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Becoming a doomsday prepper edges further away from "flat out crazy" with every day of weird, weird weather. Our climate has been extremely stable for a long t

Becoming a doomsday prepper edges further away from "flat out crazy" with every day of weird, weird weather. Our climate has been extremely stable for a long time and I'm not expert but it is my understanding that chaotic systems can suddenly flip from stable to extremely unstable. I think there will be a time, hopefully a long time away but possibly close, when the world realises that there' going to be disaster on an unprecedented scale and we all have reason to be very, very concerned. If the entire Antarctic eastern shelf melts, there is enough ice there to raise sea levels by more than 70 meters. Some say this is 100 years away.... but ice doesn't melt all at once. I wouldn't be surprised if it comes alot sooner and what that world/civilization looks like I cannot imagine. And if you have children, then 100 years away sounds very very soon because you know this is the world they will live in.

knodi123 9y ago
> we all have reason to be very, very concerned What are you going to do about it? Armed revolution? Hoard enough food to ensure that you survive a few months longer than the rest of humanity?
- hoodoof 9y ago
  I'm going to try to locate the billionaire bunkers that I am sure they have all built deep into mountains and take refuge with them before battling my way across a post apocalyptic landscape fighting zombies, accompanied by a ragtag bunch of survivors. I figure the Bezos bunker must be part of his 10,000 year clock mountain http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html Of course I have no idea what to do because why the heck would you think about that unless you were an actual doomsday prepper? Likely outcomes at that stage is gigantic food crisis and the catastrophe that would follow so you'd need to store quite alot of bags of rice to get through that.
  - prewett 9y ago
    A real doomsday prepper would have bought some land in the middle of nowhere (so hordes don't want/think to come there) and learned how to farm it. Storing six months of food or whatever is preparatory-theater and doesn't address sustainable survivel.
    - jonhendry18 9y ago
      Assuming it's still farmable.
    - Arbalest 9y ago
      I have thought about this (but done nothing, partially because I don't have the resources). This is my thinking too. Not just for you though, you need to be able to feed a self sustaining community (probably 100 or more people). Considered also taking some technological stores too. Water tech, refined metal stocks, manual and lower tech power tools. Maybe even some spare solar panels, inverters, battery electrolytes. Though I haven't thought deeply enough to actually work out any timescales for the size of stocks required. Picking the right climate is probably the most important part though. Even if there is great change, some places are still going to be more arable than others, and surely that is at least partially predictable.
      - javajosh 9y ago
        Yeah surviving an apocalypse is like settling a new, mostly terraformed planet. Sounds almost fun if you put it that way!
      - Yetanfou 9y ago
        Putting all this effort into something which most likely will not come to pass in your or your children's lifetime is not constructive and will eventually sap the energy and resource needed to stay 'prepared'. May I suggest taking up a lifestyle at this time and more or less in the place you are - assuming you're not in some jam-packed city where all hope is lost the moment society does break down for some time (New Orleans during Katarina is a good example of what will happen)? If you do live in such a place and will not consider to move out of it this won't work but if you have some space around you which you can call your own it makes sense to start using it in a productive way by growing something useful. Dig a well if you can, a dug well is more reliable than a deep-drilled one as you can get water when the power fails (which it does quite often where I live out in the Swedish countryside thanks to storms or careless snow plough drivers and such). If you don't live in a forested area you can start planting trees on less productive or hard to till soil, you'll need between 2 and 4 hectares to keep a house with around 200m2 of living area warmed to today's standards, less if you make the wise decision to lower them a bit. This does assume you have a wood-burning stove and cooking stove, of course - get those and use them regularly. Plant some fruit trees, berry bushes, a plot of potatoes (which you'll have to move around year after year as you should not grow potatoes in soil which carried them the year before or the one before that), root vegetables, easy stuff. For fun and profit you can add hops which will allow you to brew beer if you can get hold of barley - you could grow it yourself but it takes a lot of land and is a lot of work if you do everything by hand. Just make sure to think in practical terms, you're not trying to relive some Swiss Family Robinson fantasy but trying to live in a way which makes you and yours less dependent on the intricate workings of society, irrespective of whether any doomsday-scenario ever comes to pass or not. The less dependent you are of the trappings of 'modern' live, the less you'll suffer for the loss of such. I saved the best bit for the end: you'll most likely be happier in the here and now by becoming more self-reliant and less dependent on 'modern' society and its... lures. That does not mean you have to become a Luddite or back-to-the-land hippy, it just means you won't feel lost by not being part of the herd which follows the latest craze, sports the latest gizmos and relishes in the latest fad. It also means you won't need to think about 'prepping' anymore, just like people who cycle to work won't need to think about going to the gym to get some exercise as they made it part of their normal life.
