Army and Navy to join the bushfire fight as Victoria counts the cost

Royal Australian Navy ships will sail to the rescue of Victorian and NSW coastal towns engulfed by the bushfires that plunged both states into crisis on New Years Eve.

Evacuees at Mallacoota Wharf at 10.30am Tuesday. 

Thousands of holidaymakers remain trapped by fires in Victoria’s east on Tuesday, with no land route out of the fire zone expected to be open for days, as authorities continued to search for four people still missing in the huge blazes.

Air Force helicopters are expected to be first into action, after Prime Minister Scott Morrison agreed to the states’ requests for help, with the choppers to drop supplies to towns isolated by the smoke and flames, and with fixed-wing aircraft expected to join the firefighting battle soon after.

Mallacoota, in Victoria’s far south-east, and Corryong, in the north-east, were both saved on Tuesday afternoon by changes of wind direction but with “numerous” homes lost on the outskirts of both communities.

Read the story from The Age - “Army and Navy to join the bushfire fight as Victoria counts the cost.”

South Asia floods: Appeals for help as monsoon rains cause havoc in India, Nepal, Bangladesh

There is an urgent need for rescue and relief services on the Indian subcontinent as severe monsoon flooding spreads across India, Nepal and Bangladesh, leaving more than 1,200 people dead since the rains started.

Oxfam says two-thirds of Bangladesh is under water.

Oxfam said its Bangladesh staff reported two-thirds of the country was under water and in some areas the flooding was the worst since 1988, creating an urgent demand for humanitarian supplies.

Wide scale flooding in an arc stretching across the Himalayan foothills caused landslides and washed away tens of thousands of homes and vast swathes of farmland.

The UN said about 40 million had been affected.

Read the ABC News story - “South Asia floods: Appeals for help as monsoon rains cause havoc in India, Nepal, Bangladesh".

Humanity scrambles to maintain its foothold on the planet



There appears consensus that this
 is where we are headed -
 Four Degrees or More?

Maintaining a foothold on earth has long been a challenge for humanity, but with exponential growth in numbers and the blunt refusal to abandon practices that have left all aspects of our environment in serious disrepair; the few existing solutions are quickly closing down.

Beyond that, the Huffington Post notes in a story headed: “Climate change report predicts warming will only make human ills worse” that the many ills of the modern world – starvation, poverty, flooding, heatwaves, droughts, war and disease - will only worsen.

Increase in global temperatures are locked in - as 2° degree over pre-industrial levels cannot be avoided and it was at the launch of the book “Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a Hot World” in Melbourne recently there appeared consensus that such an outcome was unavoidable.

“Business as usual” is the obvious cause of global warming, along with the exponential growth in population, but it is certain that humanity has not the courage or the intellectual athleticism needed to shift to a world in which climate change mitigation is prioritized ahead of maintaining our financial wealth.

Humanity it lost at sea, its pockets burdened with gold coin, the markets for a life jacket and its last hope for rescue is with business as usual.

Its preservation begins with abandoning the gold coin, freeing itself from the market paradigm and realising that business as usual is not in the rescue business – humanity will have to save itself from itself.