I'm Never Going Near the Ocean Again

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | November 19, 2018 |

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | November 19, 2018 |

Devastating wildfires have been raging through California. The worst the state has seen since…well, last year. Thanks to climate change, what we used to call ‘thousand year wildfires’ or ‘once in a century wildfires’ have now become an annual event. This is the new norm. Around the world, extreme events of biblical proportions are fast becoming a regular occurrence. Typhoons rip through East Asia; droughts and heatwaves decimate Australasia, East Africa, and Europe; hurricanes batter the United States and the Caribbean. The events are getting worse and they are getting more frequent. The damage will affect everyone, but it will be on a dramatic sliding scale: The rich will largely weather the storm, while the poor and the vulnerable, especially in the Global South, will die in their millions, paying the price for systemic failure not of their making. To paraphrase a fallen Istari: ‘The industrial capitalists delved too greedily and too deep.’ To see a glimpse of what they’ve awoken, look to the storm currently battering the Spanish Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa.

Photographer Nelson Acosta went viral over the weekend on Twitter with his footage from a seaside hotel window on Tenerife, the largest and most populous of the Canary Islands.

Here is Tenerife and Mr Acosta’s hotel:

And here is what it looks like in satellite view:

And here is what Mr Acosta saw from his hotel:

Ola arrancando barandas en balcones en el Marisol de Mesa del mar, Tenerife 🏢🌊🌊🌊 #FMACANARIAS pic.twitter.com/4gdWSnDNvq

— Nelson J. Acosta 📸 (@NelsonAcosta80) November 18, 2018

According to local reports, 39 people were evacuated from their homes but thankfully nobody was injured.