  - red75prime 9y ago
    > quite alot of bags of rice Optimal average temperature for rice growing is 23-26C [0]. Current annual average temperature in, say, Japan is 16C. A remote place with access to water and fertile soil, a lot of weapons and you're all set. [0] https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/48657 https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/48657
    - richjdsmith 9y ago
      Yea, but knowing how to plat rice seems critical to this plan... I know I'd be in trouble.
      - jhauris 9y ago
        You got me curious, and I found this article about people growing rice in Maryland without flooded paddies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/rice-grown-in-maryland-farmer-sees-a-future-that-doesnt-involve-flooding/2013/12/16/e4b6ccee-523a-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b572c9eab0eb https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/rice-grown-in-...
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  At least when I lived back in New Zealand I had an emergency plan. I wouldn't call it a doomsday plan. With the likelihood of earthquakes and other natural disasters leaving you without help for days or weeks, it's only sensible. No need for global unrest to cause problems. You don't need to be a doomsday prepper to be prepared. And you don't need a complete collapse of society for things to get uncomfortable for you. You should have at least 3 days of food and water, as well as other essential supplies (blankets, first aid kit, radio) in a bag or convenient location, ready to go in an emergency.
  - czechdeveloper 9y ago
    You said it great. It's not only "i can still buy anything anytime and all my energies and water work" and "Mad Max". Being prepared does not mean I expect Mad Max world.
  - CapitalistCartr 9y ago
    I live in Florida. Only having three days of food during the Summer is irresponsible. A week of non-refrigerated is realistic. People who laugh about "prepping" haven't heard about hurricanes.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      Having less than a week worth of rations (as in canned / dry food) is irresponsible regardless of where you live. During the “great storm” we had in London where we had like maybe 5” of snow fall and everything stopped working I had people seriously complaining and telling war stories about going hungry because they couldn’t get food delivered... Like seriously any small scale natural disaster or even a local utilities outage can cause issues to so many unprepared people it’s not even funny. I keep some basic canned / dry food enough for about a week for 2 people, 20 liters of bottled water and several high capacity charged chargers and I live in W2 London.
  - jschwartzi 9y ago
    Even having a basic first aid kit at hand can mean the difference between life and death in a lot of cases. I keep a tourniquet and quick-clot gauze in my first aid kits because ambulance response times are commonly 30 minutes around here. If you have an arterial bleed you're going to be in pretty bad condition by the time the paramedics arrive unless you can control it. I've never seen an off the shelf first aid kit stock those items. Most of the off-the-shelf kits can barely treat a scraped knee.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 9y ago
  That’s a extreme position. Use the experience of folks living in NYC after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. Things to consider: - Disruptions to communications. - Disruptions in emergency police/fire/ems response - Gasoline and diesel gone in 24 hours (or worse... I was on a coastal island where a hurricane suddenly turned -- all gas was sold within 6 hours of the hurricane warning!) - Electricity disruption - Mass transit shutdown - Shutdown this of highways and other roads. Basically, there’s a 72 hour “oh shit” phase (priority: your safety), 4-10 days of the new normal formulating (priority: protect your property), and then the new normal (deal with consequences, if any). How to prepare depends on risk. If you live in a floodplain or on the coast, you should have a clue about how you’re going to need to think about a couple of weeks post flood or hurricane. In other places, it’s probably good to think about what to do when a snowstorm knocks out power for a week.
- sulam 9y ago
  Personally I am hoping for large scale carbon capture. Environmentalists hate it because it’s too deus ex machina — if you believe it will happen then nothing we emit now matters. I take the tack that we _must_ figure it out because the alternatives aren’t tenable. As a species we do well when it’s clear what we have to do, and I’m bullish that we will figure out how to remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere before climate change effects hit the insane point (insane = 100M sea level rise and mass migration that puts what’s happening now into the “small effect” bucket).
  - seiferteric 9y ago
    I wanted to believe this, but I think it could be too late. Doing so would require gargantuan amounts of energy that I think could only come from fusion but that is at best 30+ years away from first net energy. Even then it would take some time to build enough capacity, and lag effects in the environment mean we will almost certainly see some pretty effects in the next 100 years.
    - sulam 9y ago
