Three years ago this was a well-read and well-circulated article in Roling Stones (October 2011). Given the most recent burn season in the Land Down Under thought it might be interesting to REPOST: I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions, Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. Australia is the canary in the coal mine, says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future...... ....How bad could it get? A recent study by MIT projects that without rapid and massive action to cut carbon pollution, the Earths temperature could soar by nine degrees this century. There are no analogies in human history for a temperature jump of that size in such a short time period, says Tony McMichael, an epidemiologist at Australian National University. The few times in human history when temperatures fell by seven degrees, he points out, the sudden shift likely triggered a bubonic plague in Europe, caused the abrupt collapse of the Moche civilization in Peru and reduced the entire human race to as few as 1,000 breeding pairs after a volcanic eruption blocked out the sun some 73,000 years ago. We think that because we are a technologically sophisticated society, we are less vulnerable to these kinds of dramatic shifts in climate, McMichael says. But in some ways, because of the interconnectedness of our world, we are more vulnerable.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 04:15:09 +0000
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