It’s Raining in Antarctica and the Arctic is on Fire
Recently the highest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica was recorded at an Argentinian research station. It was a jaw dropping 70℉. This broke the previous record of 65℉ that was set only a few weeks before.
“Enjoy today, because the rest of your life, the weather is going to get worse”. That’s what I tell anyone who asks me what they should do about climate change. Because let’s face it, it’s not something that’s going to happen in some vague distant future anymore. It’s happening right now. The only thing that’s in question anymore is if it’s going to be manageable or if it’s going to be civilization crashing.
What’s striking to me, is how frequently we are caught off guard by the various ways the extra energy in the climate system manifests itself. For example, if someone had told me in 1985 that the Arctic poles would warm up first from global warming I wouldn’t have believed them. It’s not an intuitive result. You imagine that everyplace will heat up the same amount, more or less evenly. It seems wrong that the Arctic poles have warmed up almost 3℃ while the rest of the world has warmed just over 1℃. Yet that’s what’s happening.
It’s obvious now, that the poles, North and South, are the twin radiators for the heat engine that is the earth’s climate system. Just like the radiator in your car, they pull heat out of the rest of the system and radiate it away into space, during the long dark months of winter. As greater amounts of heat energy have been captured by the climate system, the bulk of that heat energy has been flowing into our planetary radiators and warming them up.
Now that we can see it happening, it makes sense. Yes, of course, the planets energy sinks are going to warm up fastest. Extra heat energy in a system is always going to flow from the hottest point to the coldest point. We should all be thankful that it’s warming so fast at the poles, that massive amounts of heat energy are flowing there, instead of warming the rest of the planet. Because if it wasn’t, the rest of the world would probably have warmed up another 1℃ and we would already be living in what the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) calls a “catastrophic” climate outcome for 2100.
The wrenching climate shift that’s happening at the poles is what’s buying the rest of us time to try and mitigate how bad things are going to get. They are our first planetary sacrifice zones, but they won’t be the last.
On November 4th, 2019 the Trump administration filed the paperwork to begin US withdrawal from the Paris Accord Treaty on Greenhouse Gas Emission Controls. As noted in his June 1, 2017 remarks, President Trump made the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement because of the unfair economic burden imposed on American workers, businesses, and taxpayers by U.S. pledges made under the Agreement.
While we were all distracted by the impeachment, Trump found the time to pull the US out of the Paris Accords. By the time of the election we will no longer be a signatory of the only real treaty to try and manage green house gas emissions at the planetary level. Analysts say that this will not make that much of a difference, since the US under Trump has been so hostile to the Accord’s objectives. They predict that the rest of the world will move on without us and continue to pursue real greenhouse gas emissions reduction.
However, at the COP25 meeting in Madrid, negotiations broke down and the two-week meeting ended without a crucial agreement on the global carbon market rules of the Paris Agreement. After extending the two-week summit for an additional two days, the world’s countries agreed to a text with vague pledges to enhance their Paris emissions reductions targets. But the watered-down text reflects a failure to agree on the key outcomes that were needed at the summit: setting a rule book for the Paris Agreement and designing a global carbon market.
Yet, at the Davos 2020 conference last month, what the planets financial elites decided, was that “a market-based solution” is the only thing that they thought could work. “Slow and steady progress” using “market-based policies” that “are not disruptive of global economic and financial systems” are what they have decided are the only solutions possible. However, the failure to negotiate a global carbon market at the COP25 meeting makes these declarations seem nonsensical.
What is clear, is that in the absence of pressure from the world’s superpowers (the US and China) the world’s financial elites are not going to do anything that disrupts the current world order. If the US does not rejoin the Paris Accord after the election this Fall, then it becomes almost certain that no real action will be taken in the coming decade. It will be another decade of “business as usual” greenhouse gas emissions.
Another decade of increasing energy flow into our climate system. Another decade of the primary and secondary effects of that energy manifesting themselves in strange and unexpected ways.
