climate change

Cost 3.1 Billion in today’s USD, it did

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Forget solidarity: the global south will not survive this century without climate justice. You in the west are talking about paper straws, we in the global south are talking about reparations.

Source: The west is ignoring Pakistan’s super-floods. Heed this warning: tomorrow it will be you | Fatima Bhutto | The Guardian

A clear example of flooding in this scale has already happened in California, of all places: The Great Flood of 1862:

  • Heavy rains over the preceding months.
  • Record amount of rain in a short period of time.
  • Knowledge from Native people was ignored. Their lore had passed down knowledge of such events.
  • Sacramento was underwater for three entire months after the storms causing the flooding passed, forcing a move of the state capital from Sacramento to San Francisco.

This is just one instance. The lack of infrastructure maintenance in the US will prove very, very costly. Just look at New Orleans.

The US should be bracing for a very watery future.

Cost 3.1 Billion in today’s USD, it did Read More »

Always has been the same lie

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No one I’ve talked to in Texas has mentioned the government. They know better than to expect anything from it. Anyone who has lived in Texas for any period of time and experienced any kind of dire need knows that the government is not going to help you. It’s controlled by men who care more about their pockets than their people. It’s one thing to come to terms with that level of neglect when it’s being enacted in the service of denying people individual rights to decisions over their body, or ensuring that everyone can carry a gun at all times. But it’s something else to see the consequences of the government’s callousness borne out in the crashing of a power grid. Even libertarians think that the government should make sure the roads are safe and that people can heat their homes.

Source: It’s Always The Same Lie | Defector

And that’s why it’s usually people high up in Texas government that are the first to pipe up about seceding. For the same reason Texas gave up this bit of land:

Map of Texas pointing to the no-mans-land that became the Oklahoma Panhandle

That bit of land is north of the Missouri Compromise line. Texas gave up this land because it wanted slavery more and secession would certainly give them a way to bring it back.

They won’t call it that outright. They’ll call it something nicer than “indentured servitude” though.

Always has been the same lie Read More »

Y ora pa’onde?

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No policy, though, would be able to stop the forces — climate, increasingly, among them — that are pushing migrants from the south to breach Mexico’s borders, legally or illegally. So what happens when still more people — many millions more — float across the Suchiate River and land in Chiapas? Our model suggests that this is what is coming — that between now and 2050, nearly 9 million migrants will head for Mexico’s southern border, more than 300,000 of them because of climate change alone.

Source: Where Will Everyone Go?

Mientras esto es lo que un modelo computacional prevee el Peje no quiere que le pregunten de nada a menos que sea sobre el avion.

Como emigrante leo esto y siento acongoje por el futuro que nos espera a todos. Mientras tanto, La Bestia sigue su implacable marcha.

Y ora pa’onde? Read More »

Blinding heat

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Longer term, the Colorado River poses issues that no amount of tribal water can resolve. Beset by climate change, overuse, and drought, the river and its reservoirs, according to various researchers, may decline to the point that water fails to pass Hoover Dam. In that case, the CAP would dry up, but so would the Colorado Aqueduct which serves greater Los Angeles and San Diego, as well as the All-American Canal, on which the factory farms of California’s Imperial and Coachella valleys depend. Irrigators and municipalities downstream in Mexico would also go dry. If nothing changes in the current order of things, it is expected that the possibility of such a debacle could loom in little more than a decade.

Tomgram: William deBuys, Exodus from Phoenix | TomDispatch.

Mexicali is already getting hotter and dryer, with the city’s water table being refilled by the keeps complaining about the All-American Canal, supplied by − you guessed it − the Colorado River. Mexicali and Calexico are already gearing up for a fight with San Diego, where the canal ends.

Then there’s Tijuana. It’s right by the sea but to its people the sea is where water eventually ends up, not a source of potable water. There have been talks of a desalination plant, but so far they’ve gone nowhere.

I have friends in both cities. What happens when conflict arises?

Blinding heat Read More »

The bad surprises of global warming

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Okay, so the COP18 climate change conference is an utter failure. That much we all know, right? Right.

So now everybody who is not a first world country is wondering “now what”. Seas rising is what, and I’m surprised at some of the places that will suffer because of it.

Thanks to a nifty toy over at firetree.net, we can see Tijuana would look like this:

Tijuana loses a bit of beach at the most, looks like. Perhaps the waves will actually hit the butte that rises up a few meters and upon which el malecon is built on, but no more than that.

“But Tijuana is right next to San Diego, and obviously it’ll lose land to the ocean” you say. But what about Mexicali, which is farther inland? Wikipedia says it sits about 8 meters above current sea level.

Mexicali loses almost all of the northwest zone of the city. Calexico is almost gone. El Centro probably is gone, as it sits 2 meters above current sea level. This is just a 1 meter rise of the sea level, which is what is expected to happen within the next century or so.

Keep in mind this is all projected weather and oceanic data, not what’s going to happen, but it most certainly helps drive home what could happen with sustained climate change.

Just for kicks, go take a look at what it would look like with a 20 meter rise.

The bad surprises of global warming Read More »