The desert city finally confirmed

Yet again, the Bureau of Meteorology is predicting heavy rainfall for Victoria without the smallest sign of it.

Although not quite as extreme as my previous prediction, the weather since I wrote a month ago is further proof of just how dire the situation is. The evidence from the past month-equivalent’s weather is, without question, that the situation is much worse than I thought last month.

Rainfall for the first sixteen days of October. What is amazing is how the driest areas are almost precisely those where climate models were expecting heavy rainfall! This is proof of the state of runaway climate change brought about by the inability to expropriate the oil sheikhs of the Gulf and coal barons of Australia. Under a just global economic system these super-polluters would have their wealth cut by ten to twelve orders of magnitude without the tiniest compensation!

Last evening, writing on Wikipedia, clouds were so dark I became really confident of some decent rain for the first time in many months.

Total rainfall so far this year, reflecting runaway climate change as a necessary result of failing to expropriate Australia’s coal barons and establish a genuine “boycott, divestment and sanctions” against the Gulf oil sheikhs that would weaken their geopolitical power 

However, as the night wore on with me extremely tired and unable to stay up, I went to bed, but the noisy blinds in my bedroom inhibited my sleep, which was extremely erratic. There were tiny traces of rain, but I was aware by the time I settled that there would not be any rainfall in Melbourne. This morning, I decided to get up earlier than I have in recent days, feeling I had had a reasonable sleep.

Later this morning, my undeniably incurable inability to react to the weather other than emotionally reared its ugly head. Pointing out that it is never going to rain again in Melbourne in a screaming voice, and hitting the kitchen bench with a clenched fist, are I will admit awful behaviours. Although I am frequently told I like it, I do not!. However, there is no possibility of:

1. it ever raining properly again in Melbourne to calm my anger, or
2. me developing a more measured response when it fails to rain
• I have frequently been told I simply “don’t want to” react in a measured way
• this is utter garbage
• the fact being that I simply cannot and never will be able to react to unfulfilled expectations of rain in a measured manner
• the fact is also that it is many orders of magnitude easier for others to get used to my screaming

The early afternoon saw an even more violent anger on my part about rain. whilst my brother is willing to see it will rain less — and this has been observed — over the past month and a half it has rained probably one-sixth to one-eighth the amounts predicted by the Bureau of Meteorology made its spring forecast. It is almost definitive that, when above-average rainfall was confidently expected, Melbourne will record its driest spring this year. We would need to receive more rain in less than half the time to equal the record low 67 millimetres from 1938. Given that predictions in August were for above-average rainfall, it is thus practically certain that Melbourne’s average annual rainfall from 2026 onwards will be substantially less than one-sixth of the historic average, Likely with increasing global warming it will be substantially less than one-eighth the historic average. One-sixth of the historic average is about 110 millimetres — less than in the driest parts of central Australia. One-eighth is around 80 millimetres — corresponding to the record low Victoria annual rainfall of 75.9 millimetres. Given that we should expect less annual rainfall even than that, how low Melbourne’s annual rainfall will be from 2026 onwards is difficult to comprehend. Likely it will be substantially less than 50 millimetres — less than the record low annual rainfalls of Broken Hill or Tibooburra.

Even channelling anger into initial measures with the ultimate goal of expropriating the polluters responsible for runaway climate change and ensuring every single confiscated cent pays for remedies and compensation at zero cost to the sufferers stands infinitely easier and more likely than the two possibilities in point form above. It is also really gross to say that catastrophic climate change is not as bad as having me scream and scream until it rains — which will be never. Were education not clouded by capitalist dogma, the facts and solutions about climate change could be understood much more accurately at much less cost at a much younger age. That capitalism is the cause of climate change is undeniably demonstrated by such documents as:

• ‘Elon Musk’s electric planet-suicide vehicle: Automobiles, emissions and degrowth’
• Environment, Capitalism and Socialism (in 1990!)
• The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World
• The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism and Barbarism
• ‘Tropical Cyclone Alfred and the politics of “keeping politics out of it”’
• ‘Why only socialism can save us from climate catastrophe’

That genuine socialism — a society in which workers run production without bosses via instantly recallable workers’ councils and production is planned in the collective need — could potentially solve the climate catastrophe with a rapidity that would be miraculous to modern eyes is also virtually undeniable. That the wealthy oil sheikhs and coal barons have an incomprehensible amount to lose is also undeniable. In fact, the rich polluters who profit from runaway global warming would minimally need to be stripped of all bar one-billionth of their accumulated wealth to reduce that wealth to a level sufficient to maintain a society in which mass interest groups actually have any influence upon government policy, as Red Flag discussed in their ‘The United States Is Not a Democracy’ in 2020. After the Kyōtō Protocol, BDS campaigns against the Gulf petromonarchies — highest per capita emitters yet permitted carte blanche emissions increases —were already overdue, yet the blindness of socialist groups obsessed with prewar conflicts with Zionism meant that only in 2015 did anyone even suggest BDS was deserved more by the oil monarchies than by Israel.