9 ms·
Advice for a climate change apocalypse
- Bootvis 7y agoAlso check out this Bloomberg podcast with the author (currently it's the first one in this overview): https://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts/odd_lots https://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts/odd_lots
- Beltiras 7y agoI've thought a bit about this and come to the conclusion that the best way to survive is not to have anything others would want. If you have nothing others want you will not be attacked for it and have to defend yourself. That will get you past the first wave of deaths: holding on to our old way of life thinking 'property' is important. It's best if you can actually walk to an area where there is protection from the elements, away from the masses of people fighting for the last scraps of loot remaining of the old world. If you manage to live a year most of the original violence will have passed. You will need to start to build a life where you can make and store foodstuffs to survive through seasons where food is more scarce (I live on 66°N, winter would be harsh). Hopefully you will be in a small band of survivors that are pooling strengths to get by and can learn farming all over again. If you do survive this period then on a timescale of decades small camps of survivors will be able to connect and start to build back up again.
- SamBam 7y agoThis is the "rugged individualist fantasy" that the author talks about. I admit many of us have fantasies of climate-change-apocalypse working out like that, but the author is correct: we will not be facing a sudden collapse of society allowing small bands of survivors to go live on farms, at least not in the first world. Instead, in the first world, the effects we'll feel are billions of climate refugees moving across the world in search of safety and arriving at our borders. There will be there current border arguments x1000, and we'll either have to deal with the economic impact of having refugees or the moral impact of not. But those aren't the kinds of triggers that will suddenly lead to people going and founding communes in the remains of society.
- Beltiras 7y agoMore like nightmares. I've read articles about Syria being the first casualty in the coming migrant wars due to climate change.
- viklove 7y agoI posted a comment about this a few days ago and got downvoted into oblivion. Seems like hn doesn't take the climate refugee threat seriously.
- AstralStorm 7y agoIt's not that the refugees are the threat. The problem is everything will be overloaded if you accept too many, and armed conflict is likely if you don't. Closest places will get hit first.
- oflannabhra 7y agoSo basically, don't be a woman?
- Beltiras 7y agoI think a collapse of civilization will be hard on women yes. I'm not misogynistic and am an advocate of equal rights for all sexes but there are hard realizations about the sort of behavior we would exhibit in the wrong sort of circumstances.
- KirinDave 7y agoAlternative: misogyny is so ingrained into our worldview that we view it as the default, natural state we revert to.
- YinglingLight 7y agoOr a child
- mc32 7y agoId suggest anyone not affiliated to a larger group would be in danger. I agree an outcast solo man might fare slightly better on their own, but in a dynamic enviro with other people a woman might fare slightly better.
- KirinDave 7y agoThis is how a lot of men expect things to go even within society. Sexual assault is ostensibly illegal but in practice does not always result in harsh penalties.
- jniedrauer 7y agoActually, the opposite is true. There's no single explanation for it, but women tend to survive in much higher numbers during times of severe famine or catastrophe. It's likely a combination of several factors: Women have slower metabolisms and higher bodyfat, and they tend to form more close knit groups. Men tend to take on more physical labor, they tend to waste more energy, and are more likely to end up as social outcasts.
- CodeCube 7y agoThis is why "preppers" make me laugh ... they go out of their way to stockpile these resources (food, guns, survival gear, etc). I don't know about you, but anyone I've ever met with prepper tendencies isn't shy about letting you know about it ... so now they're making it known that in an emergency, they will be the place for the mob to raid
- whatshisface 7y agoWouldn't the mob run away after a few people in front got shot? I'm sure there are historical examples for comparison.
- mieseratte 7y agoThe problem with security is you have to be right every time, they only have to be right once.
- saalweachter 7y agoYour children are starving. You can (a) run away and watch them starve or (b) rush the compound and hope to get some food. Threats -- and demonstrations -- of violence are only reliable if the person being threatened has something to lose.
- cameronbrown 7y agoIf you die then you can't help them anymore.
- saalweachter 7y agoIf you die, you don't have to watch them starve to death next week. If there's a 90% chance you die storming the compound, a 10% chance you survive storming the compound and obtain food and a 100% chance you die if you don't find food soon, why wouldn't you take the chance at survival?
- 7y ago
- bryanlarsen 7y ago> not to have anything others would want. Like food or the tools necessary to get food? Kind of hard to survive without that. No, I think the OP is absolutely right. Humans are social animals, and large groups of humans are more powerful than small ones. Those who survive will be those who join the best groups. And the best way to ensure you're in a good group is to use your abilities to shape your group into a good group.
- Beltiras 7y agoThis is a good strategy past the first year.
- AstralStorm 7y agoYes, because civilization collapse hits immediately in a single year, not a tens of years to century... One year is good for surviving something local, like a hurricane or landslide or such.
- hackerpacksnack 7y agoA farming community will only last until someone else establishes martial superiority over it. The best business is a protection racket. Establish martial superiority before someone else does. You can even offer a nicer protection racket than the others. But you’re gonna need organized firepower if you want to keep any of the wealth you produce in the long term
- tim58 7y agoA protection racket might be the best business, but it's also a very risky business.
