Deep Adaptation

[vexed87]

I think it's fair to say that there's a growing number of forumites who are beginning to accept that the implications and real world impacts of AGW are being brought forward, ahead of the popular scheduled narrative, the immediate future is going to look very different to what most were imagining 10 years ago, we might be seeing grain shortages within the next decade and more and more climate refugees much sooner, financial systems will be stressed, and extreme early retirement may just become out of reach, at least in the terms of financial independence providing the standard of living some of us are accustomed to. I'm very much aware that other aspects of ERE are very resilient, and still worth pursuing!!!

If you are still on the fence, you may want to read this paper by Jem Bendell.

It makes me wonder why more of us ERE folk are not engaging in deeper discussion and reflection on these themes. The above paper talks about some of these reasons,taboo included, but what's most striking is the approach on how to shift away from the business as usual approach many get stuck in. I often find myself cycling through, denial, bargaining, acceptance just to get through the day. There's something interesting happening there, and this paper put that process into words.

This blog posting has some really interesting discussion that resulted from the feedback to the above paper which is also worth a read. In fact, having spent a couple days reading the blog, it's all good stuff!
https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/0 ... daptation/

I'd love to hear people's thoughts, particularly around the discussion to the response side of things. Not so interested in denialist dogma or techno optimism though, at least outside the scope of 'deep adaptation', there are other threads for that

[daylen]

I think we have been engaging in deep discussion about the response side of things. There is no global solution; there are only individual solutions. Everyone will have to come up with their own strategy if they want to improve their chances of survival, and the "ERE strategy space" will necessarily have much in common with any successful strategy.

[Stahlmann]

After entering job market, I became much more "normie" in many aspects of life. If you spend more than 1/3 of your time on doing stuff... there's no time on pondering on various "important issues".

Yes, feel free to call most of the people ignorant... but that's reality or it's only my cynical perception or projection of my knowledge. I wouldn't also call myself enlighted, because... well, you won't feed yourself with knowledge of AGW consequences.

Yes, one more time I put myslef in center of attention. If somebody is feeling offended, sorry for that.

[ThisDinosaur]

I looked through the links. Mostly seems like he's complaining that people dont take the threat seriously enough. Very little in the way of adaptation advice. He specifically rules out doomer/prepper/transition town solutions and gives a half assed endorsement of carbon sequestration technologies.

Once we've reached maximum global temperature and sea level, there should still be some place on earth at a survivable altitude and temperature, that also has fresh water and growing plants. Somebody somewhere must know where those places will be.

[jacob]

@TD - It's difficult to kill off all humans. If max temperature and sea levels are reached (something that takes at least a couple of human lifespans for the former and several human lifespans for the latter), there will only be a few hundred million humans left above the polar circles, rest dead by starvation. For areas,you'll be looking at Canada, Russia, Greenland (now ice free), and Scandinavia(*) ... maybe some stragglers in the southern part of Chile and New Zealand, and top parts of Scotland. Maybe some outposts near the coast lines of equator where it's cool enough thanks to the oceans to preserve some level of vegetation. Maybe antarctica will be settled.

(*) Minus Denmark which will be largely under water.

While it will be dark for much of the year, the growing season will be impressive with 20+ hr daylight allowing seasons as short as 90 days (so you can squeeze in 2 in a year). Remember: It'll be warm enough to grow wheat et al at this point.

It's probably best not to aim for maximums. They're pretty bad. Also, it's not like we can start farming northern Greenland yet ... we have to wait several hundred years for the ice to melt. Also, this is presuming that the atmosphere stays oxidizing. Apparently it's losing capacity as we speak... but, yeah, areas are not very relevant if humans are committed to feeling like a stage IV COPD patient because oxygen levels have dropped. In that case, birds will rule the world. Dinosaurs should do pretty well too

Insects, not so much.

So yeah, nice ... but this is at least out beyond year 2150+ which is further out than we are from world war 1.

More interesting, to me, is adapting to the 2025-2075 period under the constraint of not making it worse for those who come after.
Parents with children might ponder 2025-2125 (1.5 human lifespans) and I'm willing to entertain that too. The real interesting change will be around 3C+ which according to our behavior we'll pass through around 2060-2080 on the way to 4C. That's when the food systems will start getting compromised.

[Jean]

I think adapting means teaching ones child to cope with it.

