Gentle Decline 1/32: Alarums & Actions
Hello. This issue is a collection of links, bits of commentary, and assorted relevant-to-this-newsletter stuff that I have found, with some actions I'm going to take at the end. At the time of writing, Storm Francis is just pulling through Northern Ireland, having flooded chunks of the West (more than 50mm of rain in 12 hours at the Valentia observatory, and about 30mm in 4 hours in Bantry) and had high winds through last night. That was hot on the heels of Storm Ellen, which was less rainy and a lot windier, and was (until Francis took the title) the latest-in-the-year named storm on record. Now, we've only had the named storm system for 5 years, so that's not huge, except that the season rolls over on the 1st of September, and we're not really expected to have named storms after about April. Welcome to the new Irish weather.
Also of interest in local observations - and I'm repeating myself from Commonplace here - this looks like being a fantastic year on Ireland's east coast for foraging. The hazels and rowans are overburdened with fruit, every semi-wild apple I've seen is laden down, the blackberries only need a few days sun to come out in huge numbers, and initial signs are for an excellent mushroom year. That's great from my point of view of acquiring wild food, but somewhat odd given that last year was also an excellent foraging year. It's possible that this is the new normal, that plants are responding to higher average temperatures, fewer frosts, and so on, by producing more fruit. But we also had a period of drought (by Irish definitions, bear with me) in both years, and It Is Known (citation needed) that plants that are about to die off will produce a super-harvest with the last available energy, so as to maximise the chance of some seed taking somewhere. This latter is folklore, not backed by any science I can find, mind. We'll see. It would be nice, for local values of nice, if we got good forage harvests hereafter.
[ Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about anthropogenic disaster, and how to cope with it. Drew (still unemployed at time of writing) doesn't get paid to write it, but you can throw a coin to your doom-monger at https://ko-fi.com/drewshiel ]
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Anyway, on to the links and things I found:
Open Source Ecology is a site that brings together open-source designs for "a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker". I think they and I would have some disagreements as to what machines are essential, but it's a good idea. What would be an excellent thing would be a collection, ideally a book, of the things you need to do to have, say, mid-19th century tech. Start at "make charcoal", "mine iron ore", and work your way up to fully formed agricultural machinery. The sequel could then deal with everything you need to have the basics of modern technology, ideally without microprocessors, because I'm pretty sure you can build a lot of basic electrical stuff - washing machines, kettles, lighting - without needing a full industrial setup.
I invoked group houses as one of the ways in which I see housing going by the 2060s. One of the unspoken aspects there is that there is some form of internal communication going on, pretty nearly constantly. This concept of a group of people in constant conversation is one that I experience now, and I suspect many of you do too. There's some interesting thinking out there on this kind of group/communication as the Small Group and also as the Squad.
I also invoked the idea of Guaranteed Employment. I knew at the time I was writing that it wasn't a new idea. In researching it further, though, I was amused to find that this deeply socialist, nigh-on completely anti-capitalist idea was enacted in the United States in the 1930s, and further, that Naomi Klein has written about it recently.
And in further stuff that I probably should have linked in the previous issue, here's Kim Stanley Robinson talking about some of the concepts I called The Reset.
Some doom to go with the future-looking: the ice melt in Greenland has passed the point of no return. And one of the mad things about ice is that it piles up, and up, and up. So by the time all the ice on that one island has melted, it's going to push sea level, world wide, a bit over five metres higher all on its own. Here's a line which I had to come back to a couple of times and read over and over:
If all of Greenland’s ice goes, the water released would push sea levels up by an average of 6 meters — enough to swamp many coastal cities around the world. This process, however, would take decades.
There are two complete weasel words in that; "if" and "would". And one really sharp one: "decades". If we imagine that the process takes the maximum time we can describe as decades - 90 years - then we have 6 metres of sea-level rise by 2110. And let's assume for a moment that this is not linear, that it's going to follow the kind of rising curve we see in many natural processes. We get this kind of effect:
Do note that that by 2060, that gives us a 50cm rise in sea level. This is the most generous scenario, the one which pushes all the trouble out as far as possible. But if we allow for the progression to be linear, we're looking at something more like a 2.5m rise by 2060 (not precise, not a mathematician, don't @ me). That's pretty bad. And now I'm going to add two more things to that. First, this is only Greenland. Second, there is the possibility that this actually follows the opposite of the graph above, a steep rise sometime early on, which levels off later. That would give something more like 4.5 metres by 2060.
There are, of course, statements out there that say that it will take a thousand years to melt the Greenland ice pack. But they too contain whole weasel phrases like "at the current rate of melting". Anyone who can read the news can see that the current rate of melting is going to be the lowest rate of melting, on average, that we're going to see for the next century. That doesn't allow for positive feedback, either, and it's clear that that's going to be a factor. So I'm not unhappy - datawise, I'm deeply unhappy with the actual concept - with the idea that this will happen a lot sooner. The word "decades" could be over-egging it, mind. But I think it'll be way shorter than the thousand years.
Move inland, yo.
