Is it climate change? you ask, as the weather becomes increasingly deranged. But it's not the averages that get you, it's the range. It's the outliers that get less and less outlandish, until they're inside your house and you're on the roof and, certainly, something has changed. Take Cyclone Ditwah, which recently took a shit where I live. We've had cyclones before, but now we have them more, and more abundantly. Is this climate change? Well, it's certainly different. What else do you want to say?

Diving

I suppose we could've seen the water coming if we'd gone underwater earlier, which I have. I occasionally go diving and very little coral is surviving. The Indian Ocean has had four mass bleaching events, one of which I remember not from statistics but from staring at it. The old-timers have told me about lush, living coral reefs but I've never seen them. I've only ever dived a coral graveyard, and only seen it get worse. Again, it's not the average that got them, it's the range. ‘Freak’ temperatures that bleach the coral, and which occur frequently enough that things are never the same.

We could've also seen the on-land consequences if we meditated on the toilet bowl for a minute. The warming of the oceans is basically the same as the warming of a human. When you get hot, you drink water, sweat, piss, and watch it all swirl down the toilet in the end. Ain't it the same on a higher plane? When the air gets hot, heat sinks into the ocean, more water ‘sweats’ out as evaporation, pisses down rain as precipitation and swirls into cyclones, like circling the drain. If you treat the ocean like a toilet, at some point it will oblige you and flush you out with a hurricane.

Cyclones have happened to Sri Lanka for centuries, but I had to look them up because they don't usually fuck us up like this. The level of property damage is worse than the Indian Ocean tsunami, because it hit us all across the island, and right in the rice-basket, washing the harvest away along with probably a thousand humans. Such a powerful cloud tsunami is possible because there's simply more energy stored (re:dumped) as heat in the oceans. There's more battery for the assault and battery. But how did this happen?

Deep Diving

As it seems to go with climate change, the people that got hit the worst least deserved it. The British both stripped the hills and shipped Indians over to work them. Their descendants are still poor and the cyclone rains caused the land itself to slide all over them. They didn't start the fire, but they get burnt first. It's important to understand that climate change started centuries ago, well before fossil fuels, and using ‘renewable’ energy.

The thieves of the Americas genocided so hard that it changed the climate in the 1500s. As Koch et al said, “The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures.” The great dying extended to our living relatives the whales, the beavers, and mega and micro fauna. CO₂ is not the problem, it's just the point at which it became a problem to White people. But they colonized the hardest on ‘renewables’ (wind, solar plantations, slave labor). Fossil fuels just poured literal gasoline on an already burning planet.

These consequences were already baked in when Sri Lanka started following a Western development model. Yes, our coal power plant proximately nuked the coral reef around Puttalam, but the bleaching events were global, and came from historical saturation of the oceans. As Billy Joel said, we didn't start the fire. Unfortunately, we're not trying to fight it either. Because we've been too busy fighting White people for survival! But all we've done, in the long run, is live to die another day. And that day is upon us now.

This is the blowback we're getting as cyclones in the south, and which you'll get as hurricanes in the north. There's only one ocean and one earth and we're all ultimately in the same pot. It cooks unevenly, but we're all cooked in the long run. I blame the capitalist goblins that cooked up globalization in the first place, but the communists that took it up aren't (yet) turning the temperature down. So, you might ask, what about China, which currently emits the most, and what about communist production, which still rapes the natural world, and can you blame everything on colonialism even now? Yes I can and that's not the question at hand. The question was is it climate change? And for Cyclone Ditwah and whatever hit our homies in Southeast Asia, yes, it was. But if you want to know more about my humanist, communist, biases, read on.

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