Most people now accept that anthropogenic climate change is here. The effects and outcomes are debatable, as are the means to address the crisis in the coming years. Evidence would suggest that meaningful action will be reactive, as opposed to proactive. There is no evidence that we have the political or societal will to meet even the modest goals of the Paris accords, and even if we did, consensus is developing that the goals fall far short of keeping global median temperature below the 1.5° mark. This is the threshold which, according to massive amounts of research, represents a tipping point from which there is no return.
The purpose of this exercise is to explore the idea of preparing for a world devastated by climate change from the perspective of an ordinary person. It assumes the outcome aligns with the current trends of increased calamity that will mark the start of the Anthropocene. I do this because I have children. I do this because I am pessimistic, and I believe in science.
I'm obviously not a writer, but I enjoy it and will try to edit the following screed accordingly. It should be noted that I have written, read, rewritten and reread this a dozen times, and it always sounds crazy. Also, I am fond of ellipsis… and they not-so-occasional aposiopesis… It's probably annoying. That's all I have to say about that...
It seems important to note that I am far from alone in pondering this question. From Guy McPherson, to the Dark Mountain Project, people are attempting to come to terms with what is increasingly seen as not a mere possibility, but a probability. My goal is to continue to listen and learn, and from that education make an informed decision about how to proceed.
Admittedly, much of the following sounds, even to my own ears, somewhere between alarmism and downright paranoia. I am not Guy McPherson, in whom I have never seen a more blatant example of confirmation bias. Everything that I will state going forward is with the understanding that some, or even much, of the prognostications about the outcomes of climate change could be overstated, misunderstood, or completely incorrect. History is filled with invalidated, "chicken little" prophecies of impending doom, cataclysm, or catastrophe, whether population bombs, resource scarcity, or environmental destruction. Many of these were the result of faulty assumptions, bad data, or bad science, but some may just have yet to come to pass. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a subject worth exploring. And if I am going to the trouble of a thought experiment, I may as well see it through to its most reasonable conclusion.
A quick aside....
Fuck you, Alex Jones. Fuck you right in the ear. Hyperbole, paranoia, and fear mongering have consequences. Rational people aren't listening. So when the time comes to actually be concerned about, say, an aspiring dictator coming to power in the US, nobody is really listening. Or when you say that everyone should be prepping for the apocalypse because of zombie vampire aliens or world governments coming to git yer guns, anyone who raises a rational alarm, based on the reality of science or climate change, is going to sound like....well, Alex fucking Jones. This complicates things. I hope you get dick cancer....
Should We Be Making Plans?
Even going by the more conservative of assessments, the likelihood that the current stability of our economy, and our societies in general, stays intact in the face of climate change is dubious. Grim, even. The IPCC's fifth report, released in 2014, makes it clear that emissions would need to flatline by 2030, and be at zero by 2050, or 2° global median temperature rise is a virtual certainty. Every report that has come out since says basically the same thing; "...it's happening even faster than we thought..."
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| Yosemite en fuego in 2017 |
So, if we agree that 1.5° or 2° is highly likely, what does that mean, exactly? I won't speculate because climatologists are science-ing the shit out of the subject for us. Read about it here, or here, or here, here and here. Want me to summarize? It's a shit show.
Is it a dystopian future where the earth is a raging inferno, and people are roaming around the blighted landscape like Mad Max? Who knows? That's already the Middle East if you remove petro dollars and increase water scarcity (which is expected to increase significantly by 2100). But even in a tamer version of the future, conflict is much more likely. People flee conflict. When small parts of an ecosystem collapse, there tends to be a cascading effect. Butterfly wings and snowballs and such.
Example: The wars in Syria, or Yemen have had almost global consequences. The migration of people from war torn regions has destabilized nearly the entirety of Europe, especially politically. Imagine if India runs mostly out of water? If Bangladesh is 50% submerged? Or Florida? Mass migration, that’s what. So, from my perch here in Kansas City, what is now a distant concern, will become very localized before long.
According to David Frum in his piece for The Atlantic, How Much Immigration is too Much, “from 1990 to 2015, 44 million people left the global South to find new homes in the global North. They came from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.” This is before the effects of climate change are even being felt with anywhere near the strength that will be seen in the coming decades. This statement does not rely on a very large assumption. Only if the science is catastrophically wrong is this point not a given. Again, we are assuming the science.
Once drought, sea level rise, water and food scarcity, and other climate change fueled disasters make life even worse for people, especially equatorial people, then is it realistic to expect that we (the west) won’t continue being inundated? It’s not that we won’t be suffering the same level of climatological disasters, but wealthy countries are more prepared to mitigate these disasters, but only at the beginning. That wealth will evaporate with startling speed if the effects of climate change are even half as severe as is being postulated.