And speaking of moving... here's an excellent article from the New York Times, by Abrahm Lustgarten (photos by Meridith Kohut) about how climate migration has already begun (warning, it's pretty grim reading). This kind of migration is hard to see from a damp island in the North Atlantic, so my understanding of it is still pretty poor. I know about it in theory - crops fail, people go elsewhere, it's not complicated - but it doesn't have the visibility of human climate niche or sea-level rise; you can't see it on satellite. So one of my next areas of research is into the parts of the world like Guatemala where this is already an issue, and where those people are going, and how they're getting there.
By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1 percent of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing one of every three people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years.
That would be 2,600,000,000 people or thereabouts needing to migrate by 2070. That number makes my 2060 fiction look unreasonably optimistic. A quarter of that number would still make it optimistic.
Migration from Mexico and points southward to the US is pretty well modelled at this point. Part of the research I've been wanting to do is seeing if there's modelling out there of the movements of people around Africa/Eurasia; the Old World, in essence. I don't know if there are figures out there which say where people displaced in India will go - my assumption is other parts of India first, and then elsewhere - but if there are, that would help. Likewise for the Middle East, particularly the Arabian Peninsula, and for the parts of Africa affected by Saharan expansion. Some of the work detailed in the article there outlines this, but also notes that it necessitated a lot of powerful CPU time to run the models. So this is not the kind of stuff I can do in my head.
Two things that I noted from Lustgarten's work there: One of the movements mentioned is from SE Asia to the Persian Gulf and India's Ganges Valley. That's going to be troublesome, because those are two areas out of which people will be forced in the medium term; this is the second-wave movement I've talked about before. And the people moving don't really have the option to go elsewhere and forestall this; anything other than the easiest area to move to costs money they don't have, and "easiest" might be better phrased as "least difficult, but not by much".
There's also a note that in El Paso, Mexico, cooling costs are as much as one third of some people's income. That's insane, at the plain old monetary level, and also at the energy consumption level. It's effectively moving the heat out of each person's space, adding a bit to it, and dumping it elsewhere in the atmosphere; usually only a few metres away. Don't get me wrong, I love air-conditioning, and it's a thing that got me through the last few hot-from-my-point-of-view summers in reasonably good condition. But it's one of the most straight-forwardly destructive things we can do unless it's managed extraordinarily well, and it usually isn't.
I want to bring this back to stuff that people can do, rather than just showing how things are terrible and will be worse. In the process of writing Gentle Decline, I've gradually nailed down three principles that will work in the long term for dealing with climate crisis: Move inland; grow food; be generous. I think those are solid, self-explanatory, put-them-on-t-shirts-and-mugs type principles.
However, I also want to look at things that can happen to change our overall environments to make ready for the world we're going to have. Some of this will be applicable in broad senses, and other bits will need to be adjusted to where you are. I'm writing specifically for Ireland, but I think once you replace "flooding" below with your particular local climate alteration, you can probably use the thinking as written.
I'm going to stick with three things here, because triads stood my Irish ancestors in good stead as ways to communicate information. Three things in the future: the increase of immigration, the increase of flooding, and the need for local resources.
Immigration is going to increase. We have a duty to accommodate some of the people coming from areas affected by climate crisis, because our way of life has caused that crisis. So we'd best make ready for this. That means making sure that immigration processes work smoothly, and without putting people into bad situations. In Ireland, that means getting rid of the hellish Direct Provision centres, for a start. To do that, we need to provide places for people to live, allow them to seek work, and expect that they will live here in the long term. I have very little, verying on no patience for the people who say we'll be flooded with immigrants. We might well be. The places they're coming from are flooded with water and heat, so buck up and get on with helping them.
As a corollary, this will mean providing housing for the people already in Ireland, most of whom are Irish, who do not have places to live. This is such an obvious necessity that it's kind of stupid to have to write it down, but no doubt some fucker will start holding forth about providing for our own people first.
ACTION: Start hassling government to get rid of Direct Provision and replace it with something humane, including provision of social housing. This will involve letters on paper.
Flooding is going to increase. Ireland has had a bunch of small towns flooded from storm rainfall in the last week, and the combinations of sea-level rise, storm surge and high tides already means Cork goes underwater frequently. We need to start doing things to prevent and handle flooding. This includes building flood defenses, moving essential infrastructure away from flood-prone areas, and planting trees wherever possible to increase rainwater absorption.
ACTION: Start hassling government about flood defences and tree planting. Also do some work on social media promotion of tree-planting (and keeping the sheep from eating them) as flood prevention.
Local resources are hard to define. But essentially, what I mean here is that when you need A Thing, the less distance The Thing has to cover to get to you, the more likely you are to get The Thing in good time. The thing can be food, help with something, tools, raw materials for a project or to fix something, or really anything else that needs to be moved around. My particular thing is information, which is kind-of not affected by distance (as long as there's an internet connection). My secondary thing is practical skills.
ACTION: Set up a local group through which useful skills can be passed on. In my specific case, that's going to be handled through a sub-branch of the SCA shire, specifically for Kildare, and running, as the pandemic allows, local classes in various things. The lens of the medieval is useful here both for maintaining my interest, and for catching the interest of other people.
Alright. I feel that's enough to be getting on with for one issue. This issue brought to you by Storms Ellen and Francis, a book by Eric Holthaus which I'm still mulling over, a possible medlar tree in a local garden, and a new harness for the dog which transforms walking him. I'm giving up on trying to say what the next issue will be in advance, but I'm taking requests - hit reply to make yours.
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