[ThisDinosaur]

there will only be a few hundred million humans left above the polar circles, rest dead by starvation. For areas,you'll be looking at Canada, Russia, Greenland (now ice free), and Scandinavia(*) ... maybe some stragglers in the southern part of Chile and New Zealand, and top parts of Scotland.

To clarify, you're saying all surviving humans will be in the polar regions? Is this because the rest of the planet will be too hot for us, for our crops, or both? What minimum altitude is safe from sea level rise?

Maybe some outposts near the coast lines of equator where it's cool enough thanks to the oceans to preserve some level of vegetation.

Ecuador? How do we know cooling ocean currents will continue after climate change?

It's probably best not to aim for maximums. They're pretty bad.

Not clear on what you mean by this.

Also, this is presuming that the atmosphere stays oxidizing. Apparently it's losing capacity as we speak... but, yeah, areas are not very relevant if humans are committed to feeling like a stage IV COPD patient because oxygen levels have dropped.

What's the mechanism for the oxygen level dropping? Or do you just mean the CO2 level will be toxic to humans?

More interesting, to me, is adapting to the 2025-2075 period under the constraint of not making it worse for those who come after.
Parents with children might ponder 2025-2125 (1.5 human lifespans) and I'm willing to entertain that too.

This is specifically what I'm interested in learning. What strategies do you recommend for this? As much detail as you're comfortable with. Primary sources encouraged.

[jacob]

@TD - In short, the rest of the planet will be desert. It's not like we can't walk there, it's just that we can't live there. If/when all the ice melts (and this will take hundreds of years), ocean levels will be 200ft higher. Water has a higher heat capacity than air and land, so being close to the beach will always be cooler than inland. We're only talking a dozen miles. The effect decreases rapidly as you go inland. By bad I mean a situation that would kill off 8-10 billion humans and civilization as we know it. A thermal maximum would do that. The atmospheric CO2 level will never be toxic to humans. We're talking parts per million or parts per thousand at that point (the CO2 levels in your lungs are way higher than that). Atmospheric oxygen levels would be dropping when plant life dies away. The biggest problem here are the oceans which generate the majority of the planet's oxygen. Oceans are getting acidic as they keep absorbing CO2---at some point plankton can no longer live there.) Note that if/when such a point is reached, Earth will still be considerably less hostile to human life than Mars or the Moon. It's just that the planet surface will be turned into the "death zone" familiar to mountain climbers. You could still bring your own supplemental oxygen and you can also go without it---just not for very long.

The starting strategy I'm recommending is completely internalizing ERE. That's level 7-8 in the ERE Wheaton table. I think the complexity required for adapting to this will be to ERE as ERE was in complexity relative to FIRE. I'm working on fleshing it out. It's pretty much at the limit of my capabilities. The challenge of the predicament here is in analyzing hundreds and hundreds of disparate primary sources and developing a strategy out of that(*). However, presumably reading it should be easier than solving/writing it with following it being somewhere between the two. Dunno if there will ever be a tips and tricks version. Speaking of deep, I do note that genotypic intelligence is continuously dropping and pretty fast at that. Past (pre-agriculture) humans had bigger brains because their world was more complex. Ours is not ... all we have is the Flynn effect which requires "exercise", hence my recommendation to internalize ERE. It helps in the same way that having internalized permaculture makes it easy to understand ERE.

(*) I can show you the primary sources but they are like the pieces of a chess game... and what you presumably want is an opening strategy of how they work together.

PS: I think the above comments about "alien future earth in the 23rd or 27th century" are somewhat of a distraction and only interesting for those who care about the deep future, so sorry for derailing.

[daylen]

Are the great lakes large enough to moderate temperature extremes near the coast to the degree we need?

[luxagraf]

Are the great lakes large enough to moderate temperature extremes near the coast to the degree we need?

Siberia is better, north-flowing rivers have been improving soil there for centuries now.

[luxagraf]

Since there have not been many takers, here's my strategy:

I plan to die.

Which is to say most of the hard transition between now and the need for serious changes will occur after I have reached the end of my expected lifespan. But then I would push back Jacob's time table a bit. However I have three kids so I do have some plans for them that I hope will help them navigate the years of roughly 2050-2100.

[slowtraveler]

Isn't Spain already growing vegetables well in the desert?

