Gentle Decline 1/2: Continuity & Considerations

Beginning

Second issue. It's always doubtful with a new project whether it's actually going to get to that difficult second issue. But here we are, and I think there's enough in this to be thoughtful, or at least thought-inducing. I'm not pretending to be any kind of slow-apocalypse guru here, mind. I don't know all that much about this, and haven't thought or worked on any of it in any detailed way, beyond a back of the head thing for a couple of decades. I mean, I have evacuation plans, and I know the kinds of things I'll need to do in the event of a slow crash in civilisation. But that doesn't mean I can see where it's coming from.

Middle

Anyway. The Thing In The Media, as the Northern hemisphere's heatwaves begin to abate, is how hot it was. How unusually, record-breaking-ly hot it was, and how hot it's going to continue to be. There are two articles from the Guardian that are apropos here: Inequality in Heat, and What 50C Is Actually Like. Now, once you discount the Guardian's unique combination of middle-class tutting and popcorny disaster porn, there's a lot of information in those. I'm going to cherry pick a few bits, rather than break it all down.

First, there's a linked article that says:

Previous work has shown that a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C can be considered an upper limit on human survivability. On the basis of an ensemble of high-resolution climate change simulations, we project that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in South Asia are likely to approach and, in a few locations, exceed this critical threshold by the late 21st century under the business-as-usual scenario of future greenhouse gas emissions.

The definition of wet-bulb temperatures is complicated, but it's connected to evaporation rates. As such measurements get higher, sweating is less effective, and there's a threshold at 35°C where sweating doesn't cool you anymore, and you start to gain heat from the surrounding air, not dissipate heat into it (Geoff Manaugh postulates invisibility to infrared vision in these conditions). So when you get to that measurement - which doesn't mean the temperature as measured by normal thermometers; that can be higher - then all you can do is get to a cooler place. Underground, if you can get far enough, might suffice. Somewhere with lower humidity will help. Or air conditioning, which will work for the space it's affecting, and fairly directly exacerbate it in both the immediate short term and the wider long term. Assuming your electrical supply holds up. Otherwise, that's it, the limit of human survivabilty.

And that's on a business-as-usual basis, taking no account of feedback loops in climate, which are probably kicking off already.

Next, the actual landscape, and urban habitation, have an effect on this.

[P]eople living in hotter areas within cities (based on land surface temperature or modeled estimates of air temperature) had 6% higher risk of mortality/morbidity compared to those in cooler areas (95% CI: 1.03-1.09). Those living in less vegetated areas had 5% higher risk compared to those living in more vegetated areas

And of course there's a correlation between trees in an area and wealth, because what would poor people dowith trees? There's a reason the richer suburbs of Dublin and London are described as "leafy". The issue where I talk about capitalism and its future ills is still some time out, but right now I want to flag up that the economic unevenness of the effects of climate change are not going to be in any way helpful.

Despite the evidence, of course, there's still plenty of denial going on at governmental levels worldwide, and The Atlantic sees a general rightward shift (a fictionward shift, for my money) on the topic. The thing which puzzles me here is that it must be more and more evident to anyone that climate change is real, and having real effects. At what point does the profit motive (the usual motivating force of the right) stop overcoming the fact that bad things are going to happen? Cynically, this will happen at the point and to the degree that they're happening to the right-wing politicians, or at a minimum, their immediate family and aides. More hopefully, it'll happen when voters begin to consider it a real issue - but with the politicians doing their best to cripple science education and climate information, that may be a few years out yet.

So with an eye to actually dealing with all of this, let's take a look at some planning. Starre Julia Vartan, as an example, has an article on a climate change survival plan, but like most, it's heavy on the tech, mostly derived from fiction, and relies on a few technologies which don't exist yet. While emergencies can help develop new tech, ones that restrict the availability of resources are going to make it difficult, and these floating, underwater, and airborne communities aren't going to be anything more than a blip for some decades, at the very least. There are some more realistic, engineering-driven takes on this, though.

You might see also Howard Hardiman's efforts to deal with the likely effects of Brexit on a remote island. This isn't the same set of causes, but the effects are going to be interestingly similar - food supplies become difficult, transport gets harder, and we roll back a few generations of physical technological progress. This is much more interesting to me, because it's possible right now; all you need is organisation, and people who will stick around rather than going to places that seem better. Of course, in the Brexit scenario, there will be places that are better; in the grip of climate change, that may not really be the case until things settle again.

A lot of thinking is also tied up in mitigation of causes of climate change, rather than dealing with the effects of change, like this lengthy Australian plan. That's good thinking (and some of it is useful for my purposes), but realistically, few enough people will take it up, because humans will continue to tend toward maximum comfort and least effort, and that plan is neither.

Overall, I'm not finding plans to handle climate change out there, which probably means I'm going to need to write my own. That's ok. Watch this space.

End

This issue brought to you by a four-day working week, a morning where a jacket was needful, and a kettle that can go to 90C and stop. If you have news, links, plans, or other stuff you think I might be interested in, send them my way. I won't promise to include them here, but they'll all be read and thought about.