2021 was NZ’s hottest year on record – the true problem with ‘Don’t Look Up’
Weather: Niwa confirms 2021 was NZ’s hottest year on record
What was New Zealand’s costliest year for flood damage was also our warmest – sending a grim reminder, if we still needed one, that our planet is heating at an alarming rate.
Niwa today revealed that 2021 was the hottest year in more than a century of records, with a mean land surface temperature of 13.56C – or just shy of 1C above the 1981-2010 average.
That placed it above our previous warmest, 2016, as well as 2018, which began with a record-hot summer, and 1998, the year a severe El Nino fuelled a nightmare drought.
‘A stark reminder’: 2021 the world’s fifth-hottest year on record – EU scientists
Last year was the world’s fifth hottest on record, while levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere hit new highs in 2021, EU scientists said.
The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a report on Monday the past seven years were the world’s warmest “by a clear margin” in records dating back to 1850 and the average global temperature in 2021 was 1.1-1.2C above 1850-1900 levels.
The hottest years on record were 2020 and 2016.
In 1980, the time between billion dollar climate destruction events was 3 months.
It’s now 18 days.
There is a point where the next destructive weather event strikes before you can rebuild from the last one.
The rapid melting of the doomsday glacier in Antarctica is the final evidence that we can’t stop what’s coming and that radical adaptation will be the only option.
Expect to hear a lot more about the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation as its weakening will trigger irreversible environmental collapse.
There is no optimism on the climate front, just consequences now.
Meanwhile we continue to focus on the big issues like cancelling people for tweets sent a decade ago and shadow banning everyone who is friends with Ani O’Brien and Rachel Stewart on Twitter.
You know, the BIG issues.
Watching Climate Strike For Students Auckland cancel itself last year because of ‘white heteronormative cis male privilege’ (I’m not joking) sums up the current climate crisis protest movement perfectly. A middle class asthetic for social justice virtue signals tied into woke dogma that believes all white people are racist, all men are rapists and anyone supporting free speech is a Nazi.
Woke Identity Politics is as alienating as a Spin-off dinner party where everyone is arguing over who hates white men the most.
Woke Identity Politics is perfect for free the nipple rallies with cycling militant Trans ally mommy bloggers, not so good on the economic neoliberal hegemony that is melting the planet.
As we squabble, midnight arrives, and ultimately, that was the true problem with Netflix’s ‘Don’t Look Up‘.
The pitiful shallow political leadership, the Aspie Billionaire rocket club, the banal celebrity obsessed public, the inarticulate scientific community with zero capacity to convince the apathetic voters – in the end you just started cheering for the fucking asteroid!
And that’s the true problem with ‘Don’t Look Up’, you are so sickened by our collective response that the only justice left is in deserving what comes next.
The petty low hanging fruit of neoliberal identity politics is the only value the progressive left can espouse because individuals no longer see themselves beyond the identity of their social media profile. We have lost collective solidarity via class for skin colour, gender and self selected identity.
And while those identities scream for social hierarchy in a never ending outrage Olympics and victim virtue signaling cacophony fed by Facebook hate algorithms, the corporations pretend they are blameless, Billionaires build bigger rockets and the Planet melts.
It’s hard not to support the asteroid.
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Times up! everything has a beginning and an ending.
All the sinful ways of mankind have colluded to bring about the ending that many cultures have predicted would eventually come.
Mars was probably green and inhabited but look at it now. The Middle East and Northern Africa was once a fertile green place, but look at it now.
All the science says going vego is the way and love of flesh eating ruined the Egyptian’s too. It aint rocket science. The reasons India and China grew and were sustainable was because they limited meat.
Luke 3:16
John answered them all, saying, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
Psalm 104:4
He makes his messengers winds, his ministers a flaming fire.
Luke 12:49
“I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!
Mike the lefty, those people probably don’t have to worry about the extra few thousand. It will be more like which colour to get.
Meanwhile, back to the important issues of the day……….pro nouns (sarc).
The boomer replacement generation members that decide not to have kids–for whatever reason–are doing humans a service, because really what reasonable person would want to put more people through what is coming?
Eco Socialism is what was needed years ago, and may still happen in little outposts as the tipping points “tip”. I disregarded Martyn’s Fortress NZ argument for a long time, but grudgingly accept a version of it will now have to kick in sooner rather than later. COVID has shown the way with supply chain blockages, and less migrant labour, tourism and general exploitation–and shock horror–the country did not collapse!
Futurist movies from WaterWorld, Mad Max, Hunger Games, The Quiet Earth, and Blade Runner to name some mainstream ones, have illustrated what we are in for.
I know of 1 way to delay the crashing of capitalism by the climate chaos. People have invented a UCC a universlal ‘carbon’ credit whereby everyone gets an equal ration of a second currency which has to be paid for everything that includes greenhouse gas pollution. That implemented for businesses would function like GST. People would be able to reduce their pollution in their own way without choices made for them. Excessive users (the rich) would have to take drastic action. They would be able to buy UCCs from the poor who dont pollute thus the rich would help the poor out of poverty.. There is an organisation working on the details.
As a keen kayaker I’m more than pleased to note that kayak rolling practice this summer has been less daunting. I’m still hanging out for coral top begin forming up in Northland though.
The true problem is that for century’s industrialist bastards have clear felled the worlds forests so it cant breathe. You know?…. like riparian edges and wholesale destruction of the Amazon rainforest and earlier, North Africa and the Mediterranean? And you wonder why ???!!!
Huh!
There was a documentary[ David Attenborough?] that showed exactly what I’d been saying to my family weeks before; A country [ West African?] was using cheap and simple irrigation techniques to revege step by step areas of desert and in doing so, creating farming and animal habitat oasis’s. Kilometer after kilometer. Huge employment, huge crop growing benefits and food production. They were harvesting grain and root crops, and planting fruit trees. Using plants native to that area as well as lupins and other nitrogen fixing and humous making plants as the advant garde.
How simple is that? , if all these high falluting conferences singled out a country to be developed with aid, then the next one – then the next one ,- we could clear this global warming crap up and provide for a healthy well nourished global population.
But no. Always the wankers who see their profit margins plummet if people worked together. And that’s the way its always been. A pox on them and the curse of 1000 cattle ticks under each of their armpits. Bloated, of course.