- hef19898 7y agoSomehow I don't get the American obsession with doomsday events. Sure, they make for a good story backdrop, but how realistic is it really? I have my doubts that's climate change apocalypse will be quick, I suspect it to be a rather drawn out affair. And just an individual could prepare for years or even decades of such things or believe one could just doesn't make sense. And if you study real doomsday periods in history, the plague, the fall of the roman empire and such things, in the end society somehow survived. During the plague even wars that have started before it continued. And England kept the state and government prett much going. And the larger, long term changes and impacts most likely cannot be mitigated on the individual level. Certainly not by stockpiling on stuff.
- rootusrootus 7y agoThis seems more like a movie script expectation of what doomsday would be like. Doesn't history show that in most cases of natural disaster, communities tend to come together rather than devolve into violence? We always assume it will be everyone for themselves, everybody armed to the teeth, etc. Even in America I doubt that's how it plays out.
- AstralStorm 7y agoCommunities yes, but they tend to toss out outgroups hard when they come for help. And then when a community can't deal with the change at all, it is more dangerous to others around. There are limits of what banding together can do in small communities. Suppose the global trade is hit, you don't have enough food and growing things locally becomes impossible. Will you find someone brilliant enough to solve it in a small community? It's not very likely... War is more likely.
- merpnderp 7y ago99.9% of humanity's history has been of slavery or subservience. Why would a collapse of modern society not change things back to how they always were?
- AstralStorm 7y agoYou can't enslave people who are dead, the remaining few will have too much of bargaining power. Look into what happened after Black Death epidemics.
- mooreds 7y agoLoved the message. Just like you can't run away from yourself (trust me), humanity can't run away from its collective self. My favorite book about this is Lucifer's Hammer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer Not perfect but certainly echoes the article's theme that we'll still be in society, even after a catastrophe, and will have to work within it.
- merpnderp 7y agoI wish I could remember the book, but it was targeted at preppers by someone who'd lived through a temporary collapse of government in S. America. And his advice was if you are truly a prepper, you aren't storing guns, ammo, and food, you're working to get your local government to prepare for disaster events. And his reasoning was this, as soon as the central government failed, the smaller towns created militias which went around collecting food and supplies to be rationed by everyone.
- AstralStorm 7y agoThat won't work in a scenario of climate change, which is long term, slow. The only solutions here are big systemic. It cannot even be attacked at a local level. What does a local community do when the wells and reservoirs dry out? Where do they get the food from when there's country wide shortage? Rationing only goes so far.
- charliesharding 7y ago"No tragic yet convenient event will allow us to discard our complex, messy, and ever-changing social reality and live out our rugged individualistic fantasy." "...it will be empathy, generosity, and courage that we need to survive. Kindness and fairness will be more valuable than any survival skill" If you're interested in a concrete discussion of what a collapse may look like this is not for you. He says it won't hurt to know survival skills and that mainly you should learn to be kind (as if you missed that lesson in pre-k). One thing is for certain; he's definitely a paragon of morality. I mean.. you can't write an article like that without being totally rock solid.
- kabdib 7y ago"Ten across, 7 letters, synonym for 'Prepper'". "Refugee." "That works."
- pjc50 7y agoExactly. The climate crisis is likely to look a lot more like Europe's refugee crisis.
- notthemessiah 7y agoJohn Baez's blog has a series on how civilizations collapse, first looking at the Anasazi, and then how one might model it using agent-based modeling and also looking at general collapse through differential equations: https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/anasazi-america-part-1/ https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/anasazi-amer... https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/anasazi-america-part-2/ https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/anasazi-amer... https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/civilizational-collapse-part-3/ https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/civilization... https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/civilizational-collapse-part-4/ https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/civilization... James Burke is a science historian and BBC documentarian, and in his first episode of "Connections" a series on the nature of innovation, he talks about how fragile our complex infrastructure can be, and, much like this article, how hopeless individualist survival skills would be once we "leave our technological womb". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ In his later series, After the Warming, a 1988 documentary which imagines what it would look like in 2050 if we failed to act on climate change (in which it predicted refugee crises, wars, hurricanes, mass flooding), and looks back on thousands of years of climate shaping civilizational rise and collapse, from the Ice Age to the Nabataeans to today and beyond. It gets most things scarily right, with the notable exception of failing to see Japanese economic bubble popping in 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa4aWFDCMqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa4aWFDCMqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJLyPSRusc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJLyPSRusc
- kbenson 7y agoConnections was one of my favorite shows when I was younger, and it played on cable. I think it was the Discovery channel, as hard as that is to imagine now. I really miss the Discovery channel of my youth, when it was a gateway to science and history, and not primarily a vehicle of reality TV programming. At least I assume it still is, I abandoned it long ago (not long after it abandoned me).
- sixplusone 7y agoI think it was The Learning Channel, before it went to complete TLC shit with incipid "reality" drama all day.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- crazydoggers 7y agoWhile I think the article is a little thin, it does scratch the surface that the hard part of civilization collapse is not about survival, but about how society will need to reorganize itself. We take for granted at the moment how critical law and law enforcement is for the stability of our society, and the major reduction in violence, civilization has enjoyed. [1] Evolution has favored an evolutionary stable strategy, basically a Nash equilibrium, between those who would exploit, those that are passive, and those that fight back when exploited. [2] A collapse of civilization would mean that as a society, we’ll have to recover and restore systems that allow us to cooperate and fend off those willing to exploit others for their own gain. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nat... 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strate...
