A Refugee Under a Scowling Enemy Sky
Serbian blogger Jasmina Tesanovic has written a compelling piece this week that I really have to share. Serbia and the Flames. It begins:
Today was the hottest day in Serbia ever since the temperature has been measured, 45°C.
Tesanovic, dismayed by her government’s inaction on climate change, asks:
When will we overcome our local obsessions and realize we are part of a world in a general crisis? The climate crisis isn’t for rich countries, it’s for every country. Especially us. We had Floods in 2006, now Fires in 2007 — the cause is in the Air, and we will end up with no Earth.
Global warming is invisible… it steals up on us like a slow fever, but our daily lives are being transformed by it. Kids can’t get milk at school, eggs might be poisoned with salmonella, the crops are wilting in the fields.
She rounds off her piece thusly:
If there is any justice in this injustice, is that global warming has no borders or nationality, and yet it has guilty and victims. Guilty: all of us who ignored inconvenient truths and sacrificed the ecological conscience for other more or less legitimate priorities. Victims: everyone yet to be born on our damaged planet; when crops wilt and forests burn down to black stumps, does it matter if that wasteland is called Kosovo or Serbia?
Year by year, mankind is becoming justly afraid of our vengeful climate. I have an epiphany: our world in 1999 is becoming all the world. No electrical, no water, no business-as-usual: fear. I remember those bombing days of Serbia and Kosovo when everyone in this land, without exception, was a refugee under a scowling enemy sky.
A commenter called Shumar added some interesting diagrams to the post with this commentary:
In a ‘normal’ summer, the Atlantic jetstream directs areas of low pressure, which bring cloud and rain, to the north of the UK. High pressure systems over Europe and the Atlantic bring warm, settled conditions.
This summer, the jetstream is flowing further south allowing low pressure systems to sweep straight over the centre of Britain. It is also pulling in warmer air from the sub-tropics and Africa which is sweeping over south-eastern Europe.
In Serbia, the agriculture ministry says 30% of the country’s annual harvest has been destroyed because of the heat, with the wheat, soya and vegetable crops worst hit.
Up to 500 people have died in the past week from a heatwave in Hungary, a top health official has said.
We are changing our climate in real-time. If we really believe in preserving our way of life, we are going to have to change the way we live. We have to take responsibility for our actions. We must act now, and act decisively to withdraw CO2 from our polluted skies, and we must, collectively pledge to reduce our outrageous levels of consumption and waste. We need to separate our generation of power from the burning of fossil fuels. We need to fly less, drive less, eat less meat. Australians and Americans are the worst polluters on Earth, but it’s not us that are really going to feel the pain of our actions in the short-term. We have a clear and present moral duty to be the change we’d like to see in the world before it’s too late for all of us. — DS
Technorati Tags: climate change, climate porn, disrupted nature, global warming, heat-wave, meltdown, Serbia
