As the Ukrainian Offensive unfolds, El Niño may prove to be the ‘Wild’ Card
As world altering as the Ukraine war is, both in terms of the global balance of power and the sustained international condemnation of the illegal Russian invasion, genocide and war crimes, the very concept of ‘world altering’ is being rescaled as Climate Collapse becomes rapidly ascendent.
El Niño is already wreaking havoc in Spain and Italy and promises to ravage Europe worse than La Niña did last summer. There is considerable concern that it may lay waste to much of Australia and cause devastating suffering in India. North Eastern America has recently gotten a ‘taste’ of how seriously global warming has been ravaging Canada for several years now.
Because time is not on their side, the longer the war lasts, the more possible it becomes that Ukraine’s efforts may be jeopardized as the rest of the world is forced to turn their attention elsewhere and begin dealing with global warming in earnest. At the very least Europe will likely have to run damage control on the fallout from El Niño, even if they continue to avoid full engagement in this Mother of All Wars.
For climate devastation is ramping up exponentially on all fronts and its ‘offensive’ is well underway. As it progresses, it promises to subsume all other issues and priorities, while consuming our time, efforts, resources and if we wait much longer, us.
Although there is no direct connection, other than a shared adjective, between the explosion and collapse of the Kakhovka dam and climate collapse, Pakalolo’s recent article about ‘flash droughts’ suggests a possibly dangerous intersection of the two.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/13/2175082/-Flash-droughts-are-coming-for-every-essential-major-food-growing-region-on-Earth
Flash droughts can turn fecund fields arid in just a matter of days, killing the crops. The agricultural water security provided by the dam is now gone and as a result there will be no irrigated water in the Donbas until such time as the dam wall can be restored and the water levels start to rise. This effectively eliminates any counter offensive water management strategies for combating these unpredictable micro droughts and the ‘old fashioned’ kind as well. Ukraine is vulnerable to attacks by both. A serious loss in wheat production would not only threaten a sizable portion of worlds food supply, but seriously damage the Ukrainian economy, at a time they can least afford it.
Ukraine cannot repair the breached dam itself until they take back control of the surrounding region and rebuilding the hydroelectric facility is estimated to take 5 years. From one day to the next, the likely hood of this happening becomes more challenging. Nor is it looking good for Ukraine to successfully rebuild the extraordinarily massive infrastructure loss and restore their severely damaged environment after hostilities cease, as the time frame for that is rapidly slipping away. Climate collapse is quickly turning all such plans into wishful thinking.
World resources are finite and we have been squandering them for decades. War is a vortex of destruction and waste, no matter how justified. Will the world be able to afford the resources necessary to rebuilt Ukraine?
(We were warned recently by the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, that the world’s beaches were running out of sand as the result of a world wide cement construction boom.)
More importantly, will the international community be able to buy the time needed for reconstruction on this scale before efforts are cut off by the demands of the global climate emergency, which continues to be stymied and shunted, exacerbating the crisis and amplifying its effects. Will there be anyone able to do the work amidst ‘wet bulb’ temperatures, drought, fires, famine, societal breakdown and god knows what else as the world collapses? Due to the shuffling of climate parameters with no clear boundaries walling off the varied threats posed by climate collapse, Ukraine is now subject to any of these scenarios.
Mother Nature is not pleased and she has a formidable arsenal with which to express her displeasure. Surrounded on all sides by the her abusers, she is lashing out without parsing her wraith.
Chernobyl has shown that portions of the world might survive radioactive fall-out from a nuclear war, depending on the severity, but environmental collapse and runaway greenhouse, if left unchecked, are orders of magnitude more catastrophic. They will leave the world a ‘burned out’ husk and we won’t be here to determine what’s left. There is no longer a corner of the planet that remains unaffected by Climate Collapse and environmental degradation. To remain unaware of this is to live in the meta world of denial and disconnect.
Rising temperatures have already begun to release greenhouse gases from the perma frost and ocean temperatures are frighteningly close to releasing vasts amounts from the continental shelves, an infinitely greater threat than rising sea levels. If we let things reach that stage without having mounted a full throttle global counter offensive, we will be lost.
DK’s reporting of and unflagging support of the war in Ukraine is admirable, but the endemic ‘blind eye’ turned toward environmental impact in those reports, as well as on this site in general, is ‘deplorable’, as being to a great extent, self-centered and timid.
