Australia Cyclone is the new climate change future
Take a long look at Cyclone Alfred hitting Australia.
The uniqueness of the Cyclone and where it hit.
The cost in the billions that will impact insurance.
Hundreds of thousands without power and coastlines irreversibly damaged.
This is the future.
This is the climate change future we have built and are trapped inside.
There is a total disconnect between the 3 centuries of exploitative resource extraction and the realities of the true cost of that now as the biosphere collapses…
Home owners could be asked to fork out up to about $400 more a year to prop up the country’s state disaster insurer.
…the latest AMI insurance TV advert is an hilarious abomination…
…as they increase their insurance rates because of catastrophic climate change, the insurance companies (part of the very capitalism that causing the climate change that AMI use in their insurance advert) are now just shrugging to you without mentioning their role in the Capitalism that is causing the climate change.
In the words of Professor Wayne Hope from his new incredible book, The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures…
The corporate ambit of emissions culpability also includes transnational finance capital. In October 2019, journalist Patrick Greenfield drew from the think tank Influence Map and business data specialists Proxy Insight to examine the investment holdings of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. Their combined portfolios presided over US$286.7 billion of oil, coal and gas company shares administered through 1 712 funds. These figures excluded direst and non-listed fund holdings. Such investments were, and are, used to manage major funds involving pensions, university endowments and insurance companies. These figures reiterate the general principle of corporate culpability for carbon emissions and point to the contribution of global finance. Further to this matter, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney surmised that multi trillion-dollar world capital markets were financing projects and activities likely to raise average global temperatures 4% more than pre-industrialised levels.
As global networks of fossil fuel extraction, refining, industrial use and related financial investment produce carbon emissions, wealthy elites dominate carbon consumption. Explaining the process first requires a short excuses on wealth distribution, luxury consumer culture and class. Clearly, global wealth growth benefits super-rich individuals from the TCC. The richest 1% of the world’s population took 38% of all additional wealth between 1995 and 2021. Just 2% went to the bottom 50% of humankind. For the same period, billionaires’ share of total global wealth grew from 1 to 3%. Tim Di Muzio, writing in 2015, depicted such differentials as a global plutonomy whereby economic growth powered and consumed mostly by the wealthy few, excluded the vast majority. With huge money surplus to spend on precious metals, property portfolios, home residences, retreats, first-class travel, cars, yachts, jets, exclusive cultural pursuits and leisure activities, the rich and super rich demarcate social prestige among themselves. Individuals, families and groups strive to symbolically out-consume their class peers, while the upper-middle classes aspire to emulate their superiors. The entire set-up, led by the dominant owners of capital, is ecologically unsustainable.
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The world is burning or drowning and we are more concerned with putting labels on people who disagree with us
Yes, the Gold Coast is not looking so flash now, with tall buildings perched rather close to eroding sand dunes. The Cyclone did not have massive predicted wind impact but the rain and floods have done their usual business, cutting off communities, power and internet out for many days for hundreds of thousands, major property damage etc.
Wakey time, another one will be along in NZ too before you are ready for it. Gabrielle cut some coastal places off for months. So many things need to be done in terms of infrastructure and planning, but too many remain in denial or inertia. The powers that be do not want to disrupt capitalism–which is exactly what needs to happen–most of that slash is still in Gisborne hills waiting for the next big one.
Don’t panic Martyn Australian Bureau of Meteorology confirm that not only have tropical cyclones becomes less frequent, there has also been a decline in the more severe ones.
Have a source for that?
Here’s a link that says “less frequent but more intense”.
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2025/March/Climate-change-cyclone-alfred
Both can’t be right.
Little wonder that more and more couples are choosing to not have babies.
This, despite Luxon’s call to copulate and populate i.e. have more babies!
But, of course, he’s “sorted”!
Yes fuck fuck fuck
Cyclones are incredibly complex and predictions about their impact are fraught with difficulty. I admit I’m no climatologist but if I recall cyclones are somewhat endemic to the north west coast of Aussie. But the science around global warming and climate change indicates they are getting more intense (although Tracy, Christmas Day 1974, Darwin was pretty severe). And if there are no high pressure systems pushing them away from the north of NZ, further out into the South Pacific, they do find there way here. Bola in 1988, Gabrielle Feb 2023, to name a couple. They’re here to stay. A reminder we don’t live in a benign world.
More intensity. Yep, that’s a worry especially if you’re living in their path. But we all pay the cost. And following on from MB and Wayne Hope, we, are all to blame. But the 1%ers and their enablers are to blame more! The fuckers. The socio-economic system is a the root of it. Exploitation of carbon resources locked up in the earth. Energy. Commodities and consumption. The fixation with endless growth. Were fucked aren’t we unless we can change that paradigm. Mitigation or adaptation? Renewable energies, alternative agriculture, reforestation, carbon taxes, better science, building back better. All noble solutions. Reason at its very best – or is that its deluded worst. Imv all a lost cause unless the focus is the very capitalism that is the cause of climate change in the first place. Bravo Wayne Hope. Another dissenting voice.