The Most Important Climate Change Graph You’ll Ever See

Here’s an excellent Netflix 10 episode documentary related to this topic for anyone interested. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s evocative food for thought and the visuals are stunning. It’s so well done in every conceivable way. I would have loved to have seen it, or would love to see it, on IMAX.

The Polar Sea

So many discussions can be rendered from this documentary. One such discussion is how the Northwest Passage is now becoming a popular tourist designation for the jet set who enjoy watching the long emergency play itself out all the while denying man has any hand in it. In fact, in the documentary, they discuss how the Northwest Passage is now the new Everest for those who have the means to self-actualize amidst the carnage.

I’d like to share an idea I had years ago, for which I’d love to implement the programming side of things, but a) never did b) it’s not been a top priority and c) I haven’t been doing any coding, at all for half a year, and probably won’t for at least a few months.

So, have at it, anybody so inclined

In the suburb of Newark that I grew up in, my next door neighbor had a huge yard. Even our much smaller back yard had enough space for a significant garden.

Meanwhile, unemployment of black youth is and has been pretty bad since the 1950’s, I believe, as Thomas Sowell likes to remind us (at which time, it was lower than for white youth). Restaurant jobs are important “gateway jobs”, and I remember that a chain restaurant I worked in, in another Newark suburb, used to actually go to Newark to pick up black kids/young people and give rides to and from work. That was before we became inundated with Latino immigrants, and I doubt that that restaurant would do the same thing, today, if it was still in business. It wouldn’t have to. (Also, uber and lyft rides are pretty cheap.)

That’s bad news for black kids in Newark.

So…. why not run vans out of Newark, which go to suburban homes and grow organic gardens? Put more of those suburb lawns to use? The produce could be split between the home and the gardening service. Selling the produce would be used to pay for the kids’ labor. In the current economy, gardening skills aren’t critical, but if food supply chains break down, that would change. So, besides the benefit of supplying gateway jobs to kids who otherwise may not get them, plus giving them some scratch to pursue other job strategies, a trained labor force of ex-kids who know how to raise food would save lives, and provide some social cohesion, in the event of the sort of catastrophes being predicted. (IMNSHO, America no longer has the moral backbone to suffer severe poverty without widespread theft and chaos.)

The original purpose of “summer vacation” from school in the US was to help with farming chores. Time to go back to the future?

@Ian,

Besides access to fresh water, what other criteria would you use to judge safe places to live or move to, for those of us who are young?

@Ian,

Sorry, just to clarify: I have read the article, and understand evaluating political stability is important after fresh water. I’m just wondering what you think the political situation of the future will look like, assuming one is young enough to move and start over with community ties. Would a fresh water lake community in North America be safer than the same in Europe, for example?

Ooh! Ooh!

I have an idea!

What if some corn breeders were to take the most hardy and toughest strains of Painted Mountain Corn and further hybrididdelize with all the different Hot Desert Corns? Like chapalote, Hopi Blue, Hopi Pink, and other desert corns findable from Native Seed Search?
https://www.nativeseeds.org/

Maybe such breeders could develop a Painted Mountain Desert Corn for even more adaptablility for people living where Climate Chaos Weather Decay brings siberian cold one year, Death Valley heat another year, and other stuff on other years.

Here is a seed breeder seller who is developing his own “landraces” of highly adapted crops.
A link to his company exists at the very bottom of this tiny little short article.
https://permies.com/t/73551/Landrace-seeds-Joseph-Lofthouse

some terms to throw out into the search engine maw of your preference:

passive solar
geothermal
greenhouse
primitive skills
permaculture
composting (of yes, even human waste is supposedly possible)
rainwater harvesting (going to be vital even in the snow zone areas, since droughts will come unpredictably and because flash flooding doesn’t help much with the needs of plants and animals for fresh, clean water).
to a lesser extent, greywater

the issues are: water, food, shelter. probably in that order. and always, undeniably, waste.

truthfully, i wish that the Amish interacted with the rest of the world. we have a lot to learn from them.

as for social organization: it makes sense to organize those you know and love. the problem is, those you know and love often do not understand these issues, and do not believe in the necessity to address these issues. life goes on “as normal” to them, and they see no point in anything that doesn’t help them get through the all-too-tough modern world they are living through. so, getting them on-board to be prepared about the future? even my ex-husband thought i was insane for wanting to move to the country and start learning self-sufficiency.