The extra energy we have been adding to the climate system for the last century is starting to manifest itself in clearly observable ways. We always knew that global warming would affect everything on the planet. How could it not? Every square foot of our planet’s surface is warming up. Every cubic foot of the atmosphere is warming up. Every gallon of water in the oceans is warming up. There is no part of the planet that climate change is not going to affect in some way. What’s disturbing is how fast it’s happening. We always seem to be reacting to the effects of climate change instead of anticipating them.
This shouldn’t be a surprise though, if you think about it. We are literally in transit now between “the world that was” and the world that “is becoming”. You cannot assume that the world your children live their lives in, will be anything like the world you lived in. That world is gone, and it will never come back. We know the world that’s coming is going to be hotter than it has been for millions of years. However, that endpoint is centuries, even millennium, away. What’s extremely unclear is what we can expect in the next few decades, or the next century. The time that we, our kids, and our grandchildren will live in.
If you are old enough, you might remember Alvin Toffler and his book “Future Shock”. Toffler wrote about how the pace of technological change had become so fast that you couldn’t plan for the future anymore. He argued, that whatever plans you made, new technologies were likely to emerge and make your plans obsolete. That planning, for more than a few years into the future, had become impossible. Being unable to plan for the future creates a feeling of having no control over the future and Toffler felt that this loss of control created a massive amount of societal anxiety that he dubbed “Future Shock”. What we are experiencing now is “Climate Shock” and it is so much worse.
The anxiety of Future Shock is bad, but it can be overcome, even managed. You take classes, you stay up to date, you surf the changes, and you adapt. After all, new technologies might disrupt your career plans, but you will still be alive. Climate Shock is existential. Climate Shock feels like death is coming and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.
So, what do you do about Climate Change? Is there anything you should or shouldn’t be doing? The hardcore are already starting to do things like moving to what they imagine are going to be the “good spots” and stockpiling supplies. The 1%’ers are buying “safe room” fortresses and attending conferences where talks include topics like “How to Keep Your Security Team Loyal and Obedient When Everything Goes to Shit”. For most of us though, this seems like 2012 panic, or Y2K panic, or any of the other “end of the world” panics that seem to grip society periodically but then fade away with the passage of time.
Changing your life, like Shaunta Grimes describes in her piece (https://medium.com/@shauntagrimes/deep-adaptation-is-it-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-b752810524b7) last September, is hard work and takes a real commitment. Sure, papers like Jem Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” or books like “The Uninhabitable Earth” are scary as hell. But is it time for panic, or are they being alarmists?
What can we really expect in the next 3 or 4 decades, and what, if anything, can you do to get improve your chances of getting through them unscathed?
Fire
Last year it seemed as if the world was on fire. There were fires in California, fires in Australia, fires in Greenland, fires in Siberia, fires in the Amazon, every time you turned on the TV it seemed as if someplace new was on fire. This has become our new normal. Whichever hemisphere of the world is having summer, seems as if it bursts into flames. Climate Change, we are told, makes wildfires more likely to happen and makes them likely to be bigger and more deadly.
So, it seems clear that you should not move to any place that might be prone to wildfires. Unfortunately, there aren’t going to be any places that aren’t prone to wildfire. Everyplace in the world is going to burn in the next century. Probably more than once. This process has already started and nothing we do, even if our greenhouse gas emissions went to zero tomorrow, can stop it.
The reason for this is straightforward and simple ecology. The ecosystem of an area is predicated on two basic things; temperature and the availability of water. That’s what determines the plants and animals that live there. If those things are stable the ecosystem will be stable. It’s basic science, and common sense, that if those conditions change then the ecosystem will change.
What we are just beginning to see are the full implications of what that means. Climate change is affecting every square foot of the planet’s surface. Every ecosystem, everywhere, is very rapidly going to change. When an ecosystem changes, all the old plant life that cannot live in the new conditions will die and become debris. Nature’s way of clearing away debris, to make way for new growth, is fire. In the century to come, there is going to be “a Great Burning” as pretty much every place on earth undergoes ecosystem turnover.
It’s starting to happen now in the places, like California and Australia, that were always sensitive to climate changes. More importantly it’s happening in the Arctic regions of the Northern hemisphere where wildfires of this scale have never been seen before. This is the start of a negative feedback loop that we failed to stop and are now probably helpless to control. The burning of the Northern Boreal forests and the arctic tundra is going to dump vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerate the melting of the Arctic permafrost (which has implications for the release of methane into the atmosphere), and dump massive amounts of soot onto Greenland accelerating its meltdown.
