Climate and the Coming Paradigm Shift

Where do you live?

I live in London, UK. It’s been hot here this summer. Ridiculously hot. Not as hot as Spain or France or Greece, but HOT.

It’s also been dry. Great swaths of this “green and pleasant land” are brown and sere from a punishing drought. The grass is so crunchy that I half expect some food influencer to reach out of the sky with a giant fork and drag it back and forth across Hampstead Heath, making that “shhhhRK shhhhhhRK!” noise that proves the crust is crisp.

Seeing wildfires in France and Greece and across the Iberian Peninsula was mind boggling, but fires there are not quite as far out of the norm as one might think. Wildfires in WALES, though? FFS.

To say that this collection of lush, drenched, mossy little countries was not prepared for the heat is an almost comical understatement.

Only 5% of homes in the UK have air conditioning. Compare that to 25% in France and an average of 10% – 20% across most of Europe. (In the United States about 90% of homes are air conditioned. That includes the family farmhouse I keep banging on about: a 1913 four square plonked in the middle of a vast ocean of cornfields that looks like an outtake from Little House on the Prairie but is, in fact, air conditioned. Our last apartment in Seattle, which was NOT air conditioned, was an oddity in the US – and a peculiarity of the cool, damp Pacific Northwest.)

Here in the UK, most businesses employ what is called “air cooling” in the summer, which is decidedly not the same thing as air conditioning – and which doesn’t do Diddly Squat Farms in 85F+ degree heat. Sitting in a pub with the doors flung open in desperate hopes of a passing breeze is in no way pleasant or relaxing.

UK buildings are constructed to keep heat IN. This is because they were built in a land where that was mostly necessary. A snug, cozy, waterproof dwelling was the ideal – huge windows, cross-drafts through open spaces, and expensive air conditioning was not.

Infrastructure, including railways and other public transport, was also designed and built for cooler, damper weather. Rails buckle in the heat. Buses have tiny windows that barely open, and let in just a trickle of moving air. There is drainage aplenty (for shedding the formerly expected “pissing down” rain) but precious little in the way of pale colored roofing to increase albedo. And so it goes.

If you read climate-related news, you might have noticed a recent uptick in discussions of what the next few decades might hold. One recent story that caught my eye opined, “life will be less Mad Max and more Gaza, Cuba, or Ukraine.” Honestly, that seems a reasonable assessment. (Although as a Mad Max franchise nut, I’d tweak it a bit: if you’re going to envision yourself living in the Mad Max universe, think of the first film, where Max Rockatansky begins his journey as a cop on an official police force, with a home, a wife, and a child, living through collapse, not in the thick of it. That all comes later.)

In any event, it all starts where you live.

I’m going to quote my 2016 self.

_{Something essential about climate change that most conversations about it fail adequately to convey is just how inescapable one’s local climate is.}

_{Climate varies over the face of the globe, obviously. Some people are chilly and damp in Scotland, while others live in Miami Florida (hot and wet), or Hyderabad Telangana (tropical wet and dry), or the American West (mostly on fire this past summer). The local climates of this cerulean globe are both varied and, up until now, largely hospitable to human life. This is, after all, where we evolved.}

_{You may have a favorite – mine’s someplace like Stornoway – but you can live anywhere. Humans have thrived on Mother Earth for millenia, adapting happily to the varied yet relatively stable local conditions wherever they’ve settled down.}

_{But what’s the same for 99% of people, no matter the local climate, is this: wherever you are, in that moment, that’s where you’re stuck. Whatever your local climate, if you don’t have lots of freedom and enough money, then without the heroic determination it takes to flee, you must deal with it.}

_{But what if your local climate becomes unbearable or uninhabitable, for even part of the year? You can’t change it back, so what do you do? What happens next?}

_{Thus far, 2015 was the deadliest year for heat in India. In Telangana, almost 600 people died, victims of a deadly heat wave that made news the world over. In all, over 2,300 people perished from the heat.}

_{And everyone there (except for the well-to-do, of course) was stuck.}

_{They were stuck outside in the sweltering heat with no shade or water, doing day labor. Stuck being old and infirm and more vulnerable to dehydration and exhaustion. Stuck being delicate little kids in a heatwave that brought temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit – which was just the temperature, not the heat index.}

Where you live will make a huge difference to how and when to start preparing. No one is suggesting that everyone up stakes and move. That isn’t feasible or possible for many. Economic constraints are particularly tight right now, with the Trump economy in shambles and the grim death grip of toxic late-stage capitalism around our collective throat.

Where you live will be a major factor in how you survive the ever-intensifying climate crisis. Where you live will determine your food supply and availability of potable water, the adequacy of your shelter, how or if you get power and fuel and a connection to the larger world via phone lines or a hand cranked radio receiver or wifi. 