All you can do is make sure you have skills useful to the petty warlords that will rise up in the wake of Government Collapse. When the collapse comes, it is those with guns and organizational skills that will dominate.

Otherwise start raising an Army yourself.

Great post; great comments.

I fear Ian understates just how bad it is likely to get, and hope we get people in charge who take this seriously before too late (ideally, as seriously as it needs to be–Bernie & Tulsi in the US take it seriously, I just hope they take it seriously enough).

If not, hopefully the best case disaster projections are right and the more likely looking ones are wrong.

I don’t know what to think about the whole prepper thing. On the one hand, it can’t hurt to learn some basic survival skills like growing food, basic repair and maintenance skills and first aid. But on the other hand a lot of prepper culture is driven by a kind of weird revenge fantasy where nobodies dream of collapse so that they can emerge from the rubble as warlords with harems because they stockpiled guns, food and other necessities.

In a true collapse scenario those who stockpiled supplies will likely be targets of roving gangs and no amount of Rambo training for yourself and your nuclear family will save you if you become the target of a roving army of bikers or whatever. Having a “tribe” is probably the most important factor in survival. There is power in numbers.

That being said, I don’t think our future is going to be like Mad Max. I doubt there will be total governmental collapse. Modern states, at least within the developed world, are very powerful, much more so than pre-modern states like the Roman Empire. The more likely scenario is some kind of authoritarianism that will attempt to utilize advanced technology to manage any chaos. Think more cyberpunk dystopia than anarchy.

I think this is why so much emphasis is being put on robots, surveillance, AI, virtual reality, biotechnology and psychoactive drugs. Keep the people in line with carrots (drugs, virtual reality and other forms of entertainment) and sticks (drones, surveillance and robot armies) in the hope that the “useless” population will just quietly die off in their dingy apartments leaving whatever is left of the world to the so-called meritocrats. Hopefully environmental and economic pressures will prevent this future from coming about and we (as in humanity) can deal with our problems before it is too late.

Herman,

A systemic collapse precludes a cyber punk dystopia. We will descend into the dark ages with the die off as too many people rely on components created by others.

If meritocracy people think they will live, I have a few questions for them:

Can you fix your equipment if it breaks or even fabricate parts for it from a blueprint?

Can you grow food or properly manage livestock? Gardening won’t cut it, you need bulk grains to provide the high energy you need in the absence of meat.

Can you properly mine, process, and smith metals?

Do you know what herbs are medicinal and how to properly process and use them?

If you answer no to all of the above or even one, you are fucked and going to die if you don’t have the people with the above knowledge on your side.

Now my family owns a ranch. I can ride a horse, I even practice medieval jousting and horse archery for sport. My stepdad is a machinist and my dad is a carpenter. I have medical training as a Paramedic. My brother is a butcher. His wife and my wife can sew and so can my mother, outside of my work uniform, they make all our clothes.

My sister is manager for a dog food company, her husband is a handyman.

We have a good circle of friends with various skills, and if shit goes down, we have a plan to form up around our family ranches and farms, and let the cities burn while we secure the Military Posts and remove or destroy the weapons there before others grab them. We won’t turn people away, but they do have to pitch in if they shelter with us. Our goal is to have a coherent front with enough firepower to deter the warlords and either kill or drive them off till we’re strong enough to expand outwards.

Make no mistake though, collapse means warfare as all the various drug gangs and militias will no longer be constrained by the US Military which will disintegrate once the pay stops and they can no longer feel the government can protect their families.

Even if the US Military stays coherent, it can’t realistically hold down the entire country if it descends into chaos and the police forces fade away.

I live in Hawaii and a co-worker has talked about leaving the state before the worst happens here. We are one of the most isolated land masses in the world with an already astronomical high cost of living. If disaster were to strike here, or to an area that is one of our major food supply chains, a lot of people already barely living paycheck to paycheck will die. My co-worker has a newborn and he is concern about the future his child will have in Hawaii. Most island states and nations are run by incompetent and corrupt leaders, and I doubt most have strategic plans in place except for the Japanese, who have experience dealing with powerful earthquakes. I’ve also thought about moving to another state that isn’t as vulnerable to natural disasters and where I can have a larger house to prepare and store for emergencies. Those who don’t take climate change and more severe weather disasters seriously will be the first to die.

@ different clue

You glossed over the caveats of what you linked and the person writing it also glossed over caveats.