- tonytheliger 7y agoThis guy says "I" too much.
- beat 7y agoSomething else to consider, that the article doesn't really touch, is the pace of change. Even at global-disaster scale, climate change moves pretty slowly. The ocean may rise a couple of meters, but it's not rising a couple of meters later this afternoon. Interesting thing to think about... in the past century, Earth's population has quadrupled, with most of that occurring along coastlines. That means we built enough housing in a century to accommodate four times as many people in those coastal cities. Why can't we just keep building? Population growth has mostly leveled off (we're looking at no more than 50% population increase over the next century, probably less), and we have much better tools now than we had then. If New Orleans floods, you don't necessarily need to move to Kansas to escape it - and the mouth of the Mississippi will continue to be a vital trade corridor even if the oceans rise. The changes are generational in timespan. Think that way.
- godshatter 7y agoThis is what I was thinking. People seem to think of climate change as something like a tornado or something. Sea level, for example, rises so slowly that you can simply abandon the land on the coast that we start to lose and keep expanding inward. The easily flooded areas from more potent storms will probably be abandoned, too, over time. It won't be fun, for sure, but I don't see civilization falling any time soon. It's not like an event labeled "climate change" is going to hit us next Thursday and we're suddenly going to be reduced to roving bands of survivors who will be wishing they had signed up for that survival training class yesterday. I'd worry more about getting our government officials to put more resources into disaster preparedness than I would how to start a fire or how best to lead a band of frightened survivors.
- AstralStorm 7y agoThe most important bit will be food and water safety, parts ever father from equator will be overloaded in terms of food production. Water facilities are not prepared to deal with the magnitude of change and it will be a lot of work to bring them up. The big problem here is that such preparations ahead of time are not exactly economically viable, and mostly impossible "just in time" as they require systemic changes. Once these pressures are bad enough, we'll have a big problem.
- kenforthewin 7y agoI wish the author had delved more into how his studies of past civ collapse inform his predictions of climate-related collapse. Instead he encourages "generosity, altruism, and cooperation" like this is some sort of corporate retreat.
- adrianN 7y agoA good strategy is probably moving to a rich country now, before the unprecedented refugee crisis starts.
- carapace 7y agoPost-apocalyse could be fun. But why wait? You can move to Slab City if that's your thing. I play a game sometimes in my head. It's a kind of speculative daydream. In this daydream, I'm sitting around a campfire with my band of fellow survivors. Things have calmed down and we've settled into a groove. The "game" has no name, but if it did it would be called "nostagia". Everyone goes around the circle and says something they miss from the old civ that they took for granted: "Q-tips" "Asprin" "Fucking morphine" "I miss my dentist." The breakdown of civilization will be horrifying. I have been a self-decribed "Apocalyptic" since sometime in my early teens. I took a look at what people were up to in re; technology and the environment and decided that we could kiss our asses good-bye in maybe fifty years. That was about thirty years ago and we are right on schedule. The first problem is going to be water. Then food. There's only about three days worth of food in a modern city at any given time. If the production and transportation system seriously breaks down for more than a week over a large enough area... Well, as the fellow from New Guinea said to the missionary, "If God didn't want us to eat people He wouldn't have made us out of meat." Check your history books if you dare, but I don't advise it unless you have a strong stomach. Heh. Best advice to survive a serious breakdown of civilization: "Live someplace three days farther than a hungry person can walk." The best time to prepare for this bleak future is now, before it happens. If you're not prepared to move to the middle of nowhere and set up a self-sufficient homestead then you had better get serious about fixing our global problems. This is where "it will be empathy, generosity, and courage that we need to survive. Kindness and fairness will be more valuable than any survival skill. Then as now, social and leadership skills will be valued. We will have to work together. We will have to grow food, educate ourselves, and give people a reason to persevere. The needs will be enormous, and we cannot run away from that. Humans evolved attributes such as generosity, altruism, and cooperation because we need them to survive. Armed with those skills, we will turn towards the problem, not away from it. We will face the need, and we will have to solve it together. That is the only option. That’s what survival looks like." It's this moment right now. You're living it. This is what the breakdown of civilization looks and feels like. Where are the insects? Where are the birds? The weather is weird. There are strange signs in the Heavens. Someone is trying to tell you something. We have solutions. Permaculture and other kinds of applied ecology can save our bacon: it's fun and easy to get back in touch with Nature (and she's delighted to have you back!) Things like the "Core Transformation Process" are algorithms for overcoming our problems and baggage. It's there, it works. Or just "Non-Violent Communication", etc. Or find Jesus and live up to His expectations. Change your life, start with your diet, it's healthy to eat food grown in healthy ecosystems: foster some. We can do this, "we have the technology", it's up to us.
- z3phyr 7y agoWhy is this flagged @dang? Am I missing something?