Fossil-fuelled heat has baked Western Australia’s (WA) plant communities, its bees are starving.
Spring in WA and the Top End has sprung with vengeance. Horrible heat that begot a flash drought has lambasted western and northern Australia. Last week in Yampi Sound, WA, the mercury touched 41.6C (106.8F), the highest winter temperature ever recorded on that continent.
More than 12,000 kinds of WA flowering plants depend on 801 species of native bees to cross-pollinate them.
The heat and ensuing drought have spawned dry flowering. That is, the moribund buds contain flower primordia but have no possibility of developing either nectar or pollen. Hence, solitary, stingless and European honeybees have little, if any, food for their offspring.
This is a shocking reminder that combusting fossil fuels, wood pellets and palm oil are adding daily the equivalent of 1,000,000 Hiroshimas of heat into the oceans, which drive the planet’s climate.
If it’s too hot and dry for the plants, and the bees are starving to death, then other animals like marsupials and birds are also facing dire straits. This means that humans, too, are in perilous times.
Mother Earth’s biomes are clearly showing scientists that accelerating manmade heat is beyond anything that any hominin has ever witnessed, i.e., a heat index of 82.2C (180F) in Iran on 28 August 2024 – unliveable!
A decade ago, daily combustion heat, equivalent to adding 250,000 Hiroshimas into the oceans, was our wake-up call to correct sociopathic consumerism, terminate fossil fuel subsidies and reject the world’s only progress metric, GDP.
Incidentally, the insufferable heat of 2013’s Angry Summer prevented many eucalypts from flowering. For the first time ever, Australian beekeepers were forced to hand feed their hives throughout that summer. One-third of the commercial bees were wiped out. Honey production across the nation was the lowest ever recorded.
Civilisation is at its crossroads. Business as usual, ransacking Mother Earth’s wilderness with reckless abandon, will accelerate collapse with more frequent and intense heat domes, climate firestorms, continental droughts, long-lasting marine ocean bottom heatwaves, typhoons, hurricanes, climate floods, sea level rise and crop failures.
It doesn’t need to be like this. Humans are social mammals, problem solvers and tool-makers. Millions of bright minds, at a supra-human level, working for the collective good are needed post-haste to implement survival plans for a hothouse Earth.
Agitate. Disrupt. Defend.
Reese Halter is a bees/trees/seas defender.
Unearthly Wails is a special edition, a collection of poetry
illustrated by renowned Ojibwa artist Terry McCue.
Email: HalterBooks@gmail.com to order
