Like Pakalolo and Mikeymikey I sometimes get so tired of the whole climate shtick.
Fifteen years ago my wife and I moved from Australia home to NZ because we had listened to Tim Flannery and a bunch of climate scientists who were very clear, Australia was going to be more affected by climate change than any other inhabited place on earth. So having the choice to not be there was a no brainer.
We assumed that we were escaping horrendous droughts and bushfires, and in late 2019 we thought that was the sign of things finally getting real. There is no way in hell we would have bet that the biggest problem for Australia in 2022 would be flood, after flood, after flood. Some towns have been washed out 3 or 4 times this year alone with water levels at, supposedly “100 year flood” levels. And properties are becoming either literally uninsurable or the premiums are into the $40 THOUSAND A YEAR range
The chief executive of Climate Valuation, Karl Mallon, said the prediction that properties would become too expensive to insure due to global heating is unfolding faster than expected in the wake of this year’s flood disasters in Australia’s eastern states.
… Mallon said “in my view, these are failures of the property market. And when I say property market, I mean planning, development and construction, insurance and the financing sector.
“We’re now seeing that the system is not able to cope with climate change.”
By 2012 we had decided that a quarter acre urban paradise was never going to come close to feeding even us, let alone any family who might need, in extremis, to take shelter and it turned out we could exchange 1,000 sq metres in one of the poorer suburbs just above sea level in Auckland (conveniently near my wife’s work at university) for 10 acres on the city boundary with 260 olive trees, a shit tonne of firewood, pasture, some swampland and a 3 bedroom house, 2 barns, a water right over the stream at the bottom, with a NNW slope from 165-210m above MSL and still have $15k left over for necessary work.
That included taking down about 30 old 40m tall boundary pine trees and another 100 or so Japanese Cedar pruned back from 15-20m to 4-5m because we may not get sea level rise, and most of the rain events are easing by the time they reach us, but we WILL get the winds when they come and they will probably be ferocious.
Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous. Hansen et al.
For the 4th summer in a row we will have a marine heatwave in the Tasman Sea between us and Aus, we have already started to see sea snakes around the coast and other species that have never been here before, while our previously reliable fishing grounds are slowly moving south.
This winter was our wettest on record nation-wide, and at my place. A really wet winter in the past has had 200mm of rain on my rolling 30 day total, from the end of April to mid September. This year there were weeks when the total was over 300mm and even now, when I used to be starting to wonder how I am going to rotate the cows through the paddocks and spare enough pasture to keep Iris milking through summer, I am sitting on 200+. This morning, after 8mm last night, I am at 285mm. That is extraordinary.
Thankfully, after a decade of trying to manage my pasture, my trees and the water, I have had no floods, very little pugging except in the stockyard surrounds where the cows congregate every day and, so far, only one lime tree that looks like it has died from phytophthera or similar. But even my barely adequate shot at regenerative farming has taken 10 years, without it, starting now, even those who might “afford” it, don’t have time.
Thanks to all that water, and maybe the fact that there have been essentially no frosts, almost every tree has blossomed like crazy and the beehive is bursting at the seams. My hive inspector said to me the other day that it feels to him like we have lost not only climate, but seasons, they are all just becoming weather. He is the only other person I have ever spoken with who has volunteered that idea, one that I have lived with increasingly in recent years.
But I also know that this wont last either. I have a friend in PEI who was hit by the scrag end of Hurricane Fiona, he wrote this the other day,
I'm okay with lessons learned. I can adapt. But Fiona was something else. A very high percentage of forest, some say 50 percent of the forest on this island was destroyed In 12 hours. We all lost some favorite trees. But I have sections with a hundred tons of downed trees in piles. It might nicely decompose. It might also catch fire in an electrical storm.
We're beyond what just happens sometimes.
I'm not sure we can fix it. The good news is we don't have to. The bad news is we're not prepared for that.
He lost hundreds of tonnes of trees, including many of his heritage apples, half a generation of work that he wont live to see restored even in the best of conditions. And they are gone now. And I know that somewhere in my future, I will be looking down the barrel of something like that.
And I will be among the lucky.
It’s not the weather that makes me tired though, it is people, those who spend so very much of their energy trying very hard not to notice the sound of the ecosystem screaming in pain.
Right now, many of us are grieving the loss of our former way of life as the pandemic and the war and the early hard signs of ecosystem failure take effect. Most of us are not ready for that level of pervasive, irremediable grief.
But its only the down payment unless we can act, the down payment on the loss of the possibility of life at all. I’m nearly 72, I am not at all convinced that, barring accidents, I wont see that. It’s enough to weary us to death.
