We fled with what belongings we could take in the face of a fire few believed would ever destroy our town. Minutes earlier, the last of the nearly 1,000 residents had bolted, some in shirts singed by flames. It took less than 30 minutes for the Dixie fire to transform my town’s tarnished Gold Rush charm into a heap of smoldering hand-hewn timbers and century-old brick walls. As that sinister cumulus rose above an oval-shaped reservoir, it collapsed, sending red-hot embers down the steep slopes toward Greenville in a storm of torched trees and exploding shrubs. On August 4, 2021, the flames suddenly flared into a heat so intense it formed a molten cloud the color of bruised flesh. Greenville, CA - Pines and firs parched by a three-year drought had been burning for days on a ridge 1,000 feet above my remote mountain town. With that in mind, let her introduce you to the world of climate migrants that could someday simply be the world for all too many of us. As she wrote in her first piece for this site, she found herself a climate refugee when most of her town in northern California burned to the ground in the devastating Dixie fire of 2021. My old friend and TomDispatch regular Braxton Little has already experienced this reality in an up close and personal fashion. No wonder some experts are already suggesting that, in the decades to come, the climate emergency could turn more than a billion of us into migrants on a planet becoming too hot to bear. In fact, a new study in Nature Sustainability suggests that, by late in this century, if we human beings don’t get a handle on climate change by truly bringing the fossil-fuelization of this planet under control, up to one-third of us could find ourselves living outside what its authors call the “human climate niche” - that is, in areas where human life could be unsustainable. And none of this, eerily enough, can be considered out of the ordinary anymore. This year, Canada is experiencing wildfires of an historically unprecedented sort. Just check out Nigeria or Australia if you don’t believe me.) At one point last year, one-third (yes, you read that right!) of Pakistan was underwater, thanks to floods the likes of which had never been seen before. Sooner or later, to put this in the context of Jane Braxton Little’s piece today, some New Yorkers will undoubtedly become climate migrants. Since 1950, the waters around my town have risen approximately nine inches (something that became all too apparent when Hurricane Sandy hit it in 2012). All those Manhattan skyscrapers and the like weigh an estimated 1.68 trillion pounds, writes the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman, “roughly equivalent to the weight of 140 million elephants.” And mind you, this is happening at a moment when the seas and oceans globally are both overheating and rising in a disturbing fashion. I’m not kidding! According to a new study, New York City, my hometown, is all too literally going down, thanks to those vertiginous towers, including the Empire State Building, constructed on land some of which was sandy and is now giving way.
0 kommentar(er)