50-80% of our energy use at the moment is already waste. Half of our food grown is wasted. It seems we have a huge amount of slack to clean up once we get the motivation as a species. I gave up hope once the corals started dying. 50% or so of the Great Barrier Reef is gone. I remember reading about this massive natural site as a kid and feeling it was indestructible. I cried the first few times I saw footage of the bleaching events since 2016.

The planet has had no ice before and life turned out well, cycles of extinction and flourishing variety as new niches arrive with new forms to inhabit them. Humans seem a very resilient kind. Not as resilient as rats but we're up there.

I saw a documentary on rats, one guy talked about an experiment he ran with a family of rats. He gave rats plenty of food and they multiplied, he then cut off the food, they began to cannibalize and do everything they could to survive. Humans can be the same. Happy under the best conditions, scary what we do when those conditions change. It would, however, drive a selection towards increasing intelligence again.

All in all, I'm an optimist. The singularity is near. The next steps after Moore's law finish exist at low levels to keep technology compounding forward. Colonizing Mars would show the possibilities of we work together, the scale is very different there since there's so many people here.

There's so much waste now that some humans weigh 400kgs and have teams dedicated to their care. There's a huge amount of room to cut waste. As oil gets more expensive, reusing those fuels by taking them from the atmosphere becomes more cost effective relative to solutions.

A few changes that could be implemented within 5 years of intense motivation on a cultural level:
Motorcycles/bikes instead of cars
Live close to food/work/school minimizes transport cost
Fan instead of AC
Share rooms
Small homes
Trains instead of trucks
Mushrooms and plants instead of excessive meat- ideally kill the animal yourself and use everything but everything is already used
Solar, wind instead of oil
Boats or trains for international travel

These changes would cut a massive percent of the energy spending but they require cultural shifts. Being an optimist is the only solution. Shaming people doesn't work, it just makes people not enjoy your company. We have a while to go.

The trends can be scary and the future is impossible to know before it happens. I'm taking life as it comes. Planning my ERE with a low wr. I believe humans will handle global warming. More and more people are becoming motivated. Only Amurica it seems is cutting its efforts at this point. Fossil fuels helped us get far, it's not an easy shift and it will require some optimizing. The price of oil spiking permanently would do a lot for reducing energy waste. No more idling hummers.

There's the problem of a very long time frame in the feedback loop involved. Oil price increases would shorten the loop.

Something peculiar to me is that most of the human population lives near the equator, where it's hot and humid. Also, near the coast. So there may be some warming that is beneficial since it'll open up more of the world to more pleasant conditions.

At this point, I'm already living in a country without clean tap water, with many stray animals, with more motorcycles than cars so I am likely consuming less energy than before by a long shot. Almost all my driving is carpooling a motorcycle.

[7Wannabe5]

As I noted in the IPCC thread, I currently believe that profound global economic collapse will precede emissions capable of producing temperature increase over 2.2 degrees approximately. Therefore, I am focusing my long-term investment towards support of my own theoretical great-grand-children (wishing all others on the planet the best possible luck in their own choices) on Northern timber and top-soil. Best-case scenario will leave me/them with valuable resort property. Worst-case scenario will leave me and my descendants dead no matter what. Mid-case scenario will find us living like 1930s farmers at rough summer camp.

[hojo-e]

Is multi-generational adaptation possible? There are so many unknown variables.

The first adaptation should be to not have a child. How could anyone who knows the scientific consensus and grasps the severity of the predictions do otherwise?

[7Wannabe5]

Is multi-generational adaptation possible?

Well, I have little choice but to make the attempt since my children are already age 30 and 27. My current rational expectation is 1.5 theoretical grand-children and 1 theoretical great-grand-child. Worst-case imagined scenario being I am 80 years old in 2045 and have nothing but liability to offer in SHTF Version 1A, 2C, or 4H.

[daylen]

In that case, birds will rule the world. Dinosaurs should do pretty well too

More like fungi has ruled the world and will continue to do so long after any animal.

[chenda]

I've had this vague idea floating around for a while as to the benefits of been part of some kind of self-identifying group for mutual aid to help with personal adaptation. Big enough for sufficient in-house expertise but small enough to have a level of group cohesion.

Minority ethno-religious groups, globally dispersed and have millennia of shared history potentially might be more adaptable in an unstable world. Zoroastrians, Jews, Irish Travellers etc. Strong sense of group cohesion. Downside might be the risk of scapegoating and extermination.

EDIT: This is not advocating an itinerant lifestyle, as appears to have been misunderstood below.