      With today’s technology, yes. There’s good science being done right now that is much more efficient. And all our current approaches are chemical engineering, but I personally think organisms modified with CRISPR could be a better path. You’re just trying to get them to do what they already do, more quickly, and I think that’s in the realm of near-term science fiction instead of magic.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    The problem with carbon capture is one of scale. Even though we're adding immense amounts to the atmosphere, it dissipates quickly. It's a minuscule percentage of air, only .04%. To remove significant amounts of carbon requires sucking in stupendous amounts of air.
- kiliantics 9y ago
  Armed revolution is starting to look more and more like the only reasonable thing that could stop this runaway train. Politics is not working. There are many eco-terrorists out there and they have put a lot of thought into this: https://deepgreenresistance.org/images/decisive-ecological-warfare-infographic-highres.jpg https://deepgreenresistance.org/images/decisive-ecological-w...
aaronbrethorst 9y ago
How about spending your energy working on fixing these issues instead of focusing on prepper stuff?
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  Because it's incredibly much easier to prepare myself and my family than leading a global effort to success. Especially given that a large part of the population in the US has turned it into parts of their identity politics to deny climate change is happening and humans are the cause of it.
  - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
    Not much of a life you’re leaving your kids.
    - davidw 9y ago
      Something along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4KTebUT6Mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4KTebUT6Mw
    - justherefortart 9y ago
      Easy solution, don't have kids.
- mathgladiator 9y ago
  Or, focus on your immediate community to survive an issue. This is something that I think about when I watch something prepper related on YouTube. People are stockpiling and building bunkers rather than building relationships with neighbors.
- hoodoof 9y ago
  There are many unselfish individuals in this world who work to fix things, but as a group, and a group of countries, we are so selfish that the problem of global warming will never be stopped. Nor the many other gigantic crises that face the earth such as plastic pollution. As there is no way the people of earth will unify to fix this, better start getting ready sometime in the next 20 years for a gigantic shift in where people see civilization is headed.
pdonis 9y ago
> Our climate has been extremely stable for a long time Depends on your definition of "stable". We have no data on most aspects of the Earth's climate for most of human history. For example, we don't know what the frequency of storms was for any time period further back than a century or two (and the data is spotty further back than a few decades). What data we do have suggests that the 20th century was a period of unusual calm with respect to many aspects of climate, and that what we are seeing now is just a return to what has been normal for most of the period since the last Ice Age ended. Even the findings presented in this article are limited: 1600 years sounds like a long time, but the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago. What has the AMOC looked like during all that time? We don't know.
- chimprich 9y ago
  > What data we do have suggests that the 20th century was a period of unusual calm with respect to many aspects of climate Really? This is quite a strong statement. What data and what aspects of climate are you thinking of? Presumably not temperature. World temperatures rose at a rate unprecedented for millennia during the 20th C - I would hardly call that a "period of unusual calm".
  - pdonis 9y ago
    > What data and what aspects of climate are you thinking of? For example, data suggesting that major storms were more frequent in the 19th century than the 20th. > World temperatures rose at a rate unprecedented for millennia during the 20th C Only if you believe highly dubious temperature reconstructions, including their claims to be accurate to within fractions of a degree.
    - chimprich 9y ago
      > Only if you believe highly dubious temperature reconstructions, including their claims to be accurate to within fractions of a degree. I do believe them because many sources from different proxies agree on the temperature record, the science is very well developed and a strong consensus across a very large majority of experts and separate disciplines has been achieved. "Highly dubious" is how I would describe the fringe criticisms of this work.
corporateslaver 9y ago
Personally I believe there’s a group of people, and I’m not saying you are one, who expect disaster because they hold an opposing political opinion. It’s similar to wanting to see your enemy fail, except seeing your enemy fail also means you fail in this case. A huge amount of climate research data has been faked. Multiple times “scientists” have been caught for this. Global temperature differences are currently not statistically significant.
- patall 9y ago
  And how do you explain that basically every village in the European Alps (or any other mountain range) has old pictures of how their glacier looked ~100 years ago, where you also see how much lower the tree line was etc. Or all the local legends about winter activities that somehow would never be possible nowadays. There is always some level of fraud in any scientific (or human) discipline but not on such a global scale.
- apotheothesomai 9y ago
  Sure, it's all been a big conspiracy perpetrated by 97% of the world's Climate Scientists. But thanks to a plucky band of right-wing ideologists and oil companies, the truth will be exposed. Seeing as this is HN and not Facebook, produce your data or go home.
- Oletros 9y ago
  Can you gives any proof of that faked data?
  - flukus 9y ago
    Will you accept a blog post repeating a daily mail article citing a blog post that completely misrepresented a published paper?
- flukus 9y ago
