Reports from across the globe show similar anomalies. Though it is important to recognize that there is variation in weather patterns across years, it seems things are accelerating at an accelerating rate: droughts across the global south, flooding in the north.
Venice is under water, with the worst floods in decades.
Says Venice's Tide Center: [This is] the deepest flood in 22 years, and the fourth highest flood level in recent history, claimed Venice's Tide Center.
Zimbabwe is suffering from a phenomenal drought that has diminished it's grain tonnage to starvation levels: from 4.5 million tons in 2000 to 800,000 tons in 2008, in a country that needs 2 million tons "just to feed its own people". Zimbabwe suffers from a multitude of disastrous conditions- the stated increasing drought, a resurgence of cholera, and perhaps worst of all, a neoliberal dictator whose regime has been bolstered for decades by the ill-fated policies of the (guess who!) International Monetary Fund, World Bank, USAID, which have produced, accordingly, "property and stock-market speculation... and very high levels of foreign debt"
Two crises; one a telling environmental catastrophe, the other a humanitarian disaster. And they're both from the same source- climate change? Guess again: Climate change is a product in and of itself of the global capitalist system we have found ourselves born under. No single action on any of our parts in the colonizing nations can exist outside of a global political system- from the food we eat to the very fact that we can read and write this, this is a privilege made only by a theft of the most extraordinary variety. Am I an alarmist? Sure.
Should alarm bells be ringing?
Absolutely.
