OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #131,
JUNE 12, 2023
· Tomgram. “Jane Braxton Little, Climate Migrants. . .”
· JANE BRAXTON
LITTLE. “Looking for Home in an Overheating World.”
TOMGRAM
TOMDISPATCH
“Jane Braxton Little, Climate
Migrants in a Hell on Earth.” POSTED ON JUNE 4, 2023
Uh-oh, my city’s sinking. 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. 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. 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).
Sooner or later, to put this in the
context of Jane Braxton Little’s piece today, some New Yorkers will undoubtedly
become climate migrants. And we’ll hardly be alone. This planet is on edge. 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. (And Pakistan wasn’t alone. Just check out Nigeria or Australia if
you don’t believe me.)
This year, Canada is experiencing wildfires of
an historically unprecedented sort.
And none of this, eerily enough, can be considered out of the ordinary anymore.
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. Imagine that.
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. My old friend and TomDispatch regular Braxton Little has
already experienced this reality in an up close and personal fashion. 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. 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. Tom
“Looking
for Home in an Overheating World: If Emissions Continue, Will We All Be
Migrants Someday?” BY JANE BRAXTON LITTLE .
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. On August 4, 2021, the flames suddenly flared into a heat
so intense it formed a molten cloud the color of bruised flesh. 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. 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.
Minutes earlier, the last of the
nearly 1,000 residents had bolted, some in shirts singed by flames. We fled
with what belongings we could take in the face of a fire few believed would
ever destroy our town. I was among the evacuees, escaping
with a hastily assembled truckload of journals and notebooks, shoes and
shovels, laptops and passports. We scattered in the sort of desperate diaspora
that has become ever more common in towns like ours across the West.
The Dixie fire left more than
700 residents of Greenville and its surroundings homeless. (While my office in town
was demolished, my home on its outskirts escaped the flames.) Displaced by
wildfire in a forest both poorly managed and dried by a warming planet, we
burned-out residents joined America’s swelling ranks of climate migrants. Many
of us found temporary shelter in neighboring small towns. Others went to Reno
or Los Angeles, Idaho, Missouri, or Kentucky, where relatives and friends were
ready to offer at least temporary safety.
My neighbors in Greenville, Indian
Falls, and Canyon Dam weren’t the only victims of climate-driven fires that
summer. Near Lake Tahoe, 100 miles to the south, the Caldor fire crossed the
crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains, destroying more than 1,000 structures and
forcing the entire city of South Lake Tahoe to evacuate. Nor were wildfires the
only all-American calamities caused by our rapidly warming planet that
year: Hurricane Ida pummeled
Louisiana and Mississippi with 150-mile-an-hour winds; a crippling megadrought of
a sort not seen in 1,200 years gripped the Southwest; and an
unprecedented heat dome in
the Pacific Northwest drove temperatures to 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49.5
degrees Celsius).
Think of the destruction of my adopted hometown as a parable for what the next century of climate change holds in store for this country, as Jake Bittle makes all too clear in his book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. MORE https://tomdispatch.com/looking-for-home-in-an-overheating-world/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=08395941ad-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-08395941ad-308836209
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