Hurricane Milton: watching the climate train wreck in slow motion

Have to admit I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last few weeks feeling not just gratitude but profound relief that I live in New Zealand. Not that we are immune, by any means, and I’m acutely aware that biggest crisis will probably be a quake and we won’t see it coming. Not slow motion trainwreck, just a sharp jolt and live changed (this we are also not prepared for by the way, that’s for another post, but everything I say here is remarkable appropriate)

So, climate change, first the scary stuff about hurricane Milton,

• Florida is having its second major hurricane in two weeks, in some places there are still large amounts of debris lining the streets from Helene (and some places are still recovering from hurricanes in August). The risks from this include debris becoming airborne and projectile, as well as blocking drains and adding to flooding.
• Milton is currently a category 3 hurricane. Several times this week as it approached landfall, it was rated as the once rare category 5. It is expect to make landfall about today NZT.
• Storm surges of 3 or more metres are forecasted in some areas, depending on the convergence with the high tide, possibly twice the height of Helene.
• Winds of 190km/hr and 140 – 225km/hr gusts, and multiple tornadoes. For comparison, gale force winds in NZ are typically in the 120km/hr range.
• Heavy rain is expected to bring catastrophic and life threatening flooding.
• Millions of people have been evacuating, the Mayor of Tampa told people to get out or die.
• NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville was impacted by Helene and still isn’t fully functional.
• All of this is driven by human induced climate change.

To make some things blatantly clear then, these are not one off events that we have to recover from. This is the climate crisis, here now, ongoing for the foreseeable future. If we lose key infrastructure (national weather services, rubbish collection, roading, hospitals, emergency services) because it is they are broken or overloaded (often at the same time), and we have extreme weather events much more frequently, or back to back, then our ability to ‘build back better’ is fucked.

It doesn’t mean we’re fucked, it means we have to stop thinking we can adapt with business as usual and carrying on as normal with a bit of intermittent disaster recovery. We need to put ourselves on climate footing and change how we live and run society. The sooner we do this, the better the outcomes.

If you feel fear watching this unfold, then know that you are sane and awake and in a better position to make the necessary changes to prevent the worst of climate collapse as well as survive what is already locked in.

If you’re not feeling fear, maybe consider you’re not paying enough attention. Or perhaps like most of us you are struggling to accommodate the unbelievable and the unbearable. There is a huge amount of technique available now to help us psychologically transition into the climate age, and the more we choose to not live in cognitive dissonance (at least some of the time) the better we will be able to act and create effective change.

It’s not too late to create a better future. So what can we do? I’ve written a lot at The Standard on transition movements and tech, I will link below. Everywhere in New Zealand we now have people who have been thinking deeply and putting systems in place. Go connect with whichever ones you can where you live.

But it was something I read this morning that made me see a specific role for the political left and the labour and indigenous movements. Sharon Astyk has been writing about peak oil, climate change and pandemics for several decades, including a large body of work on adaptation alongside mitigation. Not just writing, but making radical changes to her and her family’s lives. I wrote about her ideas on grassroots climate transition here.

In the past few weeks, she’s been posting about there being no safe place left to run in terms of where to live and build community. But some places are much much better than others, and this is the lesson from Helene and Florida. She wrote in depth about this in the US context here. Today she also connected climate adaptation with progressive movements, I’m going to quote at length,

Those are places people just won’t be able to live. Will they be able to live there a bit longer? Sure. Will they know when they can’t anymore? Nope. They’ll find out the hard way.

Now, I know, not everyone can leave easily – or even with a great deal of effort. But everyone can try and game out SOME way of making a transition eventually. That doesn’t make it easy or fair or just or good. But staying and dying isnt any of those things either.

We are going to need a high degree of collaboration on this – finding where to go, helping people who cannot move themselves to get there, providing support and resources. In a better world, this would have been being done by our government already – but I’m not holding my breath for this. They still haven’t acknowledged the sheer magnitude and inevitability of climate change.

Eventually, if we create this, the government will want in – so we are going to need to create a movement, a transit and transition system to help move millions of innocent people who believed lies about climate change (I don’t mean “it isn’t happening” although that too, I mean “it won’t hit us until 50 years from now” and “Someone will do something about it, so I don’t have to make any major sacrifices.”) Those were always bullshit, and we always knew this.

So we are going to have to create our own Climate Corps, with the motto “Leave no one behind” and create evacuation paths and resources for the poorest and most vulnerable people to get out and find a future for themselves and their posterity. I am glad to see so many people stepping up to help Milton and Helene evacuees. But we also are going need to create organizations and find funds and community resources for MILLIONS of people driven by the climate to move BEFORE the disaster strikes. And if the government won’t do it, we will have to.

We need a climate corps. And we need it now. Because we cannot leave people behind.

Astyk’s post is very American, so let’s translate that for Aotearoa/New Zealand. We are in a very good position to build on existing community, regional, and national organisations, networks and infrastructure. What we don’t have yet is the compelling narrative of a climate change world that works well. We need stories about how things work out, and thus open the doorway through which people will jump when they finally realise we have no choice but to change.

I’ve been thinking about the East Coast of the North Island in the past week, wondering how people are getting on there since Gabrielle, and why is that we don’t know or talk about this. There is a massive opportunity here for the left to be doing the mahi now so that when the next wave of disaster hits, we are much better prepared.


Also recently from Astyk,

If you are not adapting now, you won’t have a chance. Think hard about the future if you aren’t dealing with disaster already, because you will be.

Edited to add that this is about climate change, and no, I’m not saying we are all doomed, I’m saying our way of life is going to change by necessity so do it now while there are choices.

And as always, adaptation and prevention/mitigation are the same thing or not at all. This analogy from Dmitri Orlov If you are going to fall out of a window, it’s better to fall out of the first floor than higher up. We going to have to change eventually, so better to do so in a way that lessens the damage. Everything we can do now is going to make it much easier in the future both in terms of limiting the worst effects of Climate Change and in terms of adapting.

Note: no climate denial under my post. This includes the Bart Simpson excuse (“we didn’t do it”), and it’s too late messaging (there is no way to know that).