SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Bushfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia. They're Only Going to Get Worse:
Australia has deployed military planes and ships to provide aid as hundreds of wildfires rage across Australia, forcing residents to flee and destroying homes.
The Australian Defense Force is sending ships to the Victoria town of Mallacoota on a two-week supply mission and using helicopters to bring in more firefighters since roads were inaccessible, according to the Associated Press (AP).
On Tuesday, thousands of people from the town on Australia's southeastern coast fled towards the water as a fire ripped through the area.
Photos of residents taking shelter on boats circulated on social media.
[...] In New South Wales, where Sydney is located, firefighters are battling more than 100 fires, according to the state's Rural Fire Service.
Sydney's famed New Years Eve fireworks went ahead despite the fires. A petition calling on the government to cancel the display and give the funds to firefighters and farmers instead got more than 280,000 signatures.
[...] New South Wales' Rural Fire Services Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said this wildfire season is the worst on record.
"We've seen extraordinary fire behavior," he said Tuesday, according to the AP. "What we really need is meaningful rain, and we haven't got anything in the forecast at the moment that says we're going to get drought-breaking or fire-quenching rainfall."
More than 900 homes have been destroyed in the state, according to New South Wales Rural Fire Service.
A fire tracker map maintained by researchers in Western Australia shows that they are also threatening areas around every major city in the country.
Additional coverage:
- Australia fires live: two dead in Cobargo as NSW and Victoria face bushfires threat – latest updates - interactive map too
- 9news live feed
- Large parts of the NSW South Coast are expected to lose all telecommunications in coming hours
- Tens of thousands of lightning strikes spark dozens of fires across South Australia
- More than 30,000 tourists in Australia who defied orders to leave area east of Melbourne amid raging bushfires are 'TRAPPED' as roads are cut off, after locals warned staying would be 'suicide' - have the pinch of salt ready
- 4000+ blocked on Mallacoota beach as forest fire approaches
- The Navy joins fleet of military helicopters called in to help evacuate south-eastern Victoria
- A total of 33 fires are still burning across Victoria as of 7pm Tuesday, with the majority of those blazes in East Gippsland.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Freeman on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:25PM (10 children)
Yeah, she still came across as a pretentious teenager. People have been dying for a very long time. Entire ecosystems have collapsed many times before. What makes this time more special than the rest? Who's to say that this "crisis" is any worse than any of the previous crises?
I've grown up having been taught to enjoy nature. When we camped we left our campsite looking better than when we got there, having picked up the trash left by others. Air quality is definitely a concern in my book and taking care of the environment is a concern. I just kinda gave up after a while. As it's pretty obvious that at this point, people / corporations are going to do what brings them the most immediate profit. Also, radical green peace "activists" don't help their own cause.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 02 2020, @06:32PM
Welp, I lived the last 50 years in Florida, and here we've gone from vast thriving wild spaces and a few cities with scattered spots of ecological tragedy to a broad landscape of ecological tragedy, built-out development to the limits of available resources - and beyond, with scattered spots of wild spaces barely hanging on, across the ENTIRE peninsula from Cedar Key-Jacksonville down to Naples-Miami.
The population growth in Florida over those 50 years roughly mimics the population growth of the world as a whole, though Florida started out a bit more resource constrained, the whole world is heading in the same direction, and unlike Florida, the world doesn't have outside resources to tap, or a place for people who are sick of the crowds and bullshit to emigrate to.
You can keep shoveling shit in a 5lb bag long after 6lbs are in there, but at some point it truly does get messy.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @07:13PM (2 children)
Wow you're the pretentious asshole here. Maybe if there wasn't science backing up her claim, and maybe if your position wasn't just selfish short sighted greed.... maybe.
As has been pointed out a million times before, what is the downside to reducing oil use? Cleaner air? Energy independence? New jobs in infrastructure and tech? Rearranging of world power dynamics?
And you call a teenager pretentious. Just wow, science harder broooooo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @04:44AM (1 child)
If the problem was only limited to whining, then I would have no problem. The problem is the unaccountable taxes and draconian controls that affect our way of life. I support the encouragement of new technologies that supplant coal and gas plant. What I don't support is the political push to replace cost effective coal plants with renewable generators that greatly increase the cost of electricity while reducing the reliability of base power.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 03 2020, @10:11PM
There is no other way to prohibit selfish assholes from doing bad things. Building reliable base power generation is just a matter of engineering and funding. Complaining about higher cost?
a) wrong, renewables have become competitive and would be more so when built at larger scale
b) even if it cost some more that is not a reason to continue destroying the only habitable planet we have
(Score: 3, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 03 2020, @04:08AM (4 children)
That girl is ten thousand times the Christian you ever have been or ever will be.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Troll) by Freeman on Monday January 06 2020, @04:27PM (3 children)
So far, in anything I've read or heard, she hasn't once claimed to be religious or to be a Christian. Though, she has been proclaimed as Christ reincarnate or something like that.
Google Translated:
https://twitter.com/Limhamnskyrka/status/1068826078498758656 [twitter.com]
Would you still support her, if she was a devout follower of Jesus Christ? That just so happens to have a bur up her saddle regarding Climate Change.
She's definitely vexed by the whole Climate Change thing, that much is easy to ascertain.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 07 2020, @03:05AM (2 children)
Hell yes I would. And you know why?
BECAUSE SHE IS A BETTER CHRISTIAN THAN YOU AND THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE WHO CALL THEMSELVES CHRISTIANS.
That's why. Jesus *hated* hypocrites, more even than I do.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday January 07 2020, @03:30PM (1 child)
Interesting, but as of yet I've been unable to dig up anything that has her or her parents claiming to be Christian. To be Christian you actually have to believe in Jesus. She could be Christian, but so far I've been unable to ascertain that fact. Have you had any luck?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 08 2020, @02:53PM
Something something, slave who knows master's will and does it not, slave who doesn't know, etc etc etc. She's still a better Christian than you in terms of the "Chirstian virtures" even without (presumably) actually worshiping the demon smack in the center of all of this.
And it *is* a demon at the center of the Abrahamic religions. Only a demon would make "calling me exactly what I am" the "unforgivable sin" as opposed to, for example, genocide. Because, whoa-hoooo, Dan, Yahweh would be in trouble if that were an issue, now wouldn't he? Pull your head out of your ass: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are devil-worship, your God is either a myth or a demon, and you yourself are throwing your own natural conscience and humanity away by outsourcing it to this cesspool of moral nihilism.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday January 03 2020, @02:48PM
What's changed is the scale. Entire ecosystems have collapsed before, but not on the scale seen in the last couple of decades outside of the 5 major extinction events in Earth's history. People have died before, but the projections for unchecked climate change are on the scale of "everybody dies", not "a few million people die", it's already killing people and expected to get worse. We know what an environment very similar to Earth with an unchecked greenhouse effect looks like - we call it "Venus", and humans can't live there without a whole lot of technology we don't currently have.
And we're doing this to ourselves, on purpose, to ensure that some numbers in computer databases in New York, London, and Tokyo continue to increase. I don't see any way of making that out to be smart.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.