  > A huge amount of climate research data has been faked. Multiple times “scientists” have been caught for this. This was fake news before we had the term fake news. You're chosen news sources have been lying to you about this for a long enough time that you will probably never accept it.
roryisok 9y ago
70 metres?? I've never heard that before. Source?
- jammi 9y ago
  It's been around, but not quoted as often as the 8m of Greenland. The reason is that earlier they didn't think Antarctica would have considerable amounts of melt in a short (100-200 years) timeframe, but now it seems it's melting almost as quickly as continental ice everywhere, which means mere decades will be significant.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    The western part of Antartica has many fast moving glaciers, some grounded below sea level, that might speed up with global warming. This part is likely to dump a bunch of water into the ocean in the next 1-2 hundred years, but it is only about 10% of the Antarctic water/ice volume. The Eastern side is much thicker and larger and looks like it might actually increase in volume with climate warming.
    - madaxe_again 9y ago
      It’s an intensely complex system. All that you say is true, but: Warming sea water due to decreased salinity and infractions through the circumpolar current result in increased precipitation, which as you say results in an increase in volume of land ice - however this volume is accruing inland, while the coastal feet of glaciers and ice shelves continue to be undercut by said warmer water, which then allows their collapse, which allows increased flow, which allows retreat. Now - the worrying possibility which arises is that the combination of more on shore mass and less off/near shore buttressing will result in a net increase in flow, which will then contribute further to the positive feedback loop. Honestly, nobody knows, our models are nowhere near granular enough. I prefer to err on the side of caution, and take a pessimistic view, but that’s just me.
    - jammi 9y ago
      I was referring to this new study of faster than previously thought rate, but it speaks nothing of volumes, just ice retraction speed. I think they'll post something with updated melt rate by volume at some point once they've calculated it. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41561-018-0082-z https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41561-018-0082-z
hso9791 9y ago
What is easy to understand, but hard to illustrate is cyclic patterns of impulse - response. Without the impulse, no response. However, it is the response that drives the nature of the dynamics. I've recently paid attention to this phenomenon, and believe the concept can be adapted also to human phenomena. As heads-of-state Trump and Putin have misunderstood each other's communications for some time, it is only natural that they are distrustful. Each one expects the words of the other to lead to a response they can understand. I decided that I am certain enough to model a solution to the armed conflict in Syria on my blog. The analysis is based on my understanding of graph theory and studies of the nation state stakeholders in the conflict. https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/10/a-suggestion-for-returning-peace-to-syria/ https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/10/a-suggestion-for-r... https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/11/syria-analysis-border-control/ https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/11/syria-analysis-bor...
- hso9791 9y ago
  Controversial and tangential, I know. Consider this: Any organization is a system of people in roles, let's call them members. The members are expected to make decisions in accordance with their responsibilities. All decisions rest on the available information. The human mind is imperfect, including limitations in memory, and an emotional context for the information. So, an organization is typically a tree of people making decisions, which together form a system. A number of these systems are operating on and near Syrian territory. The dynamics may best be described as utter chaos. Furthermore, I don't believe there has been any instance in the history of mankind where a rocket has performed a successful investigation of crimes. It's well worth the karma hit if this may trigger someone to come up with better ideas than more rockets.
Gravityloss 9y ago
The key takeaway is that ice melt is very non linear. You can't estimate future melt rate based on just past melt rate and drawing a line. It's more like taking away bricks from a building and having a sudden collapse.
lkrubner 9y ago
Something else to consider, a simple experiment you can do at home, with sorry implications. Get some soda, fill a glass with ice, then fill the rest of it with soda, give it a minute to stabilize, then put a thermometer in it. Then watch. Does the temperature slowly converge to room temperature, in a linear fashion? Not at all. That isn't how phase shift works. The soda in the glass will remain at the same temperature for as long as there is still ice. If you got a heat lamp and put it right next to the glass, you would increase the speed at which the ice cubes are melting, but you would not raise the temperature of the soda. It's only when the ice is almost gone that the temperature rises. And then it rises a lot. Likewise, global warming is limited so long as we still have ice caps to melt. But once those ice caps are almost gone, the temperature increase will be unrestrained.
- pdonis 9y ago
  > once those ice caps are almost gone, the temperature increase will be unrestrained No, it won't. Even after all the ice is melted, the heat capacity of the Earth's oceans is huge. Plus your "heat lamp" analogy is a very poor one, the changes in radiative forcing at the top of the Earth's atmosphere are tiny compared to the total heat coming in from the Sun.

