Gentle Decline 1/8: Professions & Predictions

Hi. This issue has been subject to a few false starts, partly because one approach, involving what things could be like for our working lives in 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 years time ballooned into a future timeline at which Kim Stanley Robinson would probably have nodded approvingly, and partly because there's the odd news item that sends me into a brief frenzy of writing before I realise that it's substantially similar to something I've already written, is based on a status-quo understanding of economics, or can be summarised as "some old white dudes acknowledge that climate change might be a thing". I should also work on those run-on sentences.

Because I can't resist, and because this one gives me the heebie-jeebies, one news item/new bit of research before I get going: Rising CO2 might cause certain kinds of cloud to disappear. If this happens, global temperatures will rocket completely past the previous worst case scenarios within a century, by an additional 8C. Having put that bit of nightmare fuel out there, I'm now going to get on with talking about a future in which that does not happen.

The core question today is: how can I, personally, for each individual I reading this, earn a living in an era of gradual catastrophic change? And this is not easy to answer. There are three broad possibilities. First, you are lucky enough to work in a place and in a job that will not fundamentally change. There are very few of these jobs. If you work in a non-public-facing job in a post office in a small town in Ireland which is more than 50m above sea level, then it is just about possible that your working life will not change before such time as you retire - if retirement is still a thing then. Second, you will be in the broad category of people whose working lives change gradually (including "I do more or less the same thing in a different place", which in this era of career change is barely different at all), and I'll try to provide a bunch of if/then thinking for these below. Third, you will be in the hopefully small but realistically non-zero category of people whose working lives change completely and quite abruptly. This will be due to your place of work experiencing a fire, a flood, or other climate-related disaster, or being in the immediate periphery of one. There are differing risk factors for this, and I'll try to lay out some of them below, but by their nature, they are very individual. Some of my if/then thinking below will also apply to you, but the best core advice is: learn something new in your spare time.

...which is probably good advice for everyone, really.

If your work requires coastal access for you or your customers (anyone in the tourist trade at seaside resorts, beaches or cliffs, and the surf industry, for example), then: the next few years will get progressively more difficult. Not directly because of sea-level rise, although that will be a factor, but because storms and coastal flooding will happen a lot more. The facilities that are there - possibly including your place of work if it's right by the coast - will require a lot more maintenance, and may need to be moved inland. The number of suitable surfing days might actually increase at first, but there will also be more days when it's too dangerous. The number of days suitable for beach or cliff walks is likely to decrease. As flooding leads to road and other infrastructural damage (and see last issue's post-apocalyptic skill set notes), the number of people willing and able to visit seaside locations will decrease. It won't stop, but tourism businesses usually exist on pretty tight margins.

If your work involves growing crops, or selling produce, or goods made from produce, then: you're probably in for a rough decade. It won't be bad all the time, and the chaos of the changing climate might even play out in your favour occasionally, with good growing conditions some years. Other years, however, will feature droughts like last year's in Europe, storms at odd times of year, particularly hail and strong winds which can damage crops, polytunnels and greenhouses, stronger storms at the more expected times of year, severe frosts and lying snow (again possibly at odd times of year), and the ever-present rainfall brought up a few notches, with resultant flooding and soil saturation. If you're in North America, you're probably already experiencing some of this; for as long as the Gulf Stream is running, it does a lot to ease the weather in the Isles.

If your work involves livestock, then you're going to have to consider the possibility of moving to where the local climate better suits your animals, and you're going to have to look at changes in housing for them to accommodate stranger weather - colder, hotter, drier, wetter, and windier, all in succession and at random. Getting feed for them may be more expensive. But bluntly, you're probably not going to have as rough a time as the arable farmer next door.

If your work involves maintaining, repairing or installing infrastructural elements AND you are not dependent on at-risk depot locations: you're in the category of people who are going to be benefiting, at least as long as economies continue to behave even half-way sensibly. There will be a lot of work in your area in the next couple of decades. If you're actually physically installing the stuff, see about some training in working in water and in other poor conditions, in first aid, and so forth. If you're doing administrative or other desk work for such organisations, skill up in project and change management, and consider whether you want to do actual management - your organisation is likely to change or expand.

If your work involves immovable physical locations (quarries, mines, historic buildings, caves, rock formations) which are near coasts, then: you're going to be hit by many of the same effects as people who need coastal access. Flooding will be an issue, spring tides will be an issue, and in the case of caves, rock formations and historic buildings, your organisation may need to take steps to prevent physical erosion. The entire city of Venice is an example of this; Venice continues to sink, and sea level continues to rise, and the interaction of the two is eventually going to be extremely destructive. Holding it off as long as possible is the only thing that can be done, at least until someone manages to put the city into some kind of dome which will also hold off ground water. And some buildings will just have to be surrendered to the water, because funding won't be available for anything else. Your best bet is to seek a move to working with a similar location further inland.

