It’s 3,350 miles from Canberra, capital of Australia, to Jakarta, capital-- for now-- of Indonesia, a little less than 7 hours by air.Air quality index (AQI) readings above 200 are considered dangerous to human health. A reading over 300 means no one should go outdoors. This week in Canberra readings were over 3,000-- sometimes double that. And some of the Canberra suburbs like Monash and Florey were even worse. There are cities around the world you’ve probably never heard of where breathing the air is deadly-- Linfen, Pingdingshan, Luohe, Zhengzhou, Dongying, Jining, Xinxiang, Anyang, Jinan and dozens more in China, Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, Al-Ahmadi in Kuwait, Barisal, Gazipur and Narayangong in Bangladesh, Nagpur, Jodhpur, Lucknow, Patna, Faridabad, Kanpur and dozens more in India. And speaking of India, the capital city, Delhi is basically unlivable-- as is a hip and happening suburb, Gurugram-- and three the the country’s greatest tourist attractions, Agra, Jaipur and Varanasi (formerly Benares) are to dangerous to visit without a heavy duty mask. Three of Pakistan’s biggest cities are also basically uninhabitable-- Karachi, Rawalpindi, Peshawar-- as are the capitals of Mongolia (Ulaan Baatar) and Uganda (Kampala).I was supposed to visit Hanoi over the Christmas holiday but I cancelled the trip at the last minute when the AQI readings were hovering around 700. I first visited Katmandu, capital of Nepal, in 1971 and loved it. I’ve been back several times but the last time I was there, will, unfortunately be the last time. A heavy duty breathing mask wasn’t enough.You’ve read about the fires in Australia, right? As Adam Morton, the environmental editor of The Guardian reported last week, Yes, Australia has always had bushfires: but 2019 is like nothing we've seen before. “Record low rainfall,” he wrote, “has contributed to a continent-scale emergency that has burned through more than 5 million hectares… an area larger than many countries… and alarmed scientists, doctors and firefighters.” Over a thousand homes have been burned and at least 9 people have died-- as have hundreds of millions of animals.The right-wing government-- which denies a Climate Crisis-- is trying to play the whole thing down as just run of the mill stuff. The firefighting agency for New South Wales begs to differ. And David Bowman, director of The Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania, says “the most striking thing about this fire season is the continent-scale nature of the threat. ‘The geographic range, and the fact it is occurring all at once, is what makes it unprecedented. There has never been a situation where there has been a fire from southern Queensland, right through NSW, into Gippsland, in the Adelaide Hills, near Perth and on the east coast of Tasmania.’“
He says one of the less explored issues, though it has begun to receive some attention in recent days, is the economic impact of having prolonged fires that affect so many Australians.”“You can’t properly run an economy when you get a third to a half of the population affected by smoke, and the media completely focused on fires,” he says. “I’m not quite certain why anybody would want to be claiming fires have been like this before. It’s concerning as it is a barrier to adaptation. To deal with these sort of fires the first step is to acknowledge the scale of the problem.”Ross Bradstock, from the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, points to the Gospers Mountain fire, which started in a lightning strike north-west of Sydney in late October and has now burned about 500,000 hectares, as evidence of how this season differs from what has come before.The fire has now combined with others on the NSW Central Coast to create a mega-blaze, but Bradstock says it was almost certainly the largest single ignition-point forest fire recorded in Australia and, for mid-latitude forests, possibly the world. He says it is bigger than any in California and Mediterranean Europe. A large fire in those conditions is usually about 100,000 hectares.“We can find no evidence of forest fires of that size anywhere,” he says. “You just don’t see fires of this size in these parts of the world because you do not usually get the extreme dryness and unrelenting nature of the weather.”Two months in, Bradstock says the Gospers Mountain is a monster, “just unimaginably big” and near impossible to contain unless there is substantial rain.…This season has also seen the loss of rainforests, wet eucalypt forests, dried-out swamps and banana plantations that do not usually burn because they are too wet.Damage to the Gondwana rainforests in 40 reserves between Brisbane and Newcastle prompted the Unesco world heritage centre to last month express their concern to Australian authorities. The reserves include the largest areas of subtropical rainforest on the planet, some warm temperate rainforest and nearly all the world’s Antarctic beech cool temperate rainforest. They are considered a living link to the vegetation that covered the southern supercontinent Gondwana before it broke up about 180 million years ago.There are also fears critically endangered Wollemi pines have burned in the fires tearing through the Blue Mountains. They were thought extinct until discovered by bushwalkers in 1994. Their whereabouts had been kept secret from the public to keep them safe.Authorities say the smoke that has smothered Sydney, Canberra and other centres and towns in recent weeks has produced pollution up to 11 times greater than the hazardous level for human health. In Sydney, the air pollution has been hazardous for at least 30 days.NSW’s director of environmental health, Richard Broome, last week told reporters the state was enduring “an unprecedented emergency from a smoke point of view”. “We haven’t seen conditions like this in Sydney, certainly in anyone’s memory that I’ve spoken to,” he said.Broome said there is early evidence that the number of people turning up at hospital emergency departments needing help is higher than usual. Dr Kate Charlesworth, a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, said there was no safe level of air pollution, and that the most vulnerable in the community-- babies, children, the elderly and people with pre-existing disease-- were the most likely to be affected.What role does climate change play?The explanation should be familiar by now: greenhouse gas emissions do not cause bushfires, but they play a demonstrated role in increasing average and particularly extreme temperatures and contribute to the extraordinarily dry conditions afflicting eastern Australia.Scientists cite the near absolute lack of moisture in the landscape as a key reason the fires have been so severe.Multiple studies, here and overseas, have found the climate crisis is lengthening the fire season.In the past, the season started in spring in NSW before moving south to Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the new year. Just as Australia’s fire season is more overlapping with that in California, making resource-sharing more difficult, it is also running simultaneously across the country.Among other issues, that is putting greater strain on volunteer firefighting brigades. It is an issue that firefighters and some experts say the country needs to acknowledge and address. The Morrison government appeared to make an initial, qualified step in this direction on Christmas Eve.
So what does this have to do with Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, Australia’s closest neighbor to the north? Their climate crisis is very different from Canberra’s-- but no less horrifying. Yesterday, Eric Leister, AccuWeather senior meteorologist, reported that heavy rains have caused the worst flooding in years and has turned deadly and left much of the city underwater. So far there are 26 reported deaths, 62,000 have been evacuated from their homes and several parts of the city are without power. Rail and road services all around the city has been disrupted and the airport was forced to shut down.Reuters: “Dwikorita Karnawati, head of the Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), told reporters separately that heavy rainfall may continue until mid February.”Over 30 million people live in the Jakarta area-- which is often as polluted as Delhi (and getting worse)-- and the government has recognized that the city isn’t going to survive the Climate Crisis and is planning to move the government to Borneo, northwest of Java, the overcrowded island that includes Jakarta, which is also sinking. When will it be open season on politicians who accept bribes from corporations who benefit from denying the Climate Crisis? When?