It places individual subconscious ‘comfort’ before the biological imperative of survival.
Climate posts, by their very nature, are not safe harbors for the faint hearted, but facing them head on is what is required by this emergency and avoidance is weakness sheltered by denial.
Trimming reality to fit your ‘world view’ is what conservatives do. Progressives need to have an all encompassing view and as firm a grip on reality as possible to move forward responsibly. This is the backbone of progressive ideology. We strive to deal with what’s really out there, not an edited version. Obviously, this applies to war as well.
Prioritizing reality to get it to assuage our fears and fulfill our desires, although sometimes beneficial in the short term, can only lead to trouble further on down the road, which in this case is amply paved with good intentions, but still leads to hell.
The excuses put forward to justify this negligence, are as effective as a gun loaded with blanks.
Actions speak louder than words and when those words are configured into explanations and excuses for not adequately integrating environmental repercussions into war coverage, a shudder is louder.
If the men and women fighting in Ukraine had made the decision to ignore the war and defend ‘normal’ instead; because “our situation is hopeless”, “it upsets and depresses me”, “it makes me feel helpless”, “war can get monotonous”, “I know there is a war, but I’m focused on more important issues”, “we need to worry about politics first” or “it doesn’t conform to my world view” and “war is a bummer”, the Russians would have won in three days as planned.
Unfortunately this is all perfectly normal and therein lies the devil.
We are in a self-destructive death embrace with ‘normalcy’ and we are sacrificing everything in a misguided attempt to defend it. Regrettably, this could very well turn the war in Ukraine into collateral damage, by obscuring recon and hobbling preparedness.
Ukraine is not fighting their war on a deserted island, partitioned off from this greater global threat, but for some it may appear that way, as they desert common sense and denial ruthlessly chops their perspective down to a manageable, but inadequate scale.
This ongoing disconnect between the threat of climate collapse and the reporting of events in the war, is dangerous. There is literally a game changing force ‘massing at their borders’ and Ukraine appears oblivious of that fact, as they stay focused on their battle with the Russians. If they are aware, you wouldn’t know it from the war reporting on DK. Nevertheless, as environmental collapse is a force that far outclasses their capabilities, Ukraine will have to contend with it sooner or later and those reporting on the war do them no service by ignoring this fact. As it is, this climate gone rogue, which has already acted to shape the course of their actions, barely gets a mention other than in normalizing references to “General Mud”.
Because it is so undeniably an environmental disaster, the bombing of the Kakhovka dam has been reported as such, focusing on the terrible flooding, as well as, probable resulting crop failures. While the Deinper is described as carrying masses of highly toxic waste, once it empties into the Black Sea, the trail grows cold.
Environmental issues litter the floor in the war coverage editing room, discarded because connecting the far greater threat of climate collapse to the conflict in Ukraine does indeed complicate the narrative and muddies the clarity of an otherwise straight forward, parable-like conflict between good and evil. Be that as it may, its omission is a distortion of reality that serves no one.
I understand that as things stand now, the environment is not having an apparent direct effect on events in the war and can therefore be ‘justifiably’ sidelined as a ‘non-pertinent’ issue. But at any time it can make a very impertinent, unexpected entry, with chilling impact. This needs to be understood and prepared for. Judging from the way this type of planning is in its infancy world-wide, (mostly in high impact threatened locations not distracted by war), the lack of sufficient mention of it in relation to Ukraine is deeply concerning.
This is not a bridge we can wait to cross when we get to it, because there won’t be a bridge. What there will have to be in its stead, is an all-out, multi-directional fluid effort requiring flexible preventive planning to at least mitigate full impact. Ukraine needs to be preparing now, along with the rest of the world, because the front in this war will be everywhere and the ‘offensive’ unrelenting, with few if any obstacles other than what we may initiate in the way of appeasement.
Ukraine must continue their war if they are to survive. Sadly, even if support holds assuring their success, it is likely they will ultimately not survive if climate collapse is ignored much longer. That the war’s audience on DK hopes for Ukraines success is clear, but we need to realize that the arena in which this ‘success’ is being fought-in is expanding at an alarming rate and not take ours eyes off it for a second.