If we were on the verge of becoming a Zero Carbon civilization and getting our greenhouse gas emissions down to nothing; then maybe, we could break this feedback loop and stop this process. As a climate realist I just don’t see that happening. Our withdrawal from the Paris Accords, the refusal of the First World to fund renewable energy development for the Third World, and the expanding use of fossil fueled electricity to propel development across the Third World pretty much means that emissions will probably continue to rise throughout the next decade.
Which means that your children, your grandchildren, and your great grandchildren for probably ten generations are going to live a world which is always burning.
Flood
Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was a wake-up slap in the face. It was the second most devastating US hurricane since 1900 and, more importantly, it was “something new”. It moved onto the Texas coast on August 25th and then sat there and dumped rain on Houston for four days. A year’s worth of rain fell on Houston in just four days. That was the “something new” that had never been seen before and it was the signal that another tipping point had been crossed.
The science of it was always very clear; warm air can hold more water than cold air, warmer water evaporates faster than colder water. Put this together and it’s obvious that global warming would mean trillions of tons of water would shift from the oceans into the atmosphere. What was unclear until Harvey was what effect that water would have on the climate. What we now know, is that it creates the conditions for a new type of storm. Call them “Deluge Class” storms. Harvey was the first, but they are going to become more and more common in the years to come.
Houston was not prepared for that amount of rain in such a sort time. There was flooding in every low laying part of the city. Two water control reservoirs essentially failed and had to be opened, which flooded even more of the city. Some of the low laying areas which had been built on will probably never be recovered. They have been deemed too “risky” to rebuild on and have become the cities first “sacrifice zones” to climate change. What happened to Houston is what is going to happen to every city and area hit by one of these storms. We have no infrastructure designed, or in place, that can handle that amount of water falling from the sky in such a short time.
What’s astonishing about this story is that Houston is one of the five richest cities in the US. It is one of the nine urban areas that generate over 40% of the country’s GDP. Houston has enormous wealth and resources but it was still not prepared for a storm of this magnitude. Its infrastructure was decrepit and in poor repair after decades of neglect and poor funding. Even worse, the parts of the infrastructure that were new still got overwhelmed because they weren’t designed to handle the load suddenly placed on them. Nothing had been designed to handle that much rain, because that much rain had never fallen so quickly before.
Since then, there have been other storms following the Harvey model and dumping record breaking amounts of rain, in what used to be unbelievably short amounts of time. It has become clear that one of the effects of a warmer, wetter atmosphere is going to be storms like this. It’s also become clear that these storms can happen anywhere, not just on the coast. Last year the Midwest was racked by storms dumping record amounts of rain throughout the winter and spring. There was widespread flooding and the ground in many places was so saturated that crops could not be planted in time for the growing season. No matter where you live in the world, storms like this have become a possibility.
This is about as clear a signal as you can get. If you are currently living on the water, by a lake, near a river, in a low laying area, downriver from a dam, or behind a levee you should move to higher ground. For the foreseeable future living on higher ground should always be the default choice.
Breakdown
2005 Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans
2012 Superstorm Sandy, New York
2017 Hurricane Harvey, Houston
2017 Hurricane Maria, San Juan Puerto Rico
Four major American cities devastated by storms in just twelve years. In the case of New Orleans, the city was rendered virtually uninhabitable and citizens of the city were evacuated to refugee centers as far away as Houston. Many people, having lost everything and with no home to return to, never went back. Fifteen years later the city has recovered, but its population is still below what it was before the storm. Although there have been significant investments in the city’s infrastructure to protect against future disaster, the long-term survival of New Orleans is unlikely.
There are 600,000 bridges in the United States as of 2019. Here’s the part that’s scary, of that 600,000, 54,000 are in critical need of repair. At today’s state and federal funding levels it will take 80 years for just those 54,000 bridges to be fixed and made safe. That’s how badly infrastructure maintenance and repair is being funded in the United States, the richest country on earth. In most of the rest of the world infrastructure is even more underfunded and neglected.
