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This is the thing about climate change. There are no survival strategies - you can't plan for it. The biggest problem that will come with it is unpredicabilit
by dbingham 4y ago
This is the thing about climate change. There are no survival strategies - you can't plan for it. The biggest problem that will come with it is unpredicability.
We know the broad strokes of how climate change will impact us, but exactly how it's going to break down is impossible to predict.
We know it's going to make certain areas of the planet unlivable. We can't be sure exactly which areas.
Sea levels are already rising - but it's impossible to predict the exact rate at which they will continue to rise. There are models in which they rise relatively slowly. There are models in which they rise quickly, and there are models in which ice sheets fall off the arctic and antarctic all at once and it rises catastrophically.
The equators are already becoming unlivable (and ahead of schedule) - most models predicted we wouldn't start to see days of deadly heat until 2080, but that happened in 2020. It was literally too hot to exist outside for more than an hour or two with out supplemental cooling. We know eventually that will become the norm for much of the equatorial region.
We know climate change will destabilize rain patterns, which will destabilize crops. We know this will drive up food prices. And eventually, send us back to a place where there literally just isn't enough food to go around (right now we produce somewhere around 1.5 times the amount of food we need - there's only starvation because we aren't willing to distribute that food equitably). We don't know when or how fast.
We know all of this will drive migration. We don't know when, we don't really know from where or to where, and we don't know what the full consequences of that migration will be. The millions of people who migrated out of the Middle East as a result of the destabilization of that region post Iraq/Afghanistan and the Arab Spring contributed to cause all kinds of political destabilization in Europe - and a swing towards authoritarianism. It's impossible to predict what tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people migrating from the poorer, harder hit regions into the richer regions will do. Or what the general destabilization of the economy will do. But it's a pretty safe bet that it will fuel authoritarianism (...is fueling authoritarianism) of all kinds.
Given the uncertainty of it all, it's impossible to adequately strategize for survival - let alone a reasonably secure and comfortable life.
Our best bet would be to fight like hell right now to prevent it from getting any worse than it's already going to.
- refurb 4y agoFor all the unpredictability you seem pretty certain of the future.
- dbingham 4y agoThat's because the unpredictability lies in the details, not the broad strokes. The broad strokes we're pretty damned sure of, and many of them are already happening more or less as predicted - just not on the timelines predicted. They're happening sooner.