knodi123 9y ago

> we all have reason to be very, very concerned What are you going to do about it? Armed revolution? Hoard enough food to ensure that you survive a few months longer than the rest of humanity?

hoodoof 9y ago
I'm going to try to locate the billionaire bunkers that I am sure they have all built deep into mountains and take refuge with them before battling my way across a post apocalyptic landscape fighting zombies, accompanied by a ragtag bunch of survivors. I figure the Bezos bunker must be part of his 10,000 year clock mountain http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html Of course I have no idea what to do because why the heck would you think about that unless you were an actual doomsday prepper? Likely outcomes at that stage is gigantic food crisis and the catastrophe that would follow so you'd need to store quite alot of bags of rice to get through that.
- prewett 9y ago
  A real doomsday prepper would have bought some land in the middle of nowhere (so hordes don't want/think to come there) and learned how to farm it. Storing six months of food or whatever is preparatory-theater and doesn't address sustainable survivel.
  - jonhendry18 9y ago
    Assuming it's still farmable.
  - Arbalest 9y ago
    I have thought about this (but done nothing, partially because I don't have the resources). This is my thinking too. Not just for you though, you need to be able to feed a self sustaining community (probably 100 or more people). Considered also taking some technological stores too. Water tech, refined metal stocks, manual and lower tech power tools. Maybe even some spare solar panels, inverters, battery electrolytes. Though I haven't thought deeply enough to actually work out any timescales for the size of stocks required. Picking the right climate is probably the most important part though. Even if there is great change, some places are still going to be more arable than others, and surely that is at least partially predictable.
    - javajosh 9y ago
      Yeah surviving an apocalypse is like settling a new, mostly terraformed planet. Sounds almost fun if you put it that way!
    - Yetanfou 9y ago
      Putting all this effort into something which most likely will not come to pass in your or your children's lifetime is not constructive and will eventually sap the energy and resource needed to stay 'prepared'. May I suggest taking up a lifestyle at this time and more or less in the place you are - assuming you're not in some jam-packed city where all hope is lost the moment society does break down for some time (New Orleans during Katarina is a good example of what will happen)? If you do live in such a place and will not consider to move out of it this won't work but if you have some space around you which you can call your own it makes sense to start using it in a productive way by growing something useful. Dig a well if you can, a dug well is more reliable than a deep-drilled one as you can get water when the power fails (which it does quite often where I live out in the Swedish countryside thanks to storms or careless snow plough drivers and such). If you don't live in a forested area you can start planting trees on less productive or hard to till soil, you'll need between 2 and 4 hectares to keep a house with around 200m2 of living area warmed to today's standards, less if you make the wise decision to lower them a bit. This does assume you have a wood-burning stove and cooking stove, of course - get those and use them regularly. Plant some fruit trees, berry bushes, a plot of potatoes (which you'll have to move around year after year as you should not grow potatoes in soil which carried them the year before or the one before that), root vegetables, easy stuff. For fun and profit you can add hops which will allow you to brew beer if you can get hold of barley - you could grow it yourself but it takes a lot of land and is a lot of work if you do everything by hand. Just make sure to think in practical terms, you're not trying to relive some Swiss Family Robinson fantasy but trying to live in a way which makes you and yours less dependent on the intricate workings of society, irrespective of whether any doomsday-scenario ever comes to pass or not. The less dependent you are of the trappings of 'modern' live, the less you'll suffer for the loss of such. I saved the best bit for the end: you'll most likely be happier in the here and now by becoming more self-reliant and less dependent on 'modern' society and its... lures. That does not mean you have to become a Luddite or back-to-the-land hippy, it just means you won't feel lost by not being part of the herd which follows the latest craze, sports the latest gizmos and relishes in the latest fad. It also means you won't need to think about 'prepping' anymore, just like people who cycle to work won't need to think about going to the gym to get some exercise as they made it part of their normal life.
- red75prime 9y ago
  > quite alot of bags of rice Optimal average temperature for rice growing is 23-26C [0]. Current annual average temperature in, say, Japan is 16C. A remote place with access to water and fertile soil, a lot of weapons and you're all set. [0] https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/48657 https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/48657
  - richjdsmith 9y ago
    Yea, but knowing how to plat rice seems critical to this plan... I know I'd be in trouble.
    - jhauris 9y ago
