
Advice for a climate change apocalypse - rr-geil-j
https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article235384162.html
======
mooreds
Loved 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
I 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
That 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.

------
notthemessiah
John 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-
amer...](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/anasazi-america-
part-1/)

[https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/anasazi-
amer...](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/anasazi-america-
part-2/)

[https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/civilization...](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/civilizational-
collapse-part-3/)

[https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/civilization...](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/civilizational-
collapse-part-4/)

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
Connections 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
I think it was The Learning Channel, before it went to complete TLC shit with
incipid "reality" drama all day.

~~~
kbenson
Yep, that sounds about right. I think maybe Discovery isn't quite as bad as I
made it sound (even if it did go down hill some), but TLC just went straight
to all reality shows, and I was conflating them.

------
Beltiras
I'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.

~~~
oflannabhra
So basically, don't be a woman?

~~~
Beltiras
I 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
Alternative: misogyny is so ingrained into our worldview that we view it as
the default, natural state we revert to.

------
crazydoggers
While 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_Nat...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature)

2\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strate...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy)

------
kenforthewin
I 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.

------
beat
Something 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
This 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
The 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.

~~~
beat
That's assuming there are mass migrations due to lack of food. Why can't they
just adjust crops? We keep imagining agriculture as some sort of on-off switch
- "We have crops, and then the global warming happens, and suddenly we no
longer have crops". It doesn't work that way. We'll see production declines,
maybe, but not sudden elimination of entire food supplies. And production
declines can be dealt with intelligently - switching crops, altering harvest
cycles, etc. Again, in the past century, humanity has handled a quadrupling of
the population and wound up with _more_ food surplus and lower food costs than
at any point in history. And that's without whatever future the introduction
of genetic engineering, internet-of-things, and other modern technologies
bring to the table.

------
Bootvis
Also 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)

------
z3phyr
Why is this flagged @dang? Am I missing something?

------
adrianN
A good strategy is probably moving to a rich country now, before the
unprecedented refugee crisis starts.

------
carapace
_Post_ -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.

------
kabdib
"Ten across, 7 letters, synonym for 'Prepper'".

"Refugee."

"That works."

~~~
pjc50
Exactly. The climate crisis is likely to look a lot more like Europe's refugee
crisis.

------
tonytheliger
This guy says "I" too much.

------
charliesharding
"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.

