Gentle Decline 1/1: Inclinations & Intentions

Beginning

Welcome to Gentle Decline. I'm Drew, and I'll be your host through this collection of material about, if not the end of the world, then a slow decline of the world we know into something different. Mostly, these emails will consist of some links, and some commentary from me. I welcome replies, and pointers toward more information on anything I've written about.

Middle

I suppose I should talk a little bit here about the kind of things I want to talk about, and about the ideas that drive this. First and foremost, I am certain that the world is on the edge of some considerable change. To be fair, this has been true throughout my life, and it's not as though that shows any sign of slowing down. The difference here is that I think that the coming change will likely be something that is different in tone. It won't be the bright, cheerful, technological change of the Internet and the mobile device and the social network platform, but a somewhat grimmer one of altering climate and damaged habitats and reduced resources. And it's important to understand that all of this is stuff that we, humans, did to ourselves, and we've known we were doing it for a long time. And it's important to understand that the kind of future I'm talking about is, in the words of William Gibson, unevenly distributed - which is to say, some of it is here already.

This project is also inspired by Tom Critchlow's small-b blogging, by Warren Ellis, and by conversations I have with family and friends on a week to week basis. Other influences will probably make themselves known over time. For a start on my thinking on what's to come, you can read 7 Changes in the Next 50 Years.

And to get things rolling in this first issue, here's an article from the Guardian about the Gulf Stream.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/13/avoid-at-all-costs-gulf-streams-record-weakening-prompts-warnings-global-warming

This is one of the potential outputs of climate change that utterly fascinates me, because it will, as far as it's understood, do a very counter-intuitive thing: plunge Europe into vastly harsher winters. We've had a small taste of what that may be like here in Ireland this year, with heavy snow. I've written elsewhere about the effects of that, and what may happen if it's just a little worse.

If this happens, Ireland will have the kind of climate that northern Norway now has - albeit without the long winter nights and long summer days - with more storms than we currently have. Northern Norway itself will become uninhabitable. The rest of Europe will adjust, climate-wise, in some like manner. But it doesn't much matter what the change is, the problem is that we're not set up for change. Irish buildings cannot cope with that kind of winter, and Irish landscapes are not able for the kinds of storms we'll get. Our infrastructure already quails at a week of snow; it will not in any way handle two months or more. And our agriculture will be completely screwed, both in arable crops and livestock.

We will not be able to look to our neighbouring countries for help, because every one of them will be coping with similar changes.

Now, I'm a historian when I'm not spouting doom and gloom here. And among historians, I fall firmly into the continuitist camp, which holds that there are few to no sudden changes in history, and that even when there are sudden causes and sudden effects, that change happens slowly because culture changes slowly. So I don't think that we're going to wake up to a massively different society overnight, even if the local climate shifts massively over the course of a few years. That change will happen fairly gradually. People will start to look at places further south, in Spain or the Mediterranean, maybe even North Africa. Somewhere will benefit, in climate and agricultural terms, and people will tend there. Ireland will not be suddenly depopulated, but it - along with Scotland and Scandinavia, and maybe Northern England - will slowly move to a different way of living. We might see people from Scandinavia coming here, in a sort of thousand-year-later echo of the Viking era. There will still be agriculture. There will still be livestock. The soil won't change, and the angle of the sun in the summer won't change. We probably won't see drought much, because we'll still be an island in the North Atlantic. But there will be changes in agriculture, and infrastructure, and architecture, and changes in urban design. We'll adjust. And we'll need to, because much of the rest of the world will be changing too, and we'll need to keep up.

So what can we do about this in advance? There's certainly the policy level, but to be honest, our government bodies are reactive, not proactive, and changing that is a larger project than I fancy taking on. New policies will appear when the problems have been happening for a few years, and no sooner. And even then they'll be half-measures, because people seem to believe they can apply conservatism to physics and climate.

It's personal measures that I'm most interested in, and which I'll largely be talking about here. So in the medium term: be prepared for more extreme weather. Make sure you have the capacity to get through a few days without electricity or gas. As Swedish citizens were recently advised, although that was in case of war with Russia, keep a week's food in the house. I'm not going to go Full Prepper here; hoarding piles of canned will only get you through the period while the cans last, and then you're unready for whatever comes after. But having enough around to get over slight wobbles is sensible. Make sure that even if you can't insulate your house differently, you can keep warm - a stove or open fireplace, blankets, the ability to boil water on said fireplace, or at the very least, the ability to light a fire in the back yard to heat water. I'll expand more on this theme, and the thinking behind it, in future issues. And start thinking about longer term things, too.

There's one final piece of the Guardian article which I want to quote: "If we can keep the temperature rise to well below 2C as agreed in the Paris agreement, I think we run a small risk of crossing this collapse tipping point." That's grimly amusing because all the evidence suggests that we can't keep the temperature rise as agreed in the Paris agreement. We don't stand a chance of it. So, well, brace.

End

This issue brought to you by a cool August evening, a purring cat, and a pot of lapsang souchong tea, the last of the pack.