(opinion) Countries from Siberia to Australia are burning: the age of fire is the bleakest warning y

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/29/countries-from-siberia-to-australia-are-burning-the-age-of-fire-is-the-bleakest-warning-yet

Julian Cribb

Fri 29 Nov 2019 19.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 29 Nov 2019 23.46 GMT

On any day, between 10,000 and 30,000 bushfires burn around the planet.

Realms as diverse and distant as Siberia, Amazonia, Indonesia, Australia and California are aflame. The advent of “the age of fire” is the bleakest warning yet that humans have breached boundaries we were never meant to cross.

It is time not only to think the unthinkable, but to speak it: that the world economy, civilisation, and maybe our very survival as a species are on the line. And it is past time to act.

It isn’t just fires. It’s the incessant knell of unnatural (human-fed) disasters: droughts, floods, vanishing rivers, lakes and glaciers and the rise in billion-dollar weather impacts.

It is the spate of extinctions, the precipitous loss of sea fish, birds and corals, of forests, mammals, frogs, bees and other insects. It is the march of deserts and the waxing of dead zones in the oceans.

It is an avalanche of human chemical emissions poisoning our air, water, food, homes, cities, farms and unborn babies, slaying nine million a year.

It is the probability there will be no Arctic before the end of this century and rising seas expelling 300 million from their homes.

It is the ominous seepage of methane from the world’s oceans, tundra, swamps and fossil fuels, threatening runaway heating of 7 to 10 degrees or more.

It is the drift of billions of tonnes of soil from lands that feed us into the blind depths of the ocean, placing food security on a knife-edge as farming systems fail amid a turbulent climate and degraded landscapes.

It is the rising toll of noncommunicable disease killing three people in every four.

It is the $1.8tn spent weaponising nations for the true “war to end all wars”. Unchained by political malice or blunder, robot weapons of mass destruction commanded by artificial intelligence will choose who lives and who dies.

Yet a global citizen movement of scientists, youth, elders and women is demanding urgent action in the face of a growing risk of collapse. Its scientific warnings, Extinction Rebellion and the school strike for climate are flooding the streets of the world’s cities.
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[bucolic_frolic]

1. Prepare! Repent! Bury your dead!

Think hard about the risks you take. Seashore? Lakefront vacation home? House in the woods? What does security mean to you? Escape or disaster will be expensive. Prioritize your possessions, memories, and secure their longevity.

The book I go to for perspective on what to expect? "A Distant Mirror" by historian Barbara Tuchman. The century of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War. Whole towns disappeared. The wealthy fled the cities or holed up indoors and inocculated their children with silver spoons. Flagellists traveled in bands to bring Christian penetance to the masses, beating themselves with whips. In some places there were not enough healthy people to bury the dead.