Jamais Cascio has put up the slides from his recent Futuresonic keynote.

It’s a provocative call that I must admit is swaying me in favour of geo-engineering.

Especially as I watch one part of my country go from drought stricken to flooded and learn that the river system the supplies our food bowl is more deeply screwed then previously thought.

As one of his slides says, “It’s a choice between unintended consequences and unprecedented catastrophe”.

via treehugger

From Mother Jones:

Many successful biological invasions capitalize on mayhem. Both melaleuca and lionfish are what biologists call drivers of ecosystem changes—causing, for instance, changes in biodiversity. But both are also passengers of ecosystem changes, piggybacking on changes already under way: melaleuca on disrupted landscapes, lionfish on overfished reefs. The potential for more powerful hurricanes as a result of global climate change threatens to amplify existing invasions and maybe even foster new ones—a process known as invasional meltdown. Fifty miles to the west of Hixon’s lab, in the waters of the North Pacific, a synergy of ecological changes appears to be fueling the invasion of Humboldt squid—aggressive predators reaching nearly seven feet in length (not counting their tentacles) and 110 pounds in weight, and living in schools hundreds or thousands strong. They are known to ecologists as r-strategists: species that live fast, die young, and breed early and profusely. (Humboldt squid produce up to 32 million eggs per female.) R-strategists, like locusts and rats, thrive in unstable environments since their generational turnaround time is short enough for adaptation and evolution to work their miracles.

At the moment, a seriously unstable world beckons the Humboldt squid. Typically confined to the tropics and subtropics, they’re now moving northward explosively as waters warm, as their main predators, tuna and billfish such as marlin, are overfished, and as global-warming-induced dead zones appear—Humboldt squid are one of the few animals tolerant of their low oxygen levels. Although the squid have not been accidentally released from a home aquarium or carried across the Panama Canal in the ballast water of a ship or towed around on portable oil drilling platforms (as with Australian spotted jellyfish in the Gulf of Mexico), they are nevertheless invading new realms and are now established as far north as the once-chilly Gulf of Alaska.

Everything is changing, all at the same time.

It’s clear now that the world of our grandchildren will be something unrecognizable to our grandparents.

..but this is just getting ridiculous:

-- photo from Sue Hickton’s photostream

The worst bush fires ever seen swept through my state this Saturday, after the hottest day ever recorded, a furnace-like 48C (that’s 118.4 F for the rest of you) with fierce winds.  Some are still burning.

The death toll is currently at over 130, and they’re still finding more bodies.  Almost 10,000 are homeless.

Bush fires have always been a part of living in Australia; and that’s the biggest tragedy of all.  These people died because they thought they were prepared, or because they had no warning at all.  A lot of them had been through fires before, and had successfully defended their homes.

But Nature’s upped the ante, delivering something far worse than anything anyone ever expected.

This is the new reality.  Extremes beyond our imagining.  The world has already become uninsurable.

The fact that people ran straight to social media is heartening, but it’s not enough.  No one should die from the Weather;  it’s just fucking crazy.

I honestly don’t know what the answer is.  Worldwide we need to go on the defensive in a major way.

The old cliche remains truer than ever:  hope for the best and prepare for the very worst.

(the title of this post comes from the poem My Country by Dorthea MacKellar,  a classic ode to the Australian landscape)