A confession: I’ve known about climate change for a long time. And for a long time, I didn’t believe it.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, people around me scoffed at the whole idea. I did, too, especially on cold days. “Ha ha, here’s that global warming those nutty scientists talk about.” But I never bothered to really learn what they meant.
Later I looked into it and realized lots of data from many different sources pointed to rising global average temperatures, coincident with our rising carbon emissions. But it looked like serious problems were still decades away. We have time to fix all this, I thought.
I wasn’t wrong. We had time, but we didn’t use it well. Here’s a chart showing Earth’s average land temperature relative to an 1850-1900 baseline. You can see how the warming trend accelerated after about 1980.
Or, shown another way, here is the average temperature by month. Each line represents one year since 1850. The black one on top is 2023. It was the hottest year on record every month from June through yearend.
The reason isn’t complicated. Despite all kinds of efforts, global carbon emissions are still climbing.
And if OPEC’s oil demand forecasts are correct, it will get worse in the next five years. The cartel expects fossil fuel consumption to grow about 10% by 2028 in the emerging market countries (mainly China and India) while the OECD (wealthy) countries keep burning as much they do now.
Was 2023 just an especially hot year? Maybe. Other things are happening: an “El Nino” weather pattern, a big volcanic eruption last year, the sun’s natural cycles. But the trend is clear. Filter out the noise and the world is on track to reach 1.5C warming in less than 10 years.
That means we’re going to have problems.
In fact, we’re already having problems: extreme, unprecedented weather events all over the world. Just in the last year we saw a whole town burn in Hawaii… giant forest fires in Canada… a flood in Manhattan… heatwaves in Europe… seawater flowing up the Mississippi River toward New Orleans… a drought hobbling the Panama Canal… high sea temperatures killing Florida’s coral reefs… and continued polar ice cap shrinkage.
All this will only get worse as average temperatures continue to rise. The future isn’t the future anymore. It’s here.
We might be in a better spot if more of us had taken this seriously years ago. We didn’t. Now we have to face the situation as it is, not as it could have been.
We have two tasks:
Continue all the current decarbonization efforts and activism. Even if we can’t stop the train, slowing it down will help.
And…
Prepare our families and communities for years of increasingly extreme weather.
These two are equally important but the second one – what I call “Climate Survival” – needs more attention. That’s where I intend to focus this publication.
Getting through these times will force all of us to learn new skills. Having endured a couple of weather disasters, my wife Grace and I have thought a lot about how to make our home – and ourselves – more resilient.
Changing weather is only the first manifestation of climate change. Dealing with the second-order effects will be challenging, too.
Our physical infrastructure – roads, bridges, dams, vehicles, homes – is designed for conditions that no longer exist. A lot of it will break down or stop working at all.
Worse, our food system is built for optimal conditions, too. We raise certain kinds of crops and livestock in certain places that have always worked well. What if they stop?
Animal life – including insects – will be on the move, bringing dangerous microbes to new places. More pandemics and disease could follow.
I don’t expect civilization to collapse. I’m not retreating into end-of-the-world prepper mode. Nevertheless, I believe life is going to change dramatically until we somehow stop the planetary warming trend. Even the most optimistic climate scientists say that’s years away.
Climate Survival News will help you get through these years intact – and help others do the same.