We have maneuvered our hospitable planet into turbulent and chaotic property changes. In the anthropocene we have profoundly modified the Earth’s landscape. Human activities are creating an inhospitable ecosystem for human biomes and the biosphere at large.
The diy catastrophic climate breakdown is due to the addiction to burning fossil fuels. We are racing into a 4 degrees Celsius scenario, although it is known that fossil fuels need to stay unburned to meet climate target of 2°C. Some engage in pathological denial and are willfully blind to it resuming business-as-usual. For some it's enough to have a “change of government and climate change just disappears!”
There will be a legacy from the ones that “dig it up, ship it out and let it burn” - an out of control array of fire 'incidents', droughts, record intense heatwaves, floods, an 11-cyclone season, sea level rise and a dead, acid ocean.
Climate disruption will have severe implications for Australia's already challenged biodiversity conservation and protected areas. "Rates of extinction of species are likely to increase as the global average temperature rises by just 1.0 or 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and likely to accelerate sharply as temperature rises beyond 2 degrees Celsius."
Land degradation as usual continues with clearing, logging and slash and burn. The fossil-fuel-powered culture of sprawl, mining, plantations and pastoralism munches its way through all Australian biomes.
Fear of mega fire storms
There is a tendency to reclassify all bush/ native vegetation as fuel that needs incinerating with so that it cannot burn in the future. Backburning often leads to out-of-control blazes. Hazard reductions take place in nature refuges around cities and ever growing settlements in bushfire-prone areas. Arsonists and thoughtless cigarette tossers do their bit.
It is soothing to know ...
That Australia's 25,000 plant species have found a safe habitat in perpetuity in the freezer.
That Australian wildlife threatened by climate change will be relocated.
That "a refusal to implement the Kyoto Protocol or do something about CO2...calls for a new approach to deal with people displaced by climate change." Both overseas and local climate refugees.
That there is a "fires near me" app.
Images:
Public transport station
Updates:
The refusal to make the link between the fires and climate change will condemn more people to the inferno The Guardian
Heed the warnings on the new climate reality, The Guradian
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