Damage that climate change is causing

A favorite deceive and deflect propaganda tactic related to climate change is to ignore, deny and/or downplay the cost of doing nothing. Actually, that tactic was and is also used for cigarettes, gun regulations, and some other issues. The tactic isn't new by any means. But, it remains highly effective. Anything that climate change deniers and downplayers can to to deceive, distract, disinform, confuse and/or sow doubt is ruthlessly and shamelessly used against the public. It is protected free speech, regardless of how massive the damage it causes.

Given how serious and urgent that climate change and pollution as usual has become, it makes sense to bring up the issue of damage caused by anti-government ideologues, laissez-faire capitalist business interests that profit from polluting, e.g., Exxon-Mobile. Capitalism is great at (1) corrupting and subverting government, and (2) privatizing and trickling wealth up to the elites at the top, while trickling down to everyone else the social, environmental and governmental risks, costs, damage and harms of making profits. That's just how capitalism works and fights hard and dirty to have it. Along with campaign contributions and lobbyists, deceit and divisive propaganda is a critically important tool that capitalists rely to get their immoral deceit and dirty work done at our expense.

The New York Times writes on climate change damage accruing in parts of south Asia:

Hifjur Rehman, 40, a third-generation farmer, collapsed in a 

paddy field destroyed by floods in the Indian state of Assam

On Climate Change’s Front Lines, Hard Lives Grow Even Harder

Hundreds of millions of humanity’s most vulnerable live in South Asia, where rising temperatures make it more difficult to address poverty, food insecurity and health challenges.

FATEHGARH-SAHIB, India — When the unseasonably heavy rains flooded the fields, and then the equally unseasonable heat shriveled the seeds, it didn’t just slash Ranjit Singh’s wheat harvest by nearly half.

It put him, and nearly all the other households in his village in northern India, that much further from financial stability in a country where a majority of people scratch out a living on farms. Like many Indian farmers, Mr. Singh is saddled with enormous debt and wondering how he will repay it, as a warming world makes farming ever more precarious.

For India and other South Asian nations, home to hundreds of millions of humanity’s most vulnerable, a seemingly bottomless well of challenges — poverty, food security, health, governance — has only deepened as the region bakes on the front lines of climate change.

Global warming is no longer a distant prospect that officials with short electoral mandates can choose to look away from. The increasing volatility in weather patterns means a greater risk of disasters and severe economic damage for countries already straining to increase growth and development, and to move past the pandemic’s devastation to lives and livelihoods.

In Pakistan, which is grappling with an economic crisis and a political meltdown, a cholera outbreak in the southwest sent the local government scrambling, just as it was trying to quell massive forest fires.

In Bangladesh, floods that came before the monsoons stranded millions of people, complicating longstanding efforts to improve the country’s response to chronic flooding. In Nepal, officials are trying to drain about-to-burst glacial lakes before they wash away Himalayan villages facing a new phenomenon: too much rain, too little drinking water.

And in India, which is the region’s biggest grain supplier and provides hundreds of millions of its own citizens with food rations, the reduced wheat harvest has resurfaced longstanding concerns about food security and curbed the government’s ambitions to feed the world.

South Asia has always been hot, the monsoons always drenching. And it is far from alone in contending with new weather patterns. But this region, with nearly a quarter of the world’s population, is experiencing such climatic extremes, from untimely heavy rain and floods to scorching temperatures and extended heat waves, that they are increasingly becoming the norm, not the exception.

That March was the hottest month in India and Pakistan in 122 years of record-keeping, while rainfall was 60 to 70 percent below the norm, scientists say. The heat came earlier than usual this year, and temperatures stayed up — as high as 49 degrees Celsius, roughly 120 degrees Fahrenheit, in New Delhi in May.

Such a heat wave is 30 times as likely now as before the industrial age, estimates Krishna Achuta Rao, a climate researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology. He said that if the globe warms to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, from the current 1.2 degrees, such extreme patterns will come much more often — perhaps once every 50 years, or even every five.  

As its intensity became clear, the Indian government suddenly reversed a decision to expand wheat exports, with global supplies already reduced by the war in Ukraine. Officials cited rising international prices and the challenges of food security at home.  

The damage to the wheat crop has sent yet another tremor through India’s underperforming agriculture sector. In many places, traditional crops are particularly vulnerable to the depletion of groundwater and erratic monsoons. Farmers and the government do not agree on how far to go in opening agriculture markets. Deep in debt, farmers are committing suicide in growing numbers.

The agrarian crisis has pushed many to the cities in search of other work. But India’s economic growth, focused largely at the top, is not expanding employment opportunities. And much of the urban work is outdoor labor, which this year’s extreme heat has made dangerous.

It is reasonable to believe that climate change is going to kill millions of people. Most of the deaths will come in poor countries. US, which is able to react, remains paralyzed by corrupt government, powerful lobbyists backed by bribes called campaign contributions, and anti-government, neo-fascist Republican Party ideology.