[Riggerjack]

Are the great lakes large enough to moderate temperature extremes near the coast to the degree we need?

Sure. Until they dry up, that is. See great salt lake, and death valley for how that works, longer term. See Lake Mead for how that looks short term.

The world will be warmer. That's not so hard to work out. Look at a map. The temps down south will move north. California will be more like Mexico, PNW will be more like Cali. Eastern Washington will be more like Eastern Cali. This is because there will still be an ocean and mountains. Warm air moving across water will still pick up humidity, and dump it over land. But the gentle drizzle I am used to, will be replaced by monsoon like storms. Warmer just means more energy in the system, so bigger, more sudden storms and less mist and clouds, locally. Shifts in predominant winds will affect coastal range areas, but not likely to be a big concern inland.

The great plains is even easier, as the rivers go south and away, rather than in. Less rain will mean less water going into the lakes until evaporation exceeds rainfall. Then the lakes will receed for a generation or 2. Eventually, WI looks more like Tx. You see any big lakes in Tx? LA? AR? It's not that they don't get rain, it's that they evaporate faster than they accumulate.

Now go into Google maps, and look at the coast of moracco. Or better, look for African towns before fossil fuels. This can be done by scrolling into towns, and looking for the area that clearly wasn't laid out in a grid. Now scroll back out a bit. All that grid area is fossil fuels growth. Try it again in other parts of the globe. Get comfortable with it. Try to imagine how the reversal of that trend will look. When you have 1000 people where there are resources for 20, and no more resources coming in, you get a good grasp on the scale of the issue. Now think of how well the itinerant band of ERE Gypies suggested above will be received.

The problem isn't carbon, and never was. The problem is fecundity. And nobody is even willing to face that, let alone deal with it. A human population of one million doesn't need a carbon tax, and a carbon tax won't help a population of 7+ billion.

Again, this isn't a problem we can address thru politics.

[daylen]

I have been focusing my attention on two activities which I believe can effectively ward against certain risks. The primary activity is to identify potential black swans (or high risk events), then to estimate their frequency and severity to the systems which matter the most to my existence. This is heavily aligned with what actuarial science is all about(*), so I am thinking of transitioning into that path. The second activity is to investigate the dynamics of complex networks, and to extend the symbiotic relationship between humans, their brains, forests, and fungi. Both a brain and a fungal mass are highly complex, coupled systems and will remain quite mysterious for the foreseeable future. I think that if more humans attended to the intricacies of fungal networks, then we may find some hidden gems(**) while inspiring people towards discovery of the unknown. Space is a distraction right now.


(*) It looks to me like many actuaries, quants, and data scientists are converging onto the same role. Risk and opportunity are indistinguishable in the math. Dynamic hedging is essentially what the whole financial industry does now; the difference between a bank and an insurance company is the instrument used and time-scale.

(**) Massive potential for medicine and bioremediation.

[TheWanderingScholar]

As someone is currently living in the Baltics, which is just south of the Baltic Sea, and will be for the considerable future. I have been looking for a lifelong passion to study about, I am probably going to focus on currently Urban Climate adaptation in Baltic countries. I already have contacts in neighboring country focusing on LCA (Life Cycle Assessment), already contacting someone whose focus is on grant writing and policy implementation with like twenty+ years experience at my local university in another department.

Helps that I am already focusing on climate change on the local region, with a recent class assignment on extreme flooding events in the country, and use of various 3D modeling assessment.

So yeah, overall a little time promoting transitional cities in the Baltics, and increasing reliance upon one's self, and in general just trying to implement policy on the local level to help adapt to climate change with everything that comes with it, is a noble enought goal for a kakskummend kolm aastat vana. Or in English, twenty-three year old.

As for preventing disastrous climate change?

Yeaahhhh...I don't the tools for that shit on hand or even at the epicenter of major makers of GHG emissions. Seriously, combined the three Baltic countries make up 0.12% of global GHG emissions in 2014. Even if they were to go fully zero, they would not make quarter of a fucking percent in reduction of total GHG. Seriously. WTF?

So honestly focusing on making sure the little countries I give a shit about have a good shake at things. I guess I can focus on sub-saharan Africa, which is set to explode economically, and therefore environmentally has the largest impact incoming, however.

I really, really, really hate the heat and humidity.

Seriously...that is like one of the many main reasons I left Texas.