If you can move, where to? You can check risk before you choose a spot – although these days it doesn’t look like there are really any safe “climate havens.” But if you do move (say, from hurricane alley, or the fire-plagued Berkeley Hills) to somewhere a bit more stable in the upper midwest, you will need to compare your options based not just on traditional concerns like how close you are to a good middle school, but on modern, climatey things like how high the river might rise in your new neighborhood. You’ll need to check evacuation routes in areas that might flood or burn, vet community resources (is there a local cooling center/robust volunteer network/active planning for mitigation, etc.). You might choose not to move to a hopelessly backwater MAGA dump if you can find a better spot in a state with a bureaucracy that shows some commitment to helping citizens prepare, or could potentially be motivated to do so.

In the United States, for example, management strategies – like Louisiana’s coastal master plan and California’s wildfire mitigation program – exist at the state level.

On a grander scale, governments around the world will certainly be forced to take action to mitigate the worst – the most obvious – effects. It will be financially ruinous to ignore sea level rise, for example, but even more financially devastating to simply do nothing. Mass relocations from low-lying areas might be undertaken by governments with a huge population in an area of certain inundation. 

The federal government changes plans along with administrations, so here’s hoping we get a Democrat back in office in 2028.

But even Democrats in the Oval, House, and Senate can’t stop the warming that’s already locked in. We are in for a wild ride – if not for total civilizational collapse – and that’s not a niche opinion.

Adam McKay (how was “Don’t Look Up” five years ago already?) recently posted on his Substack:

Say what you want about “doomers” and “don’t lose hope,” but that is one PITHY post, and I can’t see anything wrong with it.

Like it or not, 2C is coming. Conditions are already bad, and worsening, at 1.5C. Harvests across Europe will suffer this year, with a 2 billion Euro hit predicted based on the June heatwaves alone. Wildfires in Belgium have been an ecological catastrophe to wildlife. In Canada at one point this summer there were over 700 fires rampaging through the boreal forest. In Ghana in June, the greater Accra area was pummeled with deadly, infrastructure-devastating flooding. “38,802 people were affected, 7,761 households were displaced, 12 people lost their lives, and 7 others were reported missing.”

You get the picture.

Want to make it through? Sure, we can talk about planning for long term survival, and we will. You should be planning now for how you’ll navigate the coming sh*t show of food shortages, power outages, and general infrastructure degradation.

There are lots of resources out there. You’ve probably already got a general idea about your risk. And once you have a handle on that (as well as anyone can know anything of the perilous future, that is) it is time to ask a LOT of questions.

How safe is my neighborhood – my subdivision – my block – my house?

Your position in the landscape is also important. Are you in a suburb? Out in the boondocks? In a funky walk-up on the Bowery in Manhattan? City vs suburban vs rural will shape how you think about your community and the networks you should be building. 

Will it be hotter? (Yes.) Will it be drier? (Probably.) Wetter? How will this affect the growing season? If I want to start a garden, or save seeds, what do I need to plan for? Will my basement storage be adequate? Should I put in a shed? If the power goes out and we don’t have A/C, can I use the attic/crawl space for convection cooling? Can I afford a generator? Where do I put it, and how does it work? Can I schedule an appointment with an electrician to run through my options?

Stop.

[Sound effect: the SCREEEEEEEEXXXXCCCCCCCCCCHHHH of a needle being dragged off an LP mid track.]

Stop.

I made it a good deal farther than that utterly banal electrician suggestion before stopping, but that mundane detail made me change my mind about publishing.

On August 13 I posted People Get Ready. The topic was immediate peril – and it did pretty well here! In the piece, I promised a second post where I’d discuss longer-term survival. And I’d fleshed out a pretty decent project plan before I stopped typing. (I’d started a RACI and an SBAR and everything!) 

Researching and writing felt like the fun old days of work, when I planned communications strategies for tech upgrades at a major regional hospital system. I was logging questions, compiling data, and enumerating considerations about gardening, growing seasons, food storage, household energy requirements, communications plans, growing your human networks of helpers and ideas for people reliant on medications or mobility devices. It was pretty good! But I had to stop.

I was first struck by the near futility of offering anything more or better than what’s already available. If you want to install a water purification system or start a commune or learn how to farrow pigs, for example, there’s a book or a website for you.

I was also struck that I’m not a subject matter expert on much of anything. I’m not an ex- Navy Seal. I’m not a rancher, or an engineer. I know a modest amount about saving seeds and stocking the tank house with bluegill. I can cook something delicious from very little. I can opine on chickens and growing potatoes. My talent lies in compiling, and on throwing a slightly different slant on things. I should stick to that.

