How Long the Decline?
Doomer Lannie is back, bitches! Capitalism is doomed. Democracy is doomed. A climate change apocalypse has already begun. The sixth mass extinction is underway. The extinction of humanity, as Medium writer and doomer-in-chief Umair Haque puts it. (…and puts it, and puts it…) The only question now is just how bad things will get how quickly.
While I am devoting some of my creative energies to try to innovate new, out-of-the-box mitigations, recently I’ve been putting some energy into another direction, which is convincing myself that the doom will not come for me, personally, for another 30 years. Because that would make me 97 years old, so it is highly likely that, by then, I will have already had my personal doom, meaning I’ll be dead from health problems or old age or accident. If I can convince myself that the global disasters will not crash down on my personal head for 30 years, I can stop being so worried about it. (Apologies in advance for the selfishness of this article.)
If I can convince myself that the global disasters will not crash down on me for 30 years, I can stop being so worried about it.
The crisis that really worries me is climate change—let’s call it global warming. Make no mistake, the world faces plenty of other terrible problems today as well. To pick two of the top ones, we have the political descent into authoritarianism and wealth inequality e.g., massively growing poverty. Fortunately for me, I am privileged to be a financially comfortable caucasian person living on the liberal north coast of California, so I am fairly isolated from the effects of these problems. While it is by no means certain that they will not impinge upon my little paradise in the next 30 years, they are not top of mind for me right now, in regards to my personal life circumstances. However, global warming is coming to get us all. If you want to dig deep into the data, why not let Medium writer Richard Crim be your guide. Richard follows the data and predicts 800 million to 1.5 billion deaths in the next five years. I’ve already had to evacuate my home for two weeks due to wildfires exacerbated by global-warming, namely, the CZU Lightning Complex fires of a couple of years ago. I’ve already accepted that My House Will burn Down at some point.
If my house does not burn down for a goodly number of years, how else can global warming come and get me? Well, how is it already getting many people in many places?
- First and foremost, obviously, global warming is already causing heat disasters. Medium writer Araci Almeida writes heartbreaking stories of how her dear Potugal is already nearing a state of being uninhabitable due to the heat and severe drought. Even London has been hit by a killer heatwave. I should be pretty okay on heat for a long while, though, being quite close to the ocean and surrounded by a cool redwood forest.
- Last winter saw terrible flooding in Germany, Kentucky, and other places. Pakistan just lost 1,000+ people to flooding. I think I’m pretty well situated to avoid floods: I live in the hills near the top of a hill, so even the worst rain storms or damn breaks should not flood me. Mudslides are a very real danger, though, but I’m probably okay as long as the redwoods around my home have not burned up.
- Sea level rise is already impacting Miami and other low-lying areas, with sea-level driven flooding arriving daily with the high tides in some areas. I’m only 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean but, again, I’m up in the hills so rising oceans will not flood me. Although I suppose they could invade our groundwaters, destroying our community’s well-driven private water system.
- Hurricanes, tornados and megastorms tend to hit the Atlantic coast and the Great Plains in the U.S.A., but not my Pacific coast. However, unusually severe freak lightning storms are hitting in my area up through Washington state, coastal and inland, igniting wildfires like my CZU Lightning Complex fire, so I guess I’m vulnerable there. (And there are always idiots with campfires and matches.)
- Global warming is bringing us pandemics like COVID and Monkey Pox, and surely more on the way. They have and will hit my little enclave of Santa Cruz County, but our COVID numbers were modest compared to Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York, Floridda, and so on. I suppose that is mostly beause we have a relatively low population density and (in my area at least) relatively high wealth levels. I can at least hope that this will continue to be the case in future pandemics. Besides, I am a homebody on the verge of retirement, so I live in near-isolation anyway. I may be cautious enough and lucky enough to have the worst of the diseases bypass me.
- Drought/aridification is a big problem in California (including my area), the USA southwest, the Horn of Africa, Portugal, northern Italy, Brazil, southern China, and plenty of other places in the world. Follow Medium writer Arthur Keith for in-depth, data-based dooming on the water/drought situation, an occassional topic for him but well worth the wait. As I mentioned before, my community has a private, well-based water system and I don’t think the nearest agriculture is pulling from the same aquifer. So I may be okay there, though I would be wise to check that out.
- The droughts/aridification, killer heatwaves, and unstable weather patterns are already causing crop failures around the world. I expect to see famines and starvation this winter. I think I should be okay for a while because California and close-to-my-area of the state are big agriculture centers. Even with farm yeilds dropping, we should still have food on our grocery store shelves. Besides, the U.S.A. is a wealthy nation and I live in a wealthy area thanks to the proximity to Silicon Valley. In addition, I’ve got a pretty good nest egg saved up for retirement because I’m just wrapping up a highly paid Silicon Valley engineering career. So I should not face starvation, even in the next 30 years. On the other hand, if the shelves at Safeway do go bare (and Blue Apron stops delivering), I’m toast. I have no idea how to get food besides going to the grocery store or, in a pinch, the farmer’s market. (Or ordering from Blue Apron or Amazon.) Besides, if the supermarket shelves go bare, things will be so awful that I fully expect bad men with guns to come to my house and take all my stuff and, if I am lucky, make me very dead.
- Hmmmm, that pretty good nest egg I’ve got? Maybe I can’t rely on that as much as I’d always assumed. Inflation is already eating into its value and climate change is going continue to stoke inflation in coming years and decades. Medium writer Frederick Bott has a plan to fix that using Kardashev Money. Frederick argues that this type of financial system based on the effectively unlimited energy that the Sun provides for us daily is inevitable, but I fear it may be too slow arriving.
Oh dear, writing this article has had the opposite effect from what I was hoping for. I’m not going to make it 30 years, am I? Any one of these effects may not crash down on me for 30 years, but the odds of all of them waiting that long are pretty low. Hell, I’ll be lucky to make it through the end of the decade. Global warming has me (and you) in its sights. Maybe it’s time for me to get my Sarco pod on order. Or at least join Medium author Tessa Schlesinger’s Climate Change Community website and support Medium author Ray Katz’s A Climate Declaration.
— Lannie Rose, 8/2022
P.S. Thanks to all the Medium writers I name-checked in this article. You paint a rational, consistent, and terrifying picture of the climate crisis and what lies immediately ahead. For those of us who dare to pull our heads out of the sand (or out of our asses), you are an invaluable source of information and sanity.
Resource: Risk Factor is a free web tool created by the nonprofit First Street Foundation to make it easy to understand the risks [of flood, wildfire, and heatwaves] from a changing environment [over the next 30 years across the United States]. I don’t know how to judge the accuracy of their data, but I found it interesting to zoom in on my area and see what they predict. It’s not pretty.
