Surviving Climate Change
What I read: Let’s say I wanted to escape climate change. Where should I go? by Eve Andrews on Grist.org. Published January 30, 2010
Climate change is something I have thought about for a long time. For better or worse, I have always tried to respect science over hype, fact over comforting fiction.
I have a close friend who worked on California’s state energy policy in the late 1990s through the mid-2000s. Even back then, my friend tells me stories of talking with scientists about climate change and how it was far more dire than most believed or were reporting.
Years later in 2006 Vice President Al Gore’s warning cry documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, and his accompanying book, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, would often yield skepticism from those who refused to accept the gathering consensus of science regarding climate change.
Yet, science. Science is about ferreting out facts and information and verifying their veracity to the best of human ability. As climate change research has progressed, the news has become more depressing and fatalistic. It seems like each year the scientific consensus elevates the risk a bit more, describes the world crisis in even more severe terms.
As this article from the New York Times, Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial., articulates,
America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to act.
Overall, I have not seen the collective commitment throughout the world to address climate change in the most meaningful ways possible because such tectonic shifts in how we live and do business are painful. They require money. They require political unity. They require a cooperative mindset that seems absent from so many leaders and citizens.
In my own country, the United States, I am a smidgen more hopeful because President Biden appears to be focused sharply on the climate change crisis, but can he shift the national and world narrative enough to sidestep outright worldwide disaster. I don’t know.
Sorry if this seems like I have no hope. I do. Really. But my hope now lies in the mitigation of the most egregious effects of what humanity has done to our climate. It would be head-in-the-sand thinking to believe we are going to avoid some serious ramifications. In truth, those ramifications are already rearing their heads with escalating wildfires, hurricanes, extreme weather events, and sea level rise. We must live with climate change now. Turning a blind eye to it is folly. Adaptation in the short term is our only way to survive. Nonstop pressure on our leaders for the long term is the only way to avoid potential extinction.
Wow, that is not a cheery scenario. Apologies. I try to not descend into negativity often, but I simply cannot avoid stating what to me is staring us all in the face. Knowledge is power. Only by clearly facing reality can we begin to correct humanity’s missteps.
For a deep dive take on how climate change will directly impact the United States, check out the 4th National Climate Assessment for a comprehensive and authoritative report on climate change and its impact. If you would like that report digested and analyzed for you concisely, read We broke down what climate change will do, region by region.
Back to the topic of the original article referenced at the top of this post.
I live in San Francisco and have given thought to where I might move in the future as I ponder eventual retirement from my corporate day job. Climate change is a factor among other considerations.
I agree with the sentiment of the article that there is essentially nowhere to live that will not see some impact from climate change. That does not mean I am not also planning for an uncertain future that may require moving despite a local area's best efforts.
How am I preparing? How do I plan to survive? Admittedly, at 66 years of age I will likely have passed on when some of the worst effects of climate change take hold, but even in my lifetime I believe I will have to adapt my way of life and perhaps location.
So, this year I am undertaking a project to reduce my possessions to a relative minimum. My guideline is "can I fit 100% of what I own into a good-sized studio apartment?" That is the goal. My theory is that if moving becomes necessary or wise in the future, having a limited bulk of possessions will help. We’ll see how that works out.
I have also begun keeping a carefully packed "go bag" around if I need to leave suddenly, bought a small solar power generator for my cell phone, and I have a 4-day Red Cross emergency kit. I still need to supplement my emergency supplies and add some other basic survival gear.
The state of California has a great collection of information, training, and checklists to help you prepare and help prepare your community for disasters. Much of that information is useful regardless of where you reside.
I also need to start learning how to grow food and cook (yeah, I don't cook) and a few other skills that would be of great benefit during or in preparation for a future disaster.
This might seem like gloom and doom, but this gives me comfort. When it comes to stuff like this, I am a planner. As but one example of my emergency planning disposition, sometimes people laugh at how many backup strategies I have for my laptop and other data, until they lose their data of course. My past IT management background, overseeing disaster recovery, changed my mindset about disasters, recovery, and advance preparation.
All that said, we should all be doing whatever we can to prepare for climate change's effects. We should be working to slow climate change but for the next couple of decades at least it is going to be about mitigation, not elimination.
People in my country should be backing President Biden’s climate change plans because they are grounded firmly in science. Ignore the climate change deniers. Some will never accept reality.
Back to the Andrews article,
If you recognize that climate change is a huge, terrifying problem, and you have the means to at least try to escape it — why wouldn’t you devote those means to trying to fix it instead, especially if you know it’s impossible to escape? By 'fix it,' I mean try to make the place you live, where you’ve made your home, where you have some sense of ownership and responsibility — and oh, let’s call it investment — more resilient to climate change. Maybe agitate for more storm-resistant infrastructure, mass transit, green spaces.
Because the future isn’t for sure, but running away from the problem ensures that it will be.
Here is the more uplifting part of this post – we all need to do what we can to advocate for legislation and policies that will improve the climate change situation. Aspects of how we live our daily lives need to change. Even if in the short term we may be dealing with impacts for decades, we owe it to the young and future residents of the planet to try and fix what we have broken.
I do not expect anyone to pursue strategies with the dedication of a Greta Thunberg, but we can all do something. The David Suzuki Foundation provides an excellent list of Top 10 things you can do about climate change.
Let’s all prepare for the inevitable disruption of our lives and the world, but let’s also do what we can to make the situation better for everyone on the planet.
Finally, just as I was finalizing this post, another article by Craig Miller, Choosing a Place to Retire? Factor In Climate Change, crossed my eyeballs. It discusses where one might retire taking climate change into account. It appears climate change is increasingly becoming a factor when deciding where one will live.