Climate Resilience Hubs, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Abrahm Lustgarten Reports "present pathway [ . . . . ] could lead to 2 billion people falling outside of the climate niche within just the next eight years, and 3.7 billion doing so by 2090"

Erin Stone reported July 31, 2023, at laist.com/news "How Resilience Hubs Can Help Communities Face The Heat And The Climate Emergency." Her article noted, "In 2021, the state [of California] launched the Community Resilience Centers program to support and speed up resilience hub efforts [ . . . . ] [It was] originally allocated $160 million, [but] has already seen significant cuts — the first round makes $98 million available and there’s no guarantee the program will continue, said Amar Azucena Cid, a deputy director with the Strategic Growth Council."

Stone added, "These are buildings that are already well-used and trusted in a community, that can provide helpful resources outside of air conditioning, water and some board games to play. They’re retrofitted with solar panels and battery power so they can ride out a disaster." Climate Resolve Resilience Coordinator Andres Rodriguez was quoted about one hub, "It's a cooling space, but it's also a healing space."

In my September 9, 2022 letter about preparing for climate refugees at The Columbian, the main newspaper for Vancouver, Washington, I wrote, "Some things to consider: cooling centers, vacant lots into gardens, community-building workshops." Resilience hubs Stone noted have the first, third, and more.

Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental reporter Abrahm Lustgarten wrote June 6, 2023, at propublica.org, "Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life. By late this century, according to a study published last month in the journal Nature Sustainability, 3 to 6 billion people, or between a third and a half of humanity, could be trapped outside of that zone, facing extreme heat, food scarcity and higher death rates, unless emissions are sharply curtailed or mass migration is accommodated." 

Lustgarten added, "According to the study, India will have, by far, the greatest population outside of the climate niche. At current rates of warming, the researchers estimate that more than 600 million Indians will be affected, six times more than if the Paris targets were achieved. In Nigeria, more than 300 million citizens will be exposed, seven times more than if emissions were steeply cut. Indonesia could see 100 million people fall out of a secure and predictable environment, the Philippines and Pakistan 80 million people each, and so on. Brazil, Australia and India would see the greatest area of land become less habitable. But in many smaller countries, all or nearly all the land would become nearly unlivable by traditional measures: Burkina Faso, Mali, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Niger. Although facing far more modest impacts, even the United States will see its South and Southwest fall toward the hottest end of the niche, leading to higher mortality and driving internal migration northward."

My May 10, 2023 post, "1939 'Voyage of the Damned' and Climate Migration," included Lustgarten's interview in the May 24, 2021 video The Great Climate Migration Has Begun | Amanpour and Company.

You may have heard, according to Graham Readfearn at The Guardian, July 29, 2023, and others, "[In Antarctica] an area bigger than Mexico has failed to freeze, worrying scientists." Jess Thomson reported at newsweek.com July 26, 2023, "Eliot Jacobson, a retired professor of mathematics and computer science, using data from Japan's National Institute of Polar Research" noted, the recent Antarctic melt is "about a 1-in-2.7[million] year event."

Antarctic melt, Arctic melt, Greenland melt, North Atlantic heat, and the AMOC possibly stopping "between 2025 and 2095, with a central estimate of 2050," according to The Guardian's Damian Carrington, July 25, 2023, make "Strange days indeed,"as John Lennon sang in "Nobody Told Me." 

It is sad global leaders are not focused on immediate solutions. Instead, the COP process and U.S. Congress seem to be missing an area "bigger than Mexico" from their consciousness, and text in official decisions. Increasing fears abound about Artifical Intelligence, but it is this Artifical Stupidity for short-term profit that concerns me. It reminds me of resistance to reality of THE VERY OLD CARDINAL in Bertolt Brecht's 1938 play Life of Galileo: "I am not just any old creature on any insignificant star briefly circling in no particular place. I am walking, with a firm step, on a fixed earth, it is motionless, it is the centre of the universe, I am at the centre and the eye of the Creator falls upon me and me alone. Round about me, attached to eight crystal spheres, revolve the fixed stars and the mighty sun which has been created to light my surroundings. And myself too, that God may see me. In this way everything comes visibly and incontrovertibly to depend on me, mankind, God's great effort, the creature on whom it all centres, made in God's own image, indestructible and . . . He collapses."

I'm grateful The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) supported my new book BRIDGE AT THE END OF THE WORLD, San Diego Reader posted five poems from the book August 4, 2023, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Masters of Advanced Studies Program in Climate Science and Policy invited me to teach an ecopoetry workshop a fifth year. Here is a post about a workshop there in 2019.

Given recent climate news, I will repost a quote from Oregon author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion) in a 1993 letter to Allen Ginsberg: "Ancient Advice Left in cave by Wise French Caveman: 'When Bigbad Shit come, no run scream hide. Try paint picture of it on wall. Drum to it. Sing to it. Dance to it. This give you handle on it.' So Twister is my try."