Rolling Stone: Climate Change and the End of Australia

[tex-wyo-dem]

By Jeff Goodell
October 3, 2011 5:43 PM ET

It's near midnight, and I'm holed up in a rickety hotel in Proserpine, a whistle-stop town on the northeast coast of Australia. Yasi, a Category 5 hurricane with 200-mile-per-hour winds that's already been dubbed "The Mother of All Catastrophes" by excitable Aussie tabloids, is just a few hundred miles offshore. When the eye of the storm hits, forecasters predict, it will be the worst ever to batter the east coast of Australia.

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."

As Yasi bears down on the coast, the massive storm seems to embody the not-quite-conscious fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global warming. This year's disasters, in fact, are only the latest installment in an ongoing series of climate-related crises. In 2009, wildfires in Australia torched more than a million acres and killed 173 people. The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves as the country's breadbasket, has suffered a dec­ades-long drought, and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming dec­ades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.

With Yasi approaching fast, disaster preparations are fully under way. At the airport, the Australian Defense Force is racing to load emergency supplies into Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters. Entire cities have shut down, their streets nearly empty as I drive north, toward the center of the storm, through sugar plantations and ranch land. Dead kangaroos sprawl by the side of the road, the victims of motorists fleeing the storm.

<more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-change-and-the-end-of-australia-20111003>

[BeHereNow]

1. OMG- I haven't heard anything about this until RIGHT now.

This an enormously important story-
Is the Rolling Stone the only publication reporting this?

BHN

[izquierdista]

2. Jared Diamond wrote about it in 'Collapse'

In a lot more detail that Rolling Stone can go into.

[calimary]

3. Not surprising.

You need brains and independent thinking to have an interest in stories like this. You need objective interest in, and appreciation of, facts and scientific findings. You need reporters willing and able to digest those facts and pursue the stories around them, rather than pretty faces who photograph well but have nothing behind them. You need editors and publishers willing to spring for what it costs to cover and report on a story as complicated as this one. And you need an awareness (if you're an editor) that stories like this are necessary, despite the neanderthal thinking among the population of possible readers.

[truebrit71]

4. Wow...that is a frightening read...

...what strikes me though was the one woman that lost everything in the fire, but still thinks that global warming science is questionable...

[BeHereNow]

5. Is this story current? I just did a search and found Feb 3, 2011

as the date of Yasi reporting!
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/floodrelief/north-queensland-braces-for-cyclone-anthony-as-cyclone-yasi-brews-behind-it/story-fn7ik2te-1225997552623

BHN:wtf:

[NickB79]

6. The author may have taken his time writing up the article

It's not unusual for a piece like this to take a few months to get right, the facts and sources worked out, and then get the publisher to print it.

[immoderate]

7. I sent this to some "deniers." Their word for me is "alarmist."

It should be science, not religion.

Good article. Thanks.

--imm

[hunter]

8. We wake up the sleeping carbon and it bites us in the ass.

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” ― John Muir

[PufPuf23]

9. Thanks for the link. Australia is a sobering laboratory

for the future of the Planet.