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cyclone
'This Is Climate Change': New Zealand Devastated by 100-Year Cyclone
"We need to stop making excuses for inaction," said the nation's climate minister in a fiery speech. "We cannot put our heads in the sand when the beach is flooding. We must act now."
Feb 14, 2023
New Zealand is under a declared national emergency Tuesday as flood waters and heavy winds from Cyclone Gabrielle battered the island with all the hallmarks of a storm made more intense by the climate crisis by causing severe flooding, mudslides, and cut off power for at least a quarter of a million people.
The North Island took the brunt of the storm, with massive flooding in Hawke's Bay on the east coast and areas north-west of Auckland reporting major power outages and residents scrambling to escape with their lives.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said the cyclone was "the most significant weather event New Zealand has seen in this century," as he explained the need for the emergency declaration, only the third time in the nation's history one has been issued.
"The severity and the damage that we are seeing has not been experienced in a generation,” Hipkins said. "We are still building a picture of the effects of the cyclone as it continues to unfold. But what we do know is the impact is significant and it is widespread."
\u201cCyclone Gabrielle lashed New Zealand, causing extensive flooding, landslides and damage to infrastructure and prompting the country to declare a national state of emergency for only the third time in its history https://t.co/Ali5GD4tVM\u201d— Reuters (@Reuters) 1676368800
According to the BBC:
About a third of the country's population of five million people live in affected areas.
Many people are displaced and some were forced to swim from their homes to safety after rivers burst their banks.
Others have been rescued from rooftops.
About a quarter of a million people are without power. Falling trees have smashed houses, and landslides have carried others away and blocked roads.
Hawke's Bay, including the city of Napier, was hit especially hard with reports of people trapped on rooftops, surrounded by raging water, for hours while they awaited rescue.
Adrianne Mason, of Esk Valley, toldThe Guardian that her 22-year-old daughter had to climb out of her bedroom window in the middle of the night and swim to safety as flood waters rose. Mason described other neighbors in the area trapped on their roofs amid flooding she described as "catastrophic."
Footage on social media showed swollen rivers overwhelmed bridges:
\u201cCyclone Gabrielle: New Zealand.\n\nAfter rampaging through North island, it\u2019s now headed for South Island. \n\nSending prayers to our Kiwi friends \u2014 @kiwikate2 take extra care over there. \n\n\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\uddfa\ud83d\ude4f\ud83d\udc99\ud83c\uddf3\ud83c\uddff\u201d— \ud83c\udde6\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf3\ud83c\uddff \u2640\ufe0fEmma \u2640\ufe0f \ud83c\udded\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde7 (@\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf3\ud83c\uddff \u2640\ufe0fEmma \u2640\ufe0f \ud83c\udded\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde7) 1676357428
On the floor of New Zealand's parliament, climate minister James Shaw, leader of the nation's Green Party, unleashed a fiery oratory against the decades lost in the fight to curb emissions and curb the onset of global warming.
He said it was not "too soon" to make it clear that the devastation being witnessed was directly related to soaring global temperatures. "This is climate change," he declared.
"As I stand here today, I struggle to find words to express what I am thinking and feeling about this particular crisis," Shaw said.
"I don't think I've ever felt as sad or as angry about the lost decades that we spent bickering and arguing about whether climate change was real or not, whether it was caused by humans or not, whether it was bad or not, whether we should do something about it or not," he continued, "because it is clearly here now, and if we do not act, it will get worse."
"We need to stop making excuses for inaction," Shaw added. "We cannot put our heads in the sand when the beach is flooding. We must act now."
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CO2 Levels Are the Highest in a Million Years as Extreme Weather and Flooding Rage Across the Globe
We can change all this, but we have to hurry to shut down CO2 emissions quickly.
Sep 01, 2022
CNN reports that satellite photos show that the overflowing Indus has created a new body of water in southern Pakistan some 62 miles (100km) wide. It will take days or weeks for the water to recede, and in the meantime millions are left homeless and over all, 33 million people have been affected by the worst monsoon floods in recorded history. CNN quotes Pakistan's Climate Minister Sherry Rahman as saying "That parts of the country 'resemble a small ocean,' and that 'by the time this is over, we could well have one-quarter or one-third of Pakistan under water.'"
Because of our burning of fossil fuels to drive cars and heat and cool buildings, the world is heating up. But the Indian Ocean is heating up a third faster than the rest of the world. Very warm waters in the Bay of Bengal are helping create more destructive cyclones and flooding. The air over warming waters contains more moisture than the 20th century average. Warming waters also make the winds that blow over them more erratic, and wayward winds from the Arabian Sea helped push the heavy monsoon rains farther north than they usually extend.
We don't have to look far for the culprits. J. Blunden, and T. Boyer, Eds., 2022: "State of the Climate in 2021" Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 103 (8), Si-S465, https://doi.org/10.1175/2022BAMSStateoftheClimate provides a state of the climate report for 2021.
