As Tropical Storm Barry made landfall in Louisiana, with millions of people under flash flood alert, an even more dire climate catastrophe was playing out across South Asia, where ongoing heavy rain and flooding have killed around a hundred people—67 people in Nepal, 25 in India, 14 in Bangladesh, monsoon rains displacing a million people, including thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees in southern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar—the largest refugee camp in the world. The flooding has also destroyed crops across the region.
Monsoon season regularly pummels South Asia with deadly rains. Flooding killed more than a thousand people in 2017. But this year’s flooding has been even worse, is likely fueled by global warming, which has led to more extreme weather in the region. Scientists warn the risk of deadly floods is not over.
Here in the United States, New Orleans residents managed to avoid the worst of Tropical Storm Barry, but 11 million remain on flash flood warning after the storm slowly made its way through Louisiana, making its way to Arkansas. President Trump declared a state of emergency in Louisiana, where more than 60,000 people remained without power on Sunday. It was well over 100,000. And, of course, here in New York, you had this power outage of just a few hours, a city that is so heavily based on fossil fuel in the grid, though it is slowly changing under the city and state’s Green New Deal, encouraging buildings, even the skyscrapers, to have solar panels on their roofs.
Dahr Jamail talking:
everything we just heard about what you’re reporting with these ICE raids and the migrant crisis, the vast majority of these people are climate refugees. So, to anyone in this country that thinks this crisis is not just on our doorstep, but we’re living with the ramifications of it, that’s just one layer of it. We can look around the world and just see, right now, before our very eyes, evidence of how deep in this crisis we already are. It’s not a future-tense thing anymore. We are in it, and it is going to grow worse.
But even right now we saw regionally high temperature records across the Arctic for May. June was a record-hot June for Alaska. July 4th, Anchorage saw 90 degrees. We’re seeing feedback loops up there already kicked in, things like the tundra and the permafrost—the tundra, specifically, already becoming a net producer of carbon rather than a carbon sink.
If we look down to the Antarctic, sea ice there is melting at record rates. 2014, according to a recent study, was a record-high year of sea ice extent in Antarctica, the ice continent. In three years, by 2017, sea ice had reduced to its lowest level ever recorded, losing, in that short 3-year period, an area of ice larger than the size of the country of Mexico.
You were talking about the flooding in Asia. In addition to all the deaths you mentioned, in June, in Mumbai, in one 48-hour period, they received their average monthly rainfall in just one 48-hour period. These things are happening right in front of us. And I think that’s a very important part of this discussion that people need to understand and take in.
it’s certainly not a surprise that these fossil fuel stooges of this administration would react exactly as Pence just did. I mean, they have their talking points, they have their marching orders, and they’re just simply executing them. Meanwhile, if we look around the world at what’s happening, again, the evidence is right in front of our face.
You know, there’s so many Native American stories that have talked about what happens when we do not live in harmony with Mother Nature, and what happens if we get out of balance with that. One of them that I’ve written about and discussed is a story from the Pit River Nation, told by Darryl Wilson of the Pit River Nation of northeastern California. And just as an example, he talks about a spirit force called Mis Misa that lives inside of Akoo-Yet, the mountain that white people named Mount Shasta. And as long as humans listen very carefully and comport themselves correctly towards that mountain and listen to that spirit voice, nature will be kept in balance. But if people stop listening altogether, and if enough people stop listening, then that spirit force, Mis Misa, will go away and stop singing, and everything on the planet will go out of balance, and life therein vulnerable to extinction. And that’s just one of countless stories and prophecies that warned of exactly what is upon us.
We, industrialized humans, have stopped listening to the planet. We’ve stopped living in harmony. And now we’re living in a time of reckoning of that. And unfortunately, if we look at all of the science, this is just the beginning. Everything that we’re seeing, everything that everybody knows about the climate crisis to date, has happened from just raising the temperatures 1.1 C above preindustrial baseline levels. We are looking at temperature escalations in the coming years—not even talking about 2100, but even by 2050—that we could see several times that amount of increase, according to some of the most dire scientific predictions.
– a senior State Department intelligence analyst has recently resigned in protest after the Trump administration blocked parts of his written testimony to Congress about the dangers of climate change. In June, analyst Rod Schoonover was permitted to appear before the House Intelligence Committee to testify about the national security risks posed by global warming, but the White House barred him from submitting peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and intelligence reports as evidence to back his claims. Part of his censored testimony to Congress read, quote, “Absent extensive mitigating factors or events, we see few plausible future scenarios where significant—possibly catastrophic—harm does not arise from the compounded effects of climate change.” Catastrophic harm. But he wasn’t allowed to say this to Congress. “Over One-Tenth of Global Population Could Lack Drinking Water by 2030.”
