrain or punish those Big Polluters.
The obviousness that democracy has been replaced by plutocracy will drive a rage that will end in revolution.
So what excuses will the right-wing hate trolls and right wing corporate media use to gloss over the catastrophic climate change we will face?
What is a “hate troll”?