It’s not just bridges, there are 91,000 dams in the US. The average age of these dams is 57 years old. Aside from about 1,500 dams owned by federal agencies, regulating dam safety is chiefly a state responsibility, and states vary widely in their commitment to the task. Across the nation, each state dam inspector is responsible on average for about 200 dams, a daunting ratio, but in some states the number is much higher. Oklahoma, for example, employs just three full-time inspectors for its 4,621 dams; Iowa has three inspectors for its 3,911 dams. Largely because of its legislators’ distrust of regulation, Alabama doesn’t even have a safety program for its 2,273 dams. The American Society of Civil Engineers has given the American dam system a grade of “D” every year since 1998 and recommended an aggressive program of repairs and improvements. Almost nothing has been done.
A dam failure or a bridge collapse is a disaster. But they are only a tiny part of the world that we have built. Modern life needs water treatment plants, water distribution systems, sewage handling systems, electrical grids, communication systems, port facilities, roads, highways, railroads, airports, hospitals, police facilities, fire control facilities, the list of things that have to work “behind the scenes” is endless. As you might guess and fear, almost all of it has had maintenance neglected and underfunded. Even without climate change as a stressor, our country and the rest of the world, was facing a crisis of infrastructure collapse that was going to require large scale mobilization of funds and resources to resolve. Now imagine all that decaying infrastructure having to cope with the massive new stresses climate change is bringing.
The question is not IF we are going to start seeing dams and bridges in this country fail. The question is WHEN will they start failing regularly and how many per year will become the new normal?
Famine
The foundational thing to understand about the global food situation is just how profoundly artificial it is. According to the UN, the basic facts to understand are these:
71% of the world’s land area has some form of plant life on it and is considered “habitable”
Of that 71%; 50% is used by agriculture, 37% is forested, 11% is scrubland or tundra, 1% is cities, 1% is lakes
In 2019 the world population reached 7.7 billion, half of which live in only 1% of the land
Of that 7.7 billion, roughly 1 billion (about 14%) live in a heightened state of food insecurity
I would add to that, something I first learned from Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivores Dilemma”.
Of that 7.7 billion, 4.2 billion would not exist if not for chemical fertilizers
Basically, everyone born after about 1975 would not exist, if not for the development of chemical fertilizers in 1913. If we stop using those fertilizers and go back to “organic farming”, about 4 billion people would starve to death in 5–10 years. Global civilization, as it currently exits, depends on the continued production, distribution, and use of a single product. This is a highly artificial situation, even without the stress of climate change.
The “natural” carrying capacity of the earth, in terms of people, is about 3.5 billion people. That’s how many the planet can provide with food, without chemical fertilizer. The package of chemical fertilizers and high yield varieties of rice, corn, and wheat; “AKA the Green Revolution” is what generated enough food for global population to reach its current level. At this level about one billion people live in a state of food insecurity and hunger. Which indicates that we are probably at the limit of the population that the planet can now support with fertilizer enhancement. However, current projections show the world population cresting at about ten billion in 2050, before gradually declining back to around seven billion around 2100.
So, even without climate change, or oceanic ecosystem collapse, or soil depletion, or projected water shortages, or nitrogen poisoning of the planet’s biosphere, or any of the other things that we are currently doing to the planet; and if environmental conditions stayed just as they are right now, we would still be looking at large scale famines (ones involving millions of people) becoming a yearly occurrence by about 2040. That’s the best possible case. Without a breakthrough in genetically engineering the world’s cereal crops to increase their productivity dramatically, that’s what we could expect in a “best case scenario” world. But, of course, we don’t live in that world.
2019 was a terrible year for farmers in the American Midwest. Late winter rains lasted so long into the spring, that fields became saturated with water. Many of them took so long to dry out, that planting became impossible for the year and the output of soybeans and corn was impacted. In short, it was a bad year in one of the world’s major cereal crop producing regions and food prices have ticked up a little bit because of it. What the IPCC is forecasting is that these “bad years” are going to start happening a lot more often, in every part of the world, in the decades ahead. They project that between now and 2050 global crop yields will decline by 20%. Without a major restructuring of global food production, the forecast is that cereal crop production could decline as much as 50% by 2100.