That’s according to studies and warnings coming out of the country of India, where literally half the population of the entire country is on track, if things do not change—and, clearly, things are changing, but unfortunately for the worse—but on the current trajectory, by 2030—we’re talking barely over 10 years from right now—half the country of India is likely going to be facing not having enough drinking water. You know, the bigger translation of that, that’s one-tenth the global population. That’s on top of people already today that lack enough drinking water, on top of the fact that the U.N. is warning of tens of millions more climate refugees just in the next decade alone.
You know, we talk about these catastrophic effects. One of these is children in cages. It’s what the whole first half of the show was just on. I mean, these changes are right in front of our face. And so, when the Trump administration talks about, “Well, you know, we’re going to use our scientists, and we’re going to rely on science,” well, you know, this is a fossil fuel lobby talking point that they’re following. If we look at all of the other science around the world, and even, save the science, if we just use our own eyes and look at these events unfolding right in front of us, it’s very, very clear.
Now, Amy, when I published my recent book, this is the result of nine years of intensive climate reporting and of meticulous research. And I went into the field, and I went to the front lines with leading scientists and saw with my own eyes what is happening. And everything that I found is right there. And I didn’t even know how right that I had it. And what we’re seeing playing out in front of us, though, now is so accelerated and so much faster than I thought, even when the book came out, that I am shaking my head on a daily basis as I write these ongoing climate dispatches. And so, it is a situation where this is likely my last journalism book, because on this crisis, the evidence is in front of us. We keep reporting the same stories over and over. We just keep adjusting the numbers upwards. And like we always used to hear when we were reporting from Iraq about how bad things were becoming there, today is better than tomorrow. And that certainly applies to the climate crisis. June was the hottest June ever recorded on the planet. The last five years are the hottest five years in history. This is the trajectory that we’re on, and these numbers are only going to continue to increase.
– A U.N. expert has warned we’re on track for a climate apartheid, where wealthy people can pay their way out of the consequences of climate devastation, while others will face hunger, conflict, mass displacement. The new report is by Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, concluding the U.N. and the larger human rights community has been complacent in the planet’s impending disaster, and that even if current global emissions targets are met, millions will be impoverished, poorer nations expecting to bear at least 75% of the costs of climate change, even as the poorer half of the world’s population generates just 10% of global emissions.
I believe the numbers from that report are 120 million more people driven into poverty by climate impacts by just 2030. And that’s on top of the people that are already there. Again, the evidence—you know, we just spent—you just spent 30 minutes reporting on the evidence and talking to these poor people who are fleeing their countries because they do not have food. They cannot grow crops. The support in their own countries to help them through this crisis, to help them find another way of living, even just basic necessities like food, shelter and healthcare, is not there. These people are risking their lives to go to a completely different country to try to find help.
And think about it. Here in the U.S., so many of us live in this bubble where we, at least for now, have enough food and water, and something like healthcare, if we’re lucky. How bad would things have to get for each one of us to leave everything that we know and love, places where we’ve spent large parts of our lives, and go to a completely new foreign country, especially one that we know hates us and rejects us, and the government is demonizing us and going to great lengths to keep us out and, if we manage to get in, is going to terrorize us and kick us out? That’s how bad it is for people living in poverty already.
we simply don’t see the links drawn by the corporate media with what’s happening in front of our faces and the climate crisis that’s driving it. So, if we talk about just using these real-time examples that you just mentioned, with Hurricane Barry, which is causing flooding—it’s caused flooding all across the coast and is now moving inland and dumping more rain on an already-swollen Mississippi River, which is a huge part of the problem of the flooding downstream—well, we’ve known for a long time now—there’s been numerous scientific studies that show that as the atmosphere warms and other impacts from the climate crisis are escalated, then, of course, hurricanes and flooding events are going to escalate, as well. You know, just even recently up in part of Canada, we saw 100- and 500-year floods occurring almost back to back, you know, and that nomenclature used for these types of flooding means, on average, that that intense of a flooding event should only happen once every 100 or 500 or 1,000 years, as the case may be.