It isn't good news. The concentration in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide increased another 2.6 parts per million, to a year-long average of 414.7 parts per million of CO2. We should be trying to get to zero increases of carbon dioxide, not increasing it. Arctic snow cores show that there hasn't been that must CO2 in the atmosphere for at least 800,000 years, i.e. nearly a million years. It turns out that if you go back to "1 million Years B.C." you don't find Raquel Welch, you find a steaming tropics of a world. The growth rate for methane was the highest on record. Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping gas, and CO2 isn't any slouch itself. Methane, though, dissipates quickly if you don't keep adding to it in the stratosphere, in as little as nine years. If you put carbon dioxide up there, though, it can last thousands and thousands of years. It is gradually absorbed by the oceans or igneous rocks, but he ocean may reach its capacity for absorption of CO2 in only 15 years, after which the stuff will just stay up there, making earth hot.
The report says that Death Valley, California, reached 54.4degC (130.46 F.) for the second time since records have been kept. Across the global ice concentrations or "cryosphere," glaciers lost ice mass for the 34th consecutive year. Now the BBC is predicting that in the near future the glacier ice lost will become so great that it will threaten the water supplies of Switzerland and other European countries.
And in horrific news for Bangladesh and Egypt, the report says, "Across the world's oceans, global mean sea level was record high for the 10th consecutive year, reaching 97.0 mm above the 1993 average when satellite measurements began, an increase of 4.9 mm over 2020."
Seas rising, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere rising to best a million-year-old-record, super-monsoons. We can change all this, but we have to hurry to shut down CO2 emissions quickly.
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Cyclone Amphan Is a Warning for the United States
The storm ravaged India and Bangladesh all the worse because of social and economic inequality. The same, or worse, could happen here.
Jun 21, 2020
In the march of the news cycle in U.S. media, the devastation of Cyclone Amphan in Bangladesh and Eastern India is all but forgotten. But the several million people who live there, and those of us with ancestral ties to the region, don't have the luxury of forgetting.
Neither, really, should anyone else. The story of Amphan -- including the surprising successes of the response as well as the horrors and the underlying causes -- hold very important lessons for everyone, including here in the United States.
Cyclone Amphan lashed Bangladesh and the neighboring Indian state of West Bengal with 165 kph (105 mph) winds and a 5-meter (15 ft.) storm surge. Almost 100 people lost their lives in India, and another 26 in Bangladesh. According to the UN, 10 million people in Bangladesh were directly affected and 500,000 families were left homeless. On the Indian side, the Chief Minister of West Bengal estimated the damage in her state to be $13 billion.
The Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, bore the brunt of the storm. Local residents, who are poor to begin with, had their livelihoods devastated, with farmlands submerged in salt water and homes destroyed.
Kolkata, a city of 15 million (and my birthplace), was severely hit as well. Power lines went down, leading to deaths from electrocution and prolonged blackouts affecting millions. Thousands of trees were downed, killing people and blocking streets. As with any disaster, the poor were most affected, with many of the city's numerous shantytowns devastated.
Saving Lives Takes Will and Planning
Tragic as the death toll is, it could have been much worse. Both the Bangladesh and West Bengal governments acted swiftly and successfully to evacuate large numbers of people -- about 2 million and 1 million people, respectively, from each place.
There's a very important lesson here. The death toll from Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast was more than 1,800. Hurricane Maria killed about 3,000 people in Puerto Rico. Yet the respective per capitas GDP of the U.S., India, and Bangladesh are almost $63,000, just above $2,000, and less than $1,700.
Evidently, saving lives doesn't take a whole lot of resources. It takes planning, preparation, and will.
A representative of the World Meteorological Organization referred to the mobilization for the cyclone in the South Asian countries as "a textbook example of how it should be done." (A caveat -- while the evacuation planning by governments on both sides of the border was indeed commendable, let's not kid ourselves into thinking that they're somehow progressive and egalitarian. They're not. More on that later.)
The question for us in the U.S. is, will we let go of our arrogant presumption that we have nothing to learn from other countries -- with an added layer of racism if the countries are majority non-white?
Inequalities of Responsibility
Next, let's ask what made such a severe storm more likely in the first place.
Bay of Bengal cyclones aren't a new phenomenon. But, just as with violent storms worldwide, they've become more severe because of the warming of our planet. Climatologists are attributing the intensification of Amphan to a warming Bay of Bengal.
As with much else in our world, not everyone is equally responsible.
India and Bangladesh have respective per capita carbon dioxide emissions of 1.7 and 0.5 kilotons, compared to 16.5 for the U.S. and an outrageous 43.9 for the oil-rich nation of Qatar.
Looking at cumulative historic emissions makes the inequalities even more stark. The U.S. alone is responsible for a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions since 1751, which is more than the 28 countries of the European Union combined. This compares to 3 percent for India, and a negligible number for Bangladesh. And science says that cumulative emissions do matter. Changes in carbon dioxide concentration, in particular, can persist in the atmosphere for "thousands of years."