The implications of this are obvious. The world is going to become hungrier and hungrier in the decades to come, and some places are going to get much hungrier than others. Most counties in the world do not produce enough food to feed their current population without importing food. Currently there are eight “breadbasket” regions of the world which grow and export the food that feeds the rest of the world. A “bad year” happens when one of these breadbasket regions, like the US Midwest in 2019, has a production decline. That can cause higher food prices globally, food riots, and even civil unrest in poor countries.
A disastrous year would occur if one of these regions suffered from total production failure, like the Great Plains during the Dustbowl years of the 30’s. Millions of people around the world would be unable to afford food and would start starving. By 2040, projections are that at least one of the breadbasket regions in the world will start failing every year. Even worse, the forecasts indicate that there will be a significant risk of “multifocal production failure” every year. This means that about one out of every four or five years the crops in multiple breadbasket regions will likely fail. Imagine if the monsoon failed in India, drought gripped central China, the Nile failed to rise and the crop failed in Egypt, drought hit Brazil and Argentina, and floods hit the American Midwest all in the same year. Something like this happened in the late 19th century and the consequences are described in the book, “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World”.
Between 1876 and 1902, sixty million people died from starvation globally, or about 6% of the world’s population. There were provinces in China where over 90% of the population died because people collapsed of hunger and thirst before they could walk out of the affected area. Now imagine it happening in 2048, but instead of affecting 60 million people it affects 400 million (more than the current population of the US) and instead of these people dying “in place”, because they have no mode of transport other than their feet, they have access to cars, trucks, trains, planes, and boats. The scale of the coming disruption is beyond real understanding. Nothing like it has ever happened before and no one knows how it’s going to play out. There simply is no way of knowing how the world is going to handle this crisis until it happens.
However, those people lucky enough to be living in the US, Canada, or one of the other “food exporting” regions will probably not be hit directly by famine itself. It’s hard to imagine a government in one of those regions not acting to safeguard domestic food supplies, which should spare those regions from directly experiencing famine situations. Instead, people in these regions will probably experience a loss of food variety and availability. Because of climate change items like coffee, chocolate, citrus fruits, and a wide range of other things will probably become very scarce and expensive.
By 2050, the average diet in the US will probably be adequate and healthier (obesity is going to be less of a problem) but by today's standards it will probably seem monotonous and bland.
Migration
Climate change migration is already happening. The immigration crisis on the US southern border the last few years hasn’t been about people pursuing economic opportunity, it’s been about people fleeing starvation. There has been a cycle of prolonged drought in Central America and subsistence farming has become impossible for millions of people. Faced with the options of “starving in place” or moving to the vast slums ringing their nations major cities, where they will become virtual slaves of the warlords that control these cities, many have attempted to flee to what they perceive as the safety and stability of the US.
While the US has been dealing with that climate refugee migration, Europe has been dealing with its own refugee crisis caused by the Syrian Civil War. This crisis is also a climate crisis because the trigger for this war was a drought in Syria. In both cases, the First World response to Third World climate refugees has been to tell them, “go home and die, there’s no room for you here”. Sadly, this is probably going to be the way that international climate refugees are treated everywhere in the decades to come.
However, international climate refugees are only half of the issue. The other half, the half that is rarely discussed, is the issue of internal or “domestic” climate refugees. In the US, over the next 30 years, it’s estimated that there could be as many as 30 million climate refugees. This looming mass migration is going to have profound effects on our demographics and our society. Yet, because of our willful denial about the reality of climate change, as a society we have made almost no plans or preparations for dealing with these effects.
For example, Florida currently has a population of about 26 million. By 2050, Miami and most of Southern Florida will be uninhabitable. Over the next three decades some 15 million people will leave Florida and need to resettle in other locations in the US. This will be one of the largest mass migrations in US history. Yet, as a country, we have not even begun to think about how we are going to deal with this.