So, we’re going to see larger hurricanes. In some places of the world, they’re going to become more frequent. And like this one, much like Hurricane Harvey, that dumped so much rain in Houston just a short number of years ago, they’re slow-moving. They sit there, and they dump enormous amounts of rain, over very, very concentrated amounts of time. And then we see the flooding. We see the Mississippi. We see all these other consequences like all of the fertilizers and pesticides and all of these chemicals used in industrial farming across the Midwest, now those are flushing down the Mississippi, causing dolphin die-offs and increasing amounts of dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
So, all of these, we can trace back to amped-up impacts from climate disruption on what it’s causing in hurricanes, how it’s impacting the monsoons over in Asia, as we’ve talked about. And the result is massive environmental degradation, massive loss of human life and, of course, increasing displacement of people in areas where that’s already a major problem.
that’s roughly 750 million people. It’s half the country of India, which is what that report I cite is addressing, is facing, by 2030, the likelihood of not having enough drinking water. You know, and giving the macro view, as I said earlier, that’s one-tenth the global population. And this is not in isolation. This is already on top of over 100 million people a year—and that’s an extremely conservative figure—but already don’t have enough drinking water on a daily basis. And the growing number of regions around the planet where water scarcity is an issue is also a direct impact of the climate crisis.
So, further talking about India, the city of Chennai, 4 million people—if I remember correctly, it’s the sixth-largest city in the country—is right now in a water crisis, where the government is having to ship in water tankers just so that people have enough water for drinking, and maybe a little bit of washing, if they’re lucky, by 2020. So we’re talking about now not even a year away. Two other major cities in India are also likely to be facing a major water crisis. And this kind of thing is spreading around the globe. And there’s even areas in the U.S., as we’ve seen back in the peak of the drought of California in the Central Valley.
This is caused by the climate crisis, as weather patterns are shifting with what’s happening in the Arctic. You know, one of the famous lines by people studying that part of the crisis is that what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. Temperature differentiations are shifting the jet stream. They’re shifting ocean currents. It’s shifting rainfall patterns. And so we have shifted weather patterns, shifted rainfall patterns. We have people, therefore, not enough water to drink. And then that might be punctuated by an extreme flooding event, like what we’re seeing right now, which will be followed by yet another drought.
And then that shows us shifting then back to the U.S. We’re seeing this around the world and in India, but even right here in our front yard, where—in the Midwest, where many farmers couldn’t even plant crops this season because the flooding was so intense that their lands stayed underwater for months on end. We are going to see food price spikes for this. Some of the future food prices for fall are already showing that right here in the U.S. And we have to remember that the Arab Spring was largely caused by the climate crisis, as well. When people don’t have enough food to eat, for example, if a family is there watching their children go hungry and, in some instances, starve to death, in Syria, then that’s going to be a problem. These people are going to go to any lengths to force the government to do something. And if people here in this country think that that can’t happen here, well, what’s happened in the U.S. is—in the Midwest is really setting the stage for that.
So, we are seeing these dramatic natural events as evidence, but then how this affects humans. We’re seeing it abroad. And I think we’re going to see it—in addition to the immigration crisis that you just did the show on, we’re going to see it much more intensely here not with just immigrants, but with people who have been in this country for generations.
just a recent update, where the Trump administration made news by passing legislation to allow through a pesticide use that is known to kill bees. So, that underscores the severity of the crisis of the insect population.
I think when I was on your show earlier this year, not long after the book was released, talking about the insect crisis, that several studies had just come out showing that at our current trajectory we’re losing 2.4% of insect biomass annually. So, at that trajectory, assuming it does not accelerate—which is a false assumption, but let’s just assume it—that still means that by 2100—I’m sorry, within a hundred years, no more insects on a functional basis on the planet. And we’re already seeing this play out.
So that brings us current to what you just mentioned happening in China, where people are literally having to go around and use humans to pollinate crops, because insects are failing to do the job. So, you know that we’re in trouble when enough of the ecosystem has already failed in some parts of the planet, where humans are having to go out and pollinate the crops. And again, we see evidence of that here in places like California, where, on an annual basis, bees are having to be brought in to certain crops to do the job. This is not sustainable. It requires fossil fuels. It requires human power. And ultimately, over the long term, there’s not going to be enough of that to get the job done. Nothing can replace these natural ecosystems as they fail.