      You got me curious, and I found this article about people growing rice in Maryland without flooded paddies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/rice-grown-in-maryland-farmer-sees-a-future-that-doesnt-involve-flooding/2013/12/16/e4b6ccee-523a-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b572c9eab0eb https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/rice-grown-in-...
toomanybeersies 9y ago
At least when I lived back in New Zealand I had an emergency plan. I wouldn't call it a doomsday plan. With the likelihood of earthquakes and other natural disasters leaving you without help for days or weeks, it's only sensible. No need for global unrest to cause problems. You don't need to be a doomsday prepper to be prepared. And you don't need a complete collapse of society for things to get uncomfortable for you. You should have at least 3 days of food and water, as well as other essential supplies (blankets, first aid kit, radio) in a bag or convenient location, ready to go in an emergency.
- czechdeveloper 9y ago
  You said it great. It's not only "i can still buy anything anytime and all my energies and water work" and "Mad Max". Being prepared does not mean I expect Mad Max world.
- CapitalistCartr 9y ago
  I live in Florida. Only having three days of food during the Summer is irresponsible. A week of non-refrigerated is realistic. People who laugh about "prepping" haven't heard about hurricanes.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Having less than a week worth of rations (as in canned / dry food) is irresponsible regardless of where you live. During the “great storm” we had in London where we had like maybe 5” of snow fall and everything stopped working I had people seriously complaining and telling war stories about going hungry because they couldn’t get food delivered... Like seriously any small scale natural disaster or even a local utilities outage can cause issues to so many unprepared people it’s not even funny. I keep some basic canned / dry food enough for about a week for 2 people, 20 liters of bottled water and several high capacity charged chargers and I live in W2 London.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  Even having a basic first aid kit at hand can mean the difference between life and death in a lot of cases. I keep a tourniquet and quick-clot gauze in my first aid kits because ambulance response times are commonly 30 minutes around here. If you have an arterial bleed you're going to be in pretty bad condition by the time the paramedics arrive unless you can control it. I've never seen an off the shelf first aid kit stock those items. Most of the off-the-shelf kits can barely treat a scraped knee.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 9y ago
That’s a extreme position. Use the experience of folks living in NYC after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. Things to consider: - Disruptions to communications. - Disruptions in emergency police/fire/ems response - Gasoline and diesel gone in 24 hours (or worse... I was on a coastal island where a hurricane suddenly turned -- all gas was sold within 6 hours of the hurricane warning!) - Electricity disruption - Mass transit shutdown - Shutdown this of highways and other roads. Basically, there’s a 72 hour “oh shit” phase (priority: your safety), 4-10 days of the new normal formulating (priority: protect your property), and then the new normal (deal with consequences, if any). How to prepare depends on risk. If you live in a floodplain or on the coast, you should have a clue about how you’re going to need to think about a couple of weeks post flood or hurricane. In other places, it’s probably good to think about what to do when a snowstorm knocks out power for a week.
sulam 9y ago
Personally I am hoping for large scale carbon capture. Environmentalists hate it because it’s too deus ex machina — if you believe it will happen then nothing we emit now matters. I take the tack that we _must_ figure it out because the alternatives aren’t tenable. As a species we do well when it’s clear what we have to do, and I’m bullish that we will figure out how to remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere before climate change effects hit the insane point (insane = 100M sea level rise and mass migration that puts what’s happening now into the “small effect” bucket).
- seiferteric 9y ago
  I wanted to believe this, but I think it could be too late. Doing so would require gargantuan amounts of energy that I think could only come from fusion but that is at best 30+ years away from first net energy. Even then it would take some time to build enough capacity, and lag effects in the environment mean we will almost certainly see some pretty effects in the next 100 years.
  - sulam 9y ago
    With today’s technology, yes. There’s good science being done right now that is much more efficient. And all our current approaches are chemical engineering, but I personally think organisms modified with CRISPR could be a better path. You’re just trying to get them to do what they already do, more quickly, and I think that’s in the realm of near-term science fiction instead of magic.
- mark-r 9y ago
  The problem with carbon capture is one of scale. Even though we're adding immense amounts to the atmosphere, it dissipates quickly. It's a minuscule percentage of air, only .04%. To remove significant amounts of carbon requires sucking in stupendous amounts of air.
kiliantics 9y ago
Armed revolution is starting to look more and more like the only reasonable thing that could stop this runaway train. Politics is not working. There are many eco-terrorists out there and they have put a lot of thought into this: https://deepgreenresistance.org/images/decisive-ecological-warfare-infographic-highres.jpg https://deepgreenresistance.org/images/decisive-ecological-w...