The biggest thunderstrike, though, was a simple insight: the most important obstacle to living through what’s coming is philosophical. It’s a paradigm shift. To survive, to live in the new world, it will be essential to move past any last reliance on hopium (net zero by 2050! renewables!) and radically embrace a new reality.

And to help with this task, I do have a few modest things to offer: 

1. I have thought and read about it quite a bit.  
2. I’m an optimistic existentialist.
3. I am old.

I’ve been thinking and writing about climate change for just a smidge over a decade, but I’ve been alive since the 1960s. I remember the first Earth Day. I was here in the before times, when we didn’t have internet or hot and cold running entertainment or closets full of cheap fast fashion or “on demand” anything. I was here before “the algorithm.” I learned to cook when what we could afford was what the Younglings now call “struggle meals.” I saw cars get small during the energy crisis of the 1970s, and then large again because people are short-sighted and stupid and politicians are bought off by Exxon and BP and Shell. My parents drummed a mantra into me:

Use it up

Wear it out

Make it do

Or do without

What that meant was “suck it up” because there’s nothing else available, and you’d better enjoy what’s in front of you. Because of their teaching, because we didn’t have a lot – and because I knew my grandparents, who were born in the 19th century and lived very simply into the 1980s – I have at least a little perspective on how to manage through leaner, gristlier times.

(BIG DISCLAIMER: what I am about to type is for the better-off folk in the house. The people with disposable income and choices to be made. There are billions who do not have the luxury of making choices. And that said…)

Humans – all of us – must get ready for the slow-motion devastation that’s coming. Global heating, and the beginnings of inevitable system collapse, is here. To navigate the next few decades, we need to do two things. (You may already have done them.)

One: viscerally understand and accept that this is ACTUALLY HAPPENING. Things are not going “back to normal.” Taking this on board is necessary in order to make the leap to the new world. By definition, someone who is looking back cannot move ahead. Someone who is hoping against hope that “it will get better” won’t be able to throw things overboard and get on with it. 

Two: be willing to do whatever it takes. Abandon preconceived notions and let things go. This is not a time for pouty regret. It’s a time for letting go of misty-eyed nostalgia, and going balls to the wall. 

Possessions, home, habits, job, neighborhood, state, country, perhaps even family and friends may not survive with you. Survivors will need to muster the courage to drop the old life and push beyond it into whatever the future holds. This will be a mental step at first, but it’s likely soon enough to manifest in the meat space where your flat screen TV and second car and air conditioning and 401K and Uber eats account and Amazon habit and riding lawn mower live.

Nothing will be the same again. The old world – the old planet – is gone. We’ve killed it.

If we crash the fossil fuel economy tomorrow and revert to zero emissions, temperatures will continue rising. Sure, they might only rise for 10 or 20 years, but we aren’t going to stop emitting now, so what is happening already is effectively locked in.

You don’t need me to post more links. If you are still reading you know what’s happening. 

My contribution this time is not a project plan. It’s not a primer on how to survive, although that is what I had originally thought I’d write, and probably will in the next week or so.

No – my contribution today is a wish. A hope. A secular prayer and a doubting Thomas’s benediction.

We can, and we should, revolt. We can, and we should, implode the current system and stop using fossil fuels. But that’s a separate effort. In the meantime, and for the foreseeable future, we must survive.

In the non-political realm of outrageous weather and decimated harvests and heat domes and drought and flash floods and power outages and scarcity, it is time to jolt ourselves out of our stasis and into a new paradigm. Our survival will depend on it.

Get ready to rumble. Get ready to throw the old politics out the window. Keep voting blue, but don’t get your hopes up. 

Get ready to do shit you’ve never done before. Get ready to learn things you thought had died out with your ancestors. Get ready to be offline, read a hard copy book, plant a garden, use a hand dug squat toilet, build a fire, dig a well, and be happy with daily can of beans, some rice, and a couple of carrots for a few weeks. Get ready to pool resources, do without, buckle down, and pitch in. Get ready to get your hands dirty.

The eldritch horror of all this is that there will be WEEKS AND MONTHS of relative calm. We’ll see robin’s egg blue skies, soft breezes, gentle spring rains, and well-stocked grocery store shelves. There will be intermittent, increasing calamities. There will be ruinous disasters. But there will also be days when your shoulders will unclench, you’ll rake the leaves or shovel the snow and think, “How lovely! It’s beautiful here!”

And yet… emissions will be rising. The global temperature will be rising. The sea will be rising.

This world is a sumptuous, spellbinding, transcendent place. There will be beauty about you. You will be graced with neighbors and family and friends to cherish. There will be music and books and nourishing lentil soup and love. It’s worth fighting for, whatever heartbreaking changes may come. And the sooner you make the mental leap, the sooner you can start prepping.

Life has never been predictable or smooth. It still won’t be. But as long as you are alive, it will be worth the struggle.