Transferring resources from Northern countries to the Global South to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a changing climate should not be seen as charity, but as a form of reparations.The conclusion? Rich Northern countries have a disproportionate share of the blame for the climate crisis, and countries in the Global South bear a disproportionate burden. Transferring resources from Northern countries to the Global South to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a changing climate should not be seen as charity, but as a form of reparations.
Remember that next time you hear sociopathic demagogues from rich countries ranting about how they don't want to squander money on climate action in poor countries.
Just in case you thought only one political party was to blame for America's climate criminality, recall that past Democratic administrations in the U.S. have also dragged their feet on climate action. The Obama administration is often credited with "leadership" on global climate action, specifically for its role in the Paris climate accord. However, pressure from the U.S. contributed to the Paris accord being non-binding (and consequently, toothless).
A more honest assessment of the Paris accord would be that the U.S. sabotaged it, not that it helped usher it in. The explosive growth in U.S. oil and gas production during the Obama years is still more evidence of the Obama administration's climate hypocrisy.
Inequalities of Burden
These North-South inequalities are a correct -- but not a complete -- picture. They don't take into account the grotesque inequalities of wealth and power within Global South countries.
The share of India's national income going to the top 1 percent reached a low of 6 percent in 1982, a pretty steep decline from the 20 percent level in the 1930s during British colonial rule. But then it started rising again, reaching even higher levels than in colonial times. Since the implementation of neoliberal economic "reforms" imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the early 1990s, the increase has been steady.
Even more alarmingly, the first two decades of accelerated neoliberalism saw the share of income going to the bottom half of the income distribution steadily falling, and now the top 1 percent earn more than the entire bottom half of the income distribution.
None of this was inevitable. It was the result of conscious political choices embraced by the Indian elite to restructure India's economy for their own benefit at the expense of the majority of Indians.
Neighboring Bangladesh has its own story of growing inequality, with the share of national income captured by the top 10 percent growing from 21 percent to 27 percent between 1984 and 2010, and the share of the bottom 10 percent decreasing from just above to just below 4 percent.
This matters a lot in the context of disasters such as Amphan. The poorer people are, the more vulnerable they are when disasters hit, and the less resources they have to rebuild their lives. And in highly unequal societies, the less political clout they have to demand governmental assistance.
We're already seeing evidence of this in post-Amphan India. Impoverished residents of the Sundarbans are complaining of the failure of local governments to distribute food. Landless peasants are guessing, based on their experience with past disasters, that their landlords will get all the government relief funds when they're eventually distributed.
Social Repression
In India in particular, the widening economic chasm between the haves and the have-nots is happening against a historical backdrop of deep-seated social inequalities based on factors such as caste and religion.
Dalits, who are lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy, have faced centuries of apartheid that persists today. Adivasis, or Indigenous peoples, are routinely displaced and dispossessed for the benefit of extractive industries. Both Dalits and Adivasis are significantly poorer on average than higher caste Hindus. And both communities routinely face vigilante violence as well as state repression when they assert their rights.
The Muslim community is the prime target for state-sanctioned violence in India. India's current fascist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government (yes, the term is accurate) is rooted in political formations whose foundational agenda is Islamophobia. True to form, the BJP has pursued an unabashedly anti-Muslim agenda in power, through state policy and open incitement of vigilante violence.
This is the broader political context in which Amphan struck India. It will require vigilance and struggle to ensure that Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis aren't discriminated against in the recovery process, or worse still, criminalized and targeted for removal and violence.
Once again, there's much for us in the U.S. to learn from the Indian context.
We also live in a deeply unequal and repressive society, where law enforcement officers routinely murder black and brown people with impunity. We haven't reached full-blown fascism yet, though there have been indications over the last several years that we're on our way down that road, and recent developments that are even more alarming. We need an urgent course correction to ensure we don't become like India during Narendra Modi's second term in office.
A Teachable Moment for the U.S.
We must reverse course domestically on economic policies that have made a few people fabulously wealthy at the expense of everyone else.There are clear takeaways for us in the U.S. from the South Asian disaster and its context.
First, we need to prioritize and put resources into responding to disasters with compassion and justice, following the lead of affected communities. If Global South countries with far less resources than the U.S. can save more lives in disasters, clearly it can be done.
Second, we need to address our vastly unequal contribution to climate chaos by cutting our own emissions and fossil fuel production, with a just transition for communities and workers. We need to contribute our fair share to addressing climate change in poor countries, accounting for our high per capita and cumulative emissions and our relative wealth. And we need to drop the hubristic notion of "American leadership," opting instead to work in good faith as an equal partner with other countries to negotiate a strong, binding international agreement on climate change.
Even as we step up on issues of global equity, we must reverse course domestically on economic policies that have made a few people fabulously wealthy at the expense of everyone else. My Institute for Policy Studies colleagues and numerous other experts have developed policy prescriptions to do that.
Most urgently, we have to reverse our slide into fascism. And we can't do that without confronting longstanding white supremacy, as large numbers of people across the country are demanding right now.
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