aaronbrethorst 9y ago

How about spending your energy working on fixing these issues instead of focusing on prepper stuff?

ajmurmann 9y ago
Because it's incredibly much easier to prepare myself and my family than leading a global effort to success. Especially given that a large part of the population in the US has turned it into parts of their identity politics to deny climate change is happening and humans are the cause of it.
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  Not much of a life you’re leaving your kids.
  - davidw 9y ago
    Something along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4KTebUT6Mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4KTebUT6Mw
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    Easy solution, don't have kids.
mathgladiator 9y ago
Or, focus on your immediate community to survive an issue. This is something that I think about when I watch something prepper related on YouTube. People are stockpiling and building bunkers rather than building relationships with neighbors.
hoodoof 9y ago
There are many unselfish individuals in this world who work to fix things, but as a group, and a group of countries, we are so selfish that the problem of global warming will never be stopped. Nor the many other gigantic crises that face the earth such as plastic pollution. As there is no way the people of earth will unify to fix this, better start getting ready sometime in the next 20 years for a gigantic shift in where people see civilization is headed.

pdonis 9y ago

> Our climate has been extremely stable for a long time Depends on your definition of "stable". We have no data on most aspects of the Earth's climate for most of human history. For example, we don't know what the frequency of storms was for any time period further back than a century or two (and the data is spotty further back than a few decades). What data we do have suggests that the 20th century was a period of unusual calm with respect to many aspects of climate, and that what we are seeing now is just a return to what has been normal for most of the period since the last Ice Age ended. Even the findings presented in this article are limited: 1600 years sounds like a long time, but the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago. What has the AMOC looked like during all that time? We don't know.

chimprich 9y ago
> What data we do have suggests that the 20th century was a period of unusual calm with respect to many aspects of climate Really? This is quite a strong statement. What data and what aspects of climate are you thinking of? Presumably not temperature. World temperatures rose at a rate unprecedented for millennia during the 20th C - I would hardly call that a "period of unusual calm".
- pdonis 9y ago
  > What data and what aspects of climate are you thinking of? For example, data suggesting that major storms were more frequent in the 19th century than the 20th. > World temperatures rose at a rate unprecedented for millennia during the 20th C Only if you believe highly dubious temperature reconstructions, including their claims to be accurate to within fractions of a degree.
  - chimprich 9y ago
    > Only if you believe highly dubious temperature reconstructions, including their claims to be accurate to within fractions of a degree. I do believe them because many sources from different proxies agree on the temperature record, the science is very well developed and a strong consensus across a very large majority of experts and separate disciplines has been achieved. "Highly dubious" is how I would describe the fringe criticisms of this work.

corporateslaver 9y ago

Personally I believe there’s a group of people, and I’m not saying you are one, who expect disaster because they hold an opposing political opinion. It’s similar to wanting to see your enemy fail, except seeing your enemy fail also means you fail in this case. A huge amount of climate research data has been faked. Multiple times “scientists” have been caught for this. Global temperature differences are currently not statistically significant.

patall 9y ago
And how do you explain that basically every village in the European Alps (or any other mountain range) has old pictures of how their glacier looked ~100 years ago, where you also see how much lower the tree line was etc. Or all the local legends about winter activities that somehow would never be possible nowadays. There is always some level of fraud in any scientific (or human) discipline but not on such a global scale.
apotheothesomai 9y ago
Sure, it's all been a big conspiracy perpetrated by 97% of the world's Climate Scientists. But thanks to a plucky band of right-wing ideologists and oil companies, the truth will be exposed. Seeing as this is HN and not Facebook, produce your data or go home.
Oletros 9y ago
Can you gives any proof of that faked data?
- flukus 9y ago
  Will you accept a blog post repeating a daily mail article citing a blog post that completely misrepresented a published paper?
flukus 9y ago
> A huge amount of climate research data has been faked. Multiple times “scientists” have been caught for this. This was fake news before we had the term fake news. You're chosen news sources have been lying to you about this for a long enough time that you will probably never accept it.