Another example is Las Vegas. We have no idea what will happen to a modern city when it runs out of water. We can expect that as it implements more and more extreme water conservation policies, its population will decline, and property values will tumble. But what happens when the taps go completely dry? When there simply is no more water. Will the entire city simply be abandoned in one mass exodus, or will there be some sort of orderly evacuation and resettlement? We are not even talking about scenarios like this yet, but over 40 million people depend on the Colorado river and its flow has already declined 20% in the last 3 decades due to climate change. There is a possibility that it will fail completely during the next century. Where will all these people go, and how will they be treated when they get there?
In the decades to come there are going to be unprecedented levels of human migration around the world. This is probably going to be one of the defining issues of the 21st century. How we respond to this issue on both the global and on the national levels is going to be one of the major factors shaping what kind of society your children and grandchildren inhabit.
Disease
As I write this, the world is collectively holding its breath and waiting to see if the Covid-19 coronavirus is going to fizzle out or become a global pandemic killing several hundred million. At this point it could go either way. There’s not much you can do about it and if it “goes global” you will probably be exposed to it sooner or later. Take comfort in the fact that it only kills about 2.5% of the people it infects. If you get it, the odds are good that you will survive. However, this outbreak, and the Ebola outbreak of a few years ago are harbingers of a future where sickness or sudden death from disease becomes a commonplace occurrence.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but the biggest one is likely to be mosquitoes. In a world which is warming and becoming prone to intermittent torrential downpours, mosquito populations are going to soar globally. With them, a lot of old diseases are going to move north and things like yellow fever and malaria will start to show up in places like the Mississippi River valley, the Great Lakes, and even New England. In addition to these old killers, there are a host of new ones like Chikungunya, Dengue, and Zika. All of these have already been found in mosquitoes in the Gulf states and in the decades to come they are going to move north.
Of all of these, I think Zika is going to going to have the greatest human cost. I recently watched a special report on the effects of the virus in Brazil. It was stunning to see clinics full of hundreds of microcephalic babies two and three years old. We now know that the virus uses fetal brain tissue to replicate when it infects a pregnant woman. So, a pregnant woman who becomes infected with the virus will give birth to a brain damaged child. It’s horrible to see the consequences of this virus in Brazil, it’s even more horrible to know that this is just the start of Zika in the world. It has already reached Miami and in another decade, it will spread throughout the Gulf Coast. Projections indicate that, without a vaccine or treatment, by 2050 as many as one child in twenty born in the American South could be a “Zika Baby”.
It isn’t just viruses though; it’s things like infrastructure breakdown resulting in contaminated water and the spread of waterborne illnesses, or failure to police the food supply chain resulting in outbreaks of food borne illnesses. There are going to be mass movements of people over the whole planet and there are going to be hundreds of millions of people who are hungry and weak. These are the conditions that we know cause epidemics and mass-death situations. Climate change is going to make all these things get worse, in addition to the problems of mosquitoes and exotic viruses.
We have been living in a “golden age of medicine” and good health but for most of the world it’s probably coming to an end.
The Seas will Rise
Projecting future sea level is challenging, due to the complexity of many aspects of the climate system. As climate research into past and present sea levels leads to improved computer models, projections have consistently increased. For example, in 2007 the IPCC projected a high-end estimate of 60 cm (2 ft) through 2099, but their 2014 report raised the high-end estimate to about 90 cm (3 ft). Several later studies have concluded that a global sea level rise of 200 to 270 cm (6.6 to 8.9 ft) this century is “physically plausible”.
At this point in time it’s impossible to know with any degree of certainty how much sea level rise there is going to be between now and 2050, or now and 2100. The range is large; from a low of 2 ft to a high of 9 ft and it could potentially be worse than that. Both poles are warming up, but Greenland is the “X” factor for how much the seas rise this century. Greenland has the potential to add 23 ft to sea levels worldwide. While no one thinks Greenland is going to melt completely away this century, it is melting much faster than expected as unexpected feedbacks have been discovered. Right now, Greenland is where the 2007 projection thought it would be in 2050.