If your work involves transport, particularly long-distance overland, whether goods or people, then things are going to be a bit weird. Obviously, you're all about mobility. There are going to be changes in technology, eventually, mostly potentially positive, like self-driving cars, or use of solar tech rather than fossil fuels - although the former may put some people out of work. But if you need to use ferries, then you're going to be caught up in all the effects of coastal flooding and the need to move facilities inland, and keep moving them until the sea stops coming (which is when the icecaps and glaciers have completely melted, which will take a while), or facilities are built which can adjust to being in deeper and deeper water. Rail lines and roads often follow coasts, so there's inevitably going to be some readjusting needed there. Some places that are not islands now will become so, and need bridges or small ferries; getting to them may become more difficult. There's little enough training that will help with all of this, but if you drive, make sure you can do so - and are licenced - with a variety of vehicles. Look into drone piloting, because that will enable delivery across short stretches of water - flood, tidal, or otherwise - which will otherwise be hard to get across. There is going to be plenty of work in moving stuff around, though.

If you work in rail or air travel, and the airports or termini you deal with are inland, then you might be in a very good position - sort of the opposite to the fixed location near the coast above. You're going to see an increase in volume of traffic through your workplace, with all that entails. If you're near capacity already, then it's likely that you'll be getting another runway or terminus building, in the case of airports, or more track laid in, in the case of rail - assuming there's room. Look into project management, management in general, or make sure you're up to date on your current skills, because work in your area is going to be in demand, and unlike the more open transport of road vehicles, there's limited capacity.

If you work in retail, services, sales, marketing, research, teaching, technical support, financials, customer success, software or web development, graphic design, or any of the million other overlaps of the academic, consumer, technical and office world, then it is harder to predict what things will be like for you. Certainly, there will be changes. Any of the details discussed above can affect you, and probably will, directly or otherwise. Some of them will be perfectly obvious - your office will have to move from Dublin's East Wall business park due to frequent flooding, and the new place may not be as well served by infrastructure for some years. Your supplier of coffee is going to have to put up the prices because the crop failed two years in a row, and your employer decides that free coffee for everyone is not going to work anymore. You get to work from home more because the roads are a mess due to the flooding 6 months ago and the fact that half the businesses in the city centre have moved to higher ground, causing massive congestion. Some will be less straightforward - it may be, for example, that your perfectly good business selling HR services to companies that specialise in mobile advertising just slowly keels over, because people's commutes are re-routed through areas that don't have good 4G or even 3G signals, and have reverted to graphics-free apps, so that your clients businesses, while they theoretically still have a large audience, don't have it at that crucial idle time, and can't afford you anymore. Or you can't actually engage in your particular game development anymore, because the graphics cards necessary to run it depend on chips made with vanadium or cobalt or unobtanium or the like come from one particular mine, which now gets massively flooded every few months, and the price has gone to the point where no new cards can be made for less than insane prices, and the existing cards are beginning to fail. And so on.

The changes, overall, are going to come from where, not what, but where affects everything, even when we think we're in the age of digital nomads.

And now, some reader questions:

"Do you really think things are going to go badly wrong?"

It depends on who and where you are. If you live in Bangladesh, yes. 15% of that country is going to be underwater regularly or permanently in the near future, and you won't be able to live there anymore. If you live in Cork city, you've slightly more time, and more places you can move to, but the same applies. If you live in an inland city, then not so much in the short term. But part of the issue here is that weather, on the small scale, and climate, on the larger, and economies, in between, are all chaotic, and we're throwing stuff into them that we don't understand. We could enter a period of super-storms next year. We could hit some massive threshold effect like the clouds link at the top of this issue and all just cook on a planet that's headed for too damn hot very quickly. It will all be gradual, certainly. But it will also all be different, and different is going to be 'wrong' for some people.

"What are your thoughts on water purification tabs?"

I mostly don't have any, to be honest. If you can get them, understand them, and they keep, go for it. As far as I know, boiling and straining water will sort out most things. I'd far rather see some permanent structure for purification - gravel beds, distillation chambers, or whatever - than a set of single-use treatments that will run out.

Alright. It's a Sunday afternoon, I'm more or less finished this line of thinking, and this could go out and clear my queue of one more item. Questions, replies and commentary all remain welcome. Unless I'm diverted by current affairs (Brexit looms ever more loomingly and loonishly), the next issue will probably be something of a dive into much-longer-term climate studies. Should you feel that Gentle Decline would be useful to someone else in your life, please forward it on and/or show them the subscription link at https://tinyletter.com/gentledecline