You’re average plot in a suburb isn’t likely near adequate water which needs to be brought to it. In a collapse, the water and sewer mains will go down. I know how to channel water from the streams and creeks around our ranch, it is labor intensive, especially when we did flood control 10 years back to keep the Ranch from flooding excessively from the high rainfall.

Now factor in weather, widespread violence, soil suitability and pollutants it might have, etc.

When you crunch the numbers most gardeners taking the advice you linked are going to die. They don’t have enough soil, water, and security to weather environmental losses, especially if they don’t have access to water and sewage control which means pests will eat their harvests and disease will be rampant. That is before you factor in fires, droughts, roving gangs, etc.

Cities and Suburbs are death traps in a collapse, only the most ruthless will survive the feeding frenzy, so your best bet is to high tail it to the country and hope a community will take you in or join the most ruthless gang in the city and hope you get a good enough cut in resources to live on.

@Tom,

These are all good things to consider. Some few of us may be able to flee to the Deep Country. The rest will have to do something or do nothing where we are.

People who start preparing in place starting now may be prepared for some of your caveats if their own near surroundings break down to that level.

I live in the high-ish rainfall/snowfall Midwest. So my thinking is limited to that situation which is what I know. If the Great Lakestan area remains semi/sub-humid, then people who have real houses and who have taken the time to install roof-water collecting systems can store several thousand gallons of roofwater for personal and family use. If such people have also set up their own in-house humanure compoo system, and then have a for-sure way to sterilize the compoo when they dig it out of the humanure gathering toilet, then they won’t be sujecting themselves to their own diseases, at least.

Some yards are smaller than others. The smaller the yard, the stronger the “not enough land” caveat which you cite. I currently live in a not-nearly-enough-land situation in a co-op townhouse dwelling unit in the semiburbs. But when I was young, our family lived in a real suburban house on a quarter-acre lot. A large portion of bare-minimum survival subsistence could be grown on half of that quarter-acre lot. Maybe all of it. And some people are in that lucky situation.

About pests/diseases of crop plants: a sufficient amount of literature on the theory and practice of creating high multi-mineral high-bioactivity soil exists to where people can read it and apply it over the pre-collapse years to come, if they are motivated enough to do so. Deer PROOF and rodent PROOF fences can be installed between now and collapse. Nutrient deficient plants grown on mineral and bio-activity deficient soils will be physiologically deranged. They will produce the kinds of heat and volatile-chemical-offgassing signatures which many insects are adapted to detect and home in on. And then eat the sick plants involved. In my little garden I have had near-zero insect pest problems year after year after year. Healthy plants are stealthy plants and can passively hide in plain sight from the insect “pests” who never even detect them. Most of these insect “pests” are better thought of as “plant vultures” who are attracted to plants which are already are sick or dead-on-their roots. Dead plants standing.

For example, I have been amateurishly growing a SoutherMountain type of heirloom corn called Hickory Cane. One year some of the plants got just sick enough that a few aphids appeared on the fast-rising tassel stalk. After about 10 days, they disappeared. Otherwise, no aphids never. The only insect annoyance I had on my corn was Japanese beetles, who love to chew holes in the leaves and bite off the cornsilks. If the Japanese beetles reach annoying numbers ( every few years), I inspect the garden in the cool morning when the Japanese beetles are somewhat inactive from the morning cool. I put a few drops of oil on each one to cover-plug their breathing holes and smother them to death. I use olive oil because I want them to die happy.

The one really bad pest I had in my corn was squirrels. One year by accident I discovered the squirrels liked maturing sunflower seeds more than they liked maturing corn kernels. So sunflowers were a good decoy crop for the squirrels. After a couple of years new generations of squirrels knew nothing about corn.

Of course, that would not apply to a locust plague. I have no plans for that, not even theoretical.

About the fellow-humans menace, I again have no answers. Maybe my neighbors will all be heavily-enough gunned-up and they will value my presence enough that I will survive within their wall of loaded guns. Maybe whole regions of America will maintain some social order within their own areas. Or maybe not.

In the end, only Darwin knows who will live and who will die. We do what we can. Let Darwin decide.

\”composting (of yes, even human waste is supposedly possible)\”

I did it for several months on my rural property a while back, just as an experiment, and it was very easy, and almost cost free. Also produces some el primo fertiliser/soil conditioner.

Need to locate the composting site well, and know what you are doing.

But definitely doable, if you have a site for it.