This number will make a huge difference to what kind of future your children and your grandchildren have; in fact, it may be the most important number of all. Because this number will determine if there is gradual flooding of coastal towns and cities, or rapid widespread flooding and abandonment. If sea levels rise too fast, there may not be time for major cities like New York or London to build sea walls and flood control projects before they become flooded so badly that they must be abandoned. If the world’s ports and trade hubs collapse suddenly, civilization collapse becomes a real possibility. So, the rate that Greenland is melting should concern everyone.
I am a science guy, I believe in data, and I tend towards conservative but pessimistic projections about future climate change. That being said, I think sea levels will rise 2 ft by 2050 and 1 ft per decade after that through 2100 for a total of 7 ft by 2100. My wife, on the other hand, thinks that feedbacks are kicking in (like soot from fires in the high latitudes) that will accelerate Greenland’s melting much faster than expected. She forecasts 4 ft by 2050 and 12 to 15 ft by 2100. This seems high to me, but here’s the deal. My wife is a literal genius. We have been discussing climate change since we met in 2004 and during that time she has been consistently right in her forecasts. Either way, what the forecasts tell us are that things are probably going to be “manageable” through 2050 and rapidly get worse for coastal regions after that.
In real terms this means that by 2050 Miami is going to probably be a ghost city and most of Southern Florida will be depopulated. Worldwide, low laying countries like Bangladesh are going to be completely washed away and their populations displaced. Major coastal cities are all going to race to build sea walls and flood defenses, but smaller coastal cities and towns are going to suffer multiple flood episodes because they won’t have the resources to fund such projects. Between 2050 and 2100 most current coastal areas will probably be abandoned as infrastructure, industry, and housing moves inland away from the rising seas.
There isn’t anything we can do about this anymore other than try to slow it down. If we have a “fast melt” scenario then global civilization has a much higher probability of collapse.
It will be a New World
When I think about climate change these days, I am reminded of the “Road Runner” cartoons of my childhood. We are like Wiley Coyote right after he has run off a cliff and has realized he is standing on thin air. Like Wiley Coyote, no matter what we do now, we are going to fall. As of right now, the current CO2 level is 414 ppm. If we stopped putting carbon in the atmosphere and became a Carbon Zero civilization tomorrow; it would take 10,000 years before the CO2 level in the atmosphere drops back to the preindustrial baseline of 280 ppm. Our carbon “belch” has already changed the climate for the next 10,000 years.
The last time CO2 levels like this were seen on Earth, was three million years ago, according to the most detailed reconstruction of the Earth’s climate by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and published in Science Advances. At that time, there were no ice sheets covering either Greenland or West Antarctica, and much of the East Antarctic ice sheet was gone. Beech forests were growing in Antarctica and temperatures were up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer globally, at least double that at the poles, with sea levels some 20 meters (65 feet) higher than today. That’s the world that waits for humanity at the bottom of the cliff we just stepped off. That’s what the world is going to be in, say, 2000 years.
However, most of us cannot think in terms of thousands of years; it’s just too far off. What concerns us is the rest of our lives, and the probable lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. So, what should we do to optimize the odds of our personal and familial survival?
Non-tangible things things that you can do for your mental health include the following;
Don’t panic, despair, or get overwhelmed by it all. Life will go on; the world will go on. A new world will emerge from the ashes of this one.
Maintain a sense of perspective. Climate Change is going to take thousands of years to play out. This isn’t going to be a “Day After Tomorrow” scenario. There are historical examples of societies surviving long term climate shifts. When the “Roman Transitional Period” started in 150 AD the weather got worse, year after year, for the next 400 years. Then the Late Antique Little Ice Age started, and conditions got even worse. By 650 AD the population of the Mediterranean basin and Europe had fallen to half of what it was in 150 AD but there was still a social order and civilization.
Don’t make rigid or long-term plans because Climate Change is probably going to make your plans worthless. The best you can realistically plan for is about five years, at which point you will have to reassess because conditions will probably have changed. So, other than being flexible, resilient, mobile, and adaptable there is no plan that you can start now that’s going to get you and your family safely to 2100.
However, there are some definite steps you can take starting right now, that will improve your odds;
Don’t move to Southern Florida, and if you live there now, move.
More generally, don’t move to any ocean-side community unless it has the resources to build projects that mitigate against sea level rise and “Deluge” type storms.