roryisok 9y ago

70 metres?? I've never heard that before. Source?

jammi 9y ago
It's been around, but not quoted as often as the 8m of Greenland. The reason is that earlier they didn't think Antarctica would have considerable amounts of melt in a short (100-200 years) timeframe, but now it seems it's melting almost as quickly as continental ice everywhere, which means mere decades will be significant.
- njarboe 9y ago
  The western part of Antartica has many fast moving glaciers, some grounded below sea level, that might speed up with global warming. This part is likely to dump a bunch of water into the ocean in the next 1-2 hundred years, but it is only about 10% of the Antarctic water/ice volume. The Eastern side is much thicker and larger and looks like it might actually increase in volume with climate warming.
  - madaxe_again 9y ago
    It’s an intensely complex system. All that you say is true, but: Warming sea water due to decreased salinity and infractions through the circumpolar current result in increased precipitation, which as you say results in an increase in volume of land ice - however this volume is accruing inland, while the coastal feet of glaciers and ice shelves continue to be undercut by said warmer water, which then allows their collapse, which allows increased flow, which allows retreat. Now - the worrying possibility which arises is that the combination of more on shore mass and less off/near shore buttressing will result in a net increase in flow, which will then contribute further to the positive feedback loop. Honestly, nobody knows, our models are nowhere near granular enough. I prefer to err on the side of caution, and take a pessimistic view, but that’s just me.
  - jammi 9y ago
    I was referring to this new study of faster than previously thought rate, but it speaks nothing of volumes, just ice retraction speed. I think they'll post something with updated melt rate by volume at some point once they've calculated it. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41561-018-0082-z https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41561-018-0082-z

hso9791 9y ago

What is easy to understand, but hard to illustrate is cyclic patterns of impulse - response. Without the impulse, no response. However, it is the response that drives the nature of the dynamics. I've recently paid attention to this phenomenon, and believe the concept can be adapted also to human phenomena. As heads-of-state Trump and Putin have misunderstood each other's communications for some time, it is only natural that they are distrustful. Each one expects the words of the other to lead to a response they can understand. I decided that I am certain enough to model a solution to the armed conflict in Syria on my blog. The analysis is based on my understanding of graph theory and studies of the nation state stakeholders in the conflict. https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/10/a-suggestion-for-returning-peace-to-syria/ https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/10/a-suggestion-for-r... https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/11/syria-analysis-border-control/ https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/11/syria-analysis-bor...

hso9791 9y ago
Controversial and tangential, I know. Consider this: Any organization is a system of people in roles, let's call them members. The members are expected to make decisions in accordance with their responsibilities. All decisions rest on the available information. The human mind is imperfect, including limitations in memory, and an emotional context for the information. So, an organization is typically a tree of people making decisions, which together form a system. A number of these systems are operating on and near Syrian territory. The dynamics may best be described as utter chaos. Furthermore, I don't believe there has been any instance in the history of mankind where a rocket has performed a successful investigation of crimes. It's well worth the karma hit if this may trigger someone to come up with better ideas than more rockets.

Gravityloss 9y ago

The key takeaway is that ice melt is very non linear. You can't estimate future melt rate based on just past melt rate and drawing a line. It's more like taking away bricks from a building and having a sudden collapse.

lkrubner 9y ago

Something else to consider, a simple experiment you can do at home, with sorry implications. Get some soda, fill a glass with ice, then fill the rest of it with soda, give it a minute to stabilize, then put a thermometer in it. Then watch. Does the temperature slowly converge to room temperature, in a linear fashion? Not at all. That isn't how phase shift works. The soda in the glass will remain at the same temperature for as long as there is still ice. If you got a heat lamp and put it right next to the glass, you would increase the speed at which the ice cubes are melting, but you would not raise the temperature of the soda. It's only when the ice is almost gone that the temperature rises. And then it rises a lot. Likewise, global warming is limited so long as we still have ice caps to melt. But once those ice caps are almost gone, the temperature increase will be unrestrained.

pdonis 9y ago
> once those ice caps are almost gone, the temperature increase will be unrestrained No, it won't. Even after all the ice is melted, the heat capacity of the Earth's oceans is huge. Plus your "heat lamp" analogy is a very poor one, the changes in radiative forcing at the top of the Earth's atmosphere are tiny compared to the total heat coming in from the Sun.