It’s interesting to note that I can remember as far back as 2006 writing about the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review report, which is the report they release on an annual basis showing what they see are the biggest security threats. And even back then, 13 years ago, they were listing the climate crisis as one of the biggest security threats the country faces. That has been in that report every subsequent year. And to date, the U.S. military continues to say that.
That said, on the negative tally sheet for the military, they are, as an entity, the single largest emitter of CO2 emissions on the planet. That’s a real problem. They are already war-gaming for certain scenarios and drawing up plans to how to respond to impacts of the climate crisis, like the refugee crisis and the immigrant crisis that we see, not just here, not just on the borders here, people being forced from their homes in Central America, not having enough food and water, and insecurity that they have to literally leave their homes. And the military is preparing for that, but around the world. So, in other places where they’re gearing up for, what if there has to be a water war? What if we need more land because the arable land in this country is not enough? These are the types of things that the U.S. military is preparing for right now.
And then the other layer of that conversation that I would add, that I briefly touched upon earlier during our live discussion, is the Arab Spring. So, if we look across that country, let’s remember that it was the vegetable vendor in Tunisia who carried out self-immolation. This was really the catalyzing event that kicked that whole revolution off across the broader region, and it was because of food prices. It was because farmers lacked enough water. Crops were failing. There was ongoing drought across several of those countries—that one and, in particular, Syria—that forced people into the cities looking for other work. Governments weren’t able to step up to the plate, or weren’t willing to help them out. We had a completely politically destabilized situation. And several of those countries are now failed states, Syria being one of them, barely hanging on by a thread as we speak, as Assad maintains power. And it’s essentially a permanent war zone. So, this is what happens when people don’t eat, when crops fail, when the climate patterns shift and the rainfall patterns shift. And the U.S. military is acutely aware of this. They’ve been studying it for a long time, and they’re actively preparing for it.
– the presidential primary debates that are taking place. The next one will take place next week or the week after. The Democratic National Committee has threatened Jay Inslee, right? He’s the—well, you’re in Seattle right now. He’s the governor of Seattle. He’s also running for president. He called for a debate solely on the climate crisis. There were, what, four hours of debate in the first presidential primary, because there are so many presidential candidates on the Democratic side. I think there was less than seven minutes were devoted to dealing with the climate crisis. So he said, why not just have a whole debate on this issue? The response of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez and the DNC, was there will not be a debate solely based on the climate crisis, and if you participate in an unsanctioned debate, you will be barred from participating in future official Democratic primary debates.
the writing’s on the wall. There it is. Who is the DNC loyal to? Whose marching orders are they following, where they—that is their response, despite the fact that all polls show that the single most important issue across Democratic voters’ minds is the climate crisis? And you have Washington state Governor Jay Inslee trying to bring that as a fore, making it his sole issue. He’s a one-issue candidate. And yet, he is being pushed out. And the fact that in these debates they’ve spent a grand total of seven minutes, which is seven minutes more than they have in the past years, as pathetic as that is, but at seven years—or, I’m sorry, seven minutes on the single most important issue on the vast majority of Democratic voters’ minds. And so, again, you know, just like the current regime in control of this country, which is clearly behaving in a very authoritarian way, we have the DNC, supposedly the Democratic Party that’s the better alternative to that, that is hardly behaving much better.
I’ve been writing these dispatches every month for about five years now. And it’s really incredible to me to see—I don’t even need to look back over the last five years, but just since my book was released—the title, The End of Ice, I didn’t know how right I had that, because just since that book is released, we’ve seen reports come out and show a sixfold increase in Antarctica, the ice continent, just since the 1970s. Things are so intense in Greenland now with the acceleration of melting, that for the first time that I’ve seen, even some conservative scientists are talking about the possibility of losing the entire ice sheet of Greenland, which alone would bring 24 feet of sea level rise across the globe.
So, all trends are accelerating, and not just accelerating in a linear fashion—and this is, I think, a very important note to end on—but they’re accelerating and moving into nonlinear territory. And several of the scientists that I’ve interviewed for stories and for my book said this is the single most important factor that worries them the most and keeps them up at night, is the nonlinear, very unpredictable fashion of once we have enough of these different feedback loops kicked in, which I believe we do already, then we’re going to be seeing nonlinear, abrupt, catastrophic changes in the future as a result of the climate crisis. It means they are unpredictable. They do not move from point A to point B. It’s more of a straight-up, abrupt, exponential, explosive fashion.
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Dahr Jamail
staff reporter at Truthout and author of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption.
— source democracynow.org | Jul 15, 2019