Don’t live in a low-lying area or down river from a dam. Always look for places to live on high ground.
Don’t move to the country or to a rural location. It’s more likely to burn in the coming decades as ecosystem turnover intensifies. Even if it’s a, “good spot” now, it probably won’t be in 20 years. Fires, floods, and infrastructure deterioration will all make rural areas more prone to isolation and collapse of services.
Moving to a city is a better long-term strategy. Cities are the engines of the economy and will continue to be so. They are the nodal points in the world’s communication, manufacturing, transport, and trade networks. They will be invested in and defended, long after rural regions are written off.
However, not all cities are well positioned to survive in the coming decades. Cities like Miami and Jakarta are not sustainable because of their geography. Cities like London and New York have much better chances of battling sea level rise and surviving in the new climate conditions. If you live in a city where flooding is already an issue, you should move. If you live in city which is already short on water, you probably should move (Las Vegas and Phoenix come to mind). Carefully weigh a cities prospects before committing and, as always, be prepared to move in response to changing conditions.
Don’t obsess over growing your own food. If things get so bad that everyone is living off what they can grow and forage for themselves, then civilization has collapsed. It may come to that eventually, but probably not in this century. Although disruptions and shortages in the food supply are going to become a regular occurrence in the future, the consequences of that are going to fall unevenly on the world populations. Some places are going to suffer more than others. If you are in a place where food supplies are already questionable then you should be doing everything in your power to relocate now. Things will only get worse in the future. If you are in one of the “breadbasket” areas of the world you should probably consider starting the practice of having six months to a year’s supply of food “on hand” like the Mormons do. Start small and gradually build up a pantry that you can draw on in the event of supply disruption. At the very least, have a reserve of emergency supplies in your “bug out” kit that can sustain you for a few weeks. Be resilient by being prepared.
In terms of being prepared, get vaccinated, whenever possible, for as many things as possible. Do this for yourself and your kids. Disease is going to become more common in the decades to come and vaccinations may become harder and harder to get. They more things you are protected against the better off you will be.
Lastly, be adaptable. Invest in yourself to learn skills or a profession that will always be in demand (doctor, engineer, building trades, skills that you carry with you instead of needing a factory or office to be useful). Don’t tie yourself rigidly to a location or institution because conditions are going to become more fluid and the situation that’s “great today” may be “hellish” in five years. Being able to walk away from a place if it starts to go sour may be the difference between life and death.
Conclusion
In no way do I want to minimize or “play down” the disaster that is climate change. As a “climate realist” I think that the world’s population in 2100 is going to be about half of what it is now. Billions of people are going to die or have their lives shortened in the decades to come because of climate change. I think that the world is going to be a more dangerous, violent, impoverished, and uncertain place because of climate change. It may be a “civilization crashing” event, although I don’t think it has to be, but I don’t see it as an extinction level event. I am confident that there will still be people around to arrive at the bottom of the cliff we have stepped off, and to live in the “new world” that is coming.
However, the question of whether or not these people and their culture have any continuity with us is still very much in doubt. It is very likely that the world population in 2100 is going to be less than what it today but, how it gets to that level is crucial. Will it be a gradual decline of say, 1% per year for the next fifty years, or will it be in waves of 10% or 20% at a time? In the first scenario our global civilization is likely to survive, adapt, and continue. In the second scenario complete collapse becomes a likely outcome.
Other than voting whenever possible for competent, effective leadership there just isn’t much you can do at the individual level to influence what happens in the next 3–5 decades. Also, nothing is written in stone. There could be breakthroughs in fusion power or plant genetics that change everything and allow us to sail through climate change with minimal disruption and death. Alternatively, there are disasters like a nuclear exchange between India and China, or a Carrington event that make things much worse and cause rapid depopulation and total civilization collapse very quickly.
We live with uncertainty about the future and always have. Climate change doesn’t alter that fundamental human condition, but it does make it much more likely that there is going to be substantial “die-back” in the coming decades. We all need to start thinking in terms of how we, our children, and our grandchildren are going to be among the survivors who “pull through” and not be numbered among the fallen.
