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Writings on Surviving Climate Change

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Writings on Surviving Climate Change Empty Writings on Surviving Climate Change

Post by Climate Blogger Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:48 am

The safest places will be significant communities in the north that are not isolated, that have abundant water, that have the possibility of agricultural self-sufficiency, that have little immediate risk of forest fires, that are well elevated, and that are built on solid rock.

Community / neighbours will be gold. Your survival, your family’s survival will depend on good neighbours just as they depend on you. So that means you need to make your move to your new location over the next decade or so. You and your extended family will be well established in the community by the time the troubles really start.

Water will be the key factor with the coming heat and droughts. Areas further north and on the western slope of a good mountain range should generally benefit from the prevailing westerly winds to wring the moisture out, producing rain, keeping agriculture healthy, and reducing the wildfire problem.

Given the probability of too much rain at times, it would be good to live in areas with some elevation and natural drainage. Also a few thousand feet of elevation yields the natural cooling.

Thus, looking at the US, from far northern California to Washington State, WEST of the mountains. A secondary area would be on the western slopes of the Rockies. In the east, on the western slopes of the Appalachians, from Tennessee up to New York.
Anything on the east side of a decent mountain range will tend to get the opposite effect of dry air, droughts, and increased fires.

The problem with most coastal areas is that they will be dealing with some tremendous dislocations, from the actual sea level rise, as well as what will then be recognized as the inevitable 500 years + of sea level rise to come. This will throw everything from governments, tax bases, utilities and water tables into chaos. Nearly everyone underestimates the impact of even a foot of sea level rise which we will likely have by mid century regardless of what is done about greenhouse gas levels at this point, due to the huge lag time between atmospheric temperature and melting the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. As that reality becomes apparent, and the futility of thinking that the government will do another New Orleans Katrina rebuild and compensation, nearly all coastal cities will be places to avoid. It does not matter if your house is on high ground if the entire city and infrastructure is awash at high tide. The common assumption that seawalls will be the answer is not true in areas of porous rock such as South Florida. You can build any seawall you want, higher seas will just percolate through the limestone and come up through the ground.

As several others have pointed out, we are so interdependent that I can’t imagine anyplace being ‘good’ for long.
When the big collapse occurs, modern agriculture and modern industry will fail hard. Supplies will run out as demand for basic goods will skyrocket beyond primitive production and distribution capabilities. If you or your neighbor can’t make something (clothes, shoes, matches, bullets, glass jars for food storage, a wood stove, a hoe, an axe, etc.), can you do without it? If you can’t do without it – what can be substituted?

Can you have enough to share with your neighbors so they don’t steal from you?
Can you protect yourself and your family from the hordes of folks who are displaced first without degrading into the survival mode?

There is a reason most parts of the world can’t feed themselves. There are few places with good enough agricultural soils to pull it off food for tens of millions even. And most of these need water and nitrogen brought to them now.
Go into any grocery store in northern USA or Canada and see where all the food comes from in the winter.
If you are not literally standing on good top soil, forget it. Growing food in Alaska?! It will still be dark half the year.

Global Warming doesn’t mean everywhere at every time. The disappearance of Arctic Ice is going to change climates in the Northern Hemisphere in ways not yet in any way understood. Since Growing Food is all that matters and it is unclear as of now where the Climate will be hospitable to that purpose it is difficult to have any good idea of where to be in the years hence. I suspect that for much of inland North America and Europe it will mean Winters with more cold and storm extreme events. Likewise IMO Summers will be hotter in average Temp and have more extreme weather events.

If there is water to grow food there will be water to drink but where the rain will fall is unclear. If the food supply is significantly compromised by climate change and associated extreme weather events (and that seems inevitable) IMO all else will be moot as industry and commerce will cease, Government and it’s institutions will fail and Billions will Die. I fear our highly organized and interdependent civilization is extremely fragile and won’t tolerate even a partial disruption of the food supply.

The best advice I have heard is to learn to grow something to eat. From experience this is a non-trivial undertaking, whatever the scale.

It’s quite difficult to grow enough food to feed yourself, under the best of circumstances. It must be preserved for the winter months, for one thing.
Our ancestors were able to survive the lean times because nature was abundant. Fish were leaping out of rivers, buffalo were carpeting plains, the woods were full of birds and other game, the trees dropped fruit and nuts, brambles were laden with berries.
Those days are gone. We have destroyed the Garden of Eden…eaten it, mowed it down, and poisoned it.
Not to mention which, none of the worst-case scenarios depicted in the preceding comments acknowledges another existential threat – the entire ecosystem is in free-fall collapse.
1. coral reefs and phytoplankton in the oceans are on their way to extinction and
2. so are trees, the foundation of all other terrestrial life.
Both are being destroyed by toxic emissions, that will not be resolved even if – ha ha – the CO2 emissions are curtailed or captured.
Somebody above said, it’s time to stop talking about preventing climate change and start talking about adaptations and mitigation, because that is the realistic scenario that we are already left with.

Who’s going to decide who gets to survive? Because it will be only a tiny percentage of humans, and an even tinier percentage of other species.

Farm crops will move to areas where the new weather suits them better. We’ll develop new crops which will allow us to continue farming in areas which have become hotter and receive less water. We’ll eat less snow peas and more dates and olives. The valleys of Oregon will become the new Napa Valley.

Food will become more expensive which means that farmland will become more valuable and we’ll quit building on the good stuff. We’ll eat less meat and use more of our cropland for ‘people food’.

Our population will continue to drop. We will feel the pressure to take in some climate refugees, but we’ll increase the height of our housing in order to pack people more densely. And we’ll put a lot of pressure on the newly arrived to limit their family size.


Now, if we do screw up and don’t start aggressively getting off fossil fuels much more quickly than we are now doing, just speed that movie up a lot following our self-inflicted tip over.

We’ll move a lot farther north and much higher up. And we’ll put a lot more pressure on our ‘breeders’ to be less breedie.
And then we’ll experience our butts turning to toast.


Bill Mckibben outlined the best possible scenario and maybe the only possible way to survive (via small communities and local organization). The food you can grow in your backyard is basically all that counts.
People project on current estimates and gut feelings and current experience. But it is almost impossible to assess and most people here i think are to naive. Most people will just die, because only a few (i do not talk about rich people) have the will to survive. And from these few only even less have the intelligence to do so and from those only a small fraction will do the right decisions and have the luck to get through the chaos. But what is more waiting after lets say 2060?

Even if people find the best spot, health problems, psychological impacts, chemical and radioactive contamination will be an growing issue. The last small climate change made the Neanderthal extinct, though with all these factors i have high doubts that humans and particular the human body/organism could possibly withstand a major climate shift.

If you study extinct civilizations, to my understanding all have in common, they vanished in no time. And all the big empires did so, because of climate change of some sort and those were tiny shift, nothing in compare we tempering with today.

The level of the emissions the human species is releasing into the atmosphere is UNPRECEDENTED in the history of the earth. The magnitude we dealing with here, is in the same league as the biggest extinction events the earth saw. Humans will vanish within an eye blink if the species doesn’t counter the major climate shift with sucking the heat trapping gases back from the atmosphere – starting yesterday.

Humans are to flawed, to slow in adapting to our environment and to slow in moving on and advance as a species.



http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/12/18/207217/where-would-be-the-best-place-to-live-in-2035-2060/
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