The question then becomes how does one prepare, individually, while also not abdicating the responsibility to contribute to the necessary efforts to curtail the damage? It's could be argued that creating a plan is the contribution. How can one look at this question rationally, and take action that is commensurate? How do we refrain from apocalyptic fantasies and assess the situation using reason, considering the science and choosing the course of action that best fits the reality?
Most importantly, how do we convince others that the threat is grave enough to warrant action that, on its face, sounds mildly absurd? Without that, this is simply a thought experiment and nothing more, because what I am actually suggesting is an effort that would take decades, and cost tens of millions of dollars. *checks bank account* Yep. This will not be a singular or unilateral effort.
And that’s the point, really. Taking just my family and moving to a cabin in the Yukon isn’t exactly a great strategy for creating a place where my posterity can carve out an existence in a world gone to pot. They’ll need medicine, engineering, and tasty beverages. So that means asking, with my goldfish in a bag, “Who’s coming with me?!?” More on that later.
The simple part of this effort is devising a plan. Vastly more difficult would be implementation.
Is "rationally planning for doomsday" even a thing?
It seems like the only people prepping for doomsday are, well….doomsday preppers. If I have to live through dystopia with that bunch of kooks, I’m liable to just smother the family and be done with it. As I said, we are going to assume climate disaster, so I think my main consideration is isolation from the almost guaranteed civil unrest that will accompany said calamity.
The first thing should probably be to carefully assess what the world is going to look like in 2050 or 2100 and beyond. What is the likelihood, based on the data, that desertification is going to render huge swaths of the planet basically uninhabitable? What is melting permafrost going to unleash upon the arctic, and the rest of the planet? What are feedback loops going to do for melting that can’t be accurately predicted in climate modeling? Is “accurately predicted in climate modeling” an oxymoron? Also, is there any validity to the counter-arguments? Is the problem being over-blown?
However, for the purposes of this word salad, let’s just assume the facts: that the world will be radically changed for our, and especially our kids generation, and beyond. That means finding safe haven from the storms, fires, and floods will be all but impossible. Where, in the long view, would one go to be best positioned to forge a life and survive? How would you get there? What should you bring and build? Will I still be able to stream Game of Thrones?
People like Peter Thiel are already thinking along these lines. He has been buying up large swaths of New Zealand with the stated purpose of having a place to which he can retreat should society face partial or total collapse on a global scale. Most of us would not be invited into Pete's version of Helm's Deep however, and neither would most of us want to be there. I doubt that Mr. Thiel is thinking along the lines of forming a community from which the future could be forged.
Mr Thiel is also a billionaire, and I am not. I'm just a dude. I can't purchase my way to safety.
I think it should be assumed that nobody can escape the actual changes to the climate. Anywhere you go will be affected. So the question is really, how to protect ourselves from the desperate masses trying to escape the hardest hit places. We are in a position of relative affluence, and freedom of movement, which means that we are part of a small percentage of people on this planet who can possibly prepare. But for how long?
I have to think in terms of my grandkids and beyond. Life for my generation will probably go on without too much change, except maybe in the most extreme scenarios. By 2100, however, the world, and climate, in which our species evolved might be gone forever. In some respects, it already is...
So, where to go? The problem with going remote is that there aren’t the services, infrastructure and resources that we generally rely on to survive. We'll need antibiotics, fuel, power, security, and tequila. And if the world hasn’t gone full World War Z, convincing people of the need to forego those resources will be nearly impossible. And it shouldn't be necessary. Approaching this problem without descending into fictional narratives of life in the middle ages where we're all on horses and using bows and nobody bathes is probably a good idea.
These reasons alone might not justify an extreme decision to commit resources to something like a real world Helm’s Deep. After all, what level of preparation is really justified? There is another thing that is animating my exploration of this topic. Our society seems remarkably unhealthy right now. Rates of depression, anxiety and suicide are increasing at alarming rates. Opioid addiction is ravaging whole communities. Partisan hatred and division is as pronounced as at any time in the history of our country. This is also true across the West. Far right nationalism is an enormous problem, not just in the United States, but also Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Brazil and beyond.
So where’s the bottom? If things continue to regress at this pace, how long can the world’s fragile democracies stand against the rising tides of authoritarianism, fascism and kleptocracy, not to mention mass migration? I don’t have an answer, but it would seem prudent to at least consider the possibility that things could get uglier.
For the purposes of this thought experiment I am purposefully ignoring the possibility that our current political situation could simply be a pendulum swing, and things will swing back the other direction and we will be better and stronger for it. Listen to Steven Pinker or Matt Ridley, and it’s easy to become much more optimistic. Even if it is, the effects of climate change do not operate on small time scales. By the time the pendulum begins swinging back toward cooling, the year could start with a 3, or 4....
In future posts to myself, I will explore this idea in depth, and also do some linking and pointing and whatnot to content that supports my idea, or helps to invalidate it. Both are equally important.
