Initially developed to treat folks who have already developed heat stroke, these boxes are apparently now being deployed to keep employees who are toiling in extreme heat just cool enough that they do not develop heat stroke in the first place - and thus, one assumes, so that they do not inconveniently die on the job.

Name: the Do Hiemon Box.

Specs: about the size of a human. Made of stainless steel. Modelled, apparently, on refrigerated vending machines.

What they do: provide a space to sit that is cooled to 59 degrees F, with a jet of 5 degree F air that blows directly at the user’s neck and head.

Cost: just under ten thousand American dollars.

Stupidity level: since this is my first entry in this series, I don’t know. I haven’t yet begun to calibrate the scale.

And perhaps these are not terribly stupid if rolled out in factories or in businesses with no air conditioning (perhaps because of infrastructure limitations). But can’t you easily imagine these popping up on street corners, as “the world warms?” (Do not get me started on that phrase, BTW.)

I can easily see a day in the not very distant future where cities hit with endless summer heat domes roll out fleets of these babies: cities like Manhattan, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, Dallas, Albuquerque… and Saginaw Michigan.

It takes no advanced imagination at all, in fact, to picture that a short sesh in the Chill-EE Box, or Calming CoolR, or Freeze Friend, or however they are cutely named, will cost you five bucks - ten bucks - more? And even less imagination to then assume that the amount you’ll spend to not die in the fucking heat will be set by (checks notes) SURGE PRICING. [cue horror movie organ music]

I am not arguing that there isn’t a problem.

I am suggesting that tackling the ACTUAL problem might be a better idea than rolling out janky, half-assed “solutions” instead. Particularly since I see nothing but corporations jumping on this bandwagon to “maximize shareholder value,” etcetera etcetera tedious corporate behaviour etcetera.

More later. For right now… does this seem like a great idea to you?

For much of the past 35-ish years I have been in the midst of reading or re-reading one of the astonishing novels that make up the legendary Master and Commander (Aubrey-Maturin) naval saga.

There are twenty of these books, which makes for a deliciously long re-re-re-re-read cycle. The stories were written by a fellow named Patrick O’Brien who, despite having no seafaring experience at all, built up an intricately detailed picture of the world of the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars - from the particulars of the ships and the sails (their evocative names, how they are hung, the ropes that are used, etc.) to the ranks of the men and the societal protocols on land and sea. These books are densely-written, detailed, and packed with absorbing facts about life on sea and on land at the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries.

That might make them sound dry. They are not. From first to last, the adventures of Jack Aubrey (the naval man) and Stephen Maturin (his friend, a doctor and spy) are crammed with intrigue, spycraft, romance, bromance, lively adventure, derring-do, chills, thrills, humor, pathos, grit, and society gossip. They include the medical, scientific, and naval minutiae that my inner geek craves, and pair it with sweeping travel writing, soaring adventure, and superb female characters, all written in compact, elegant prose that will make you weep.

The novels inspired a 2003 movie directed by the always exceptional Peter Weir. I generally avoid movies inspired by books that I love, but in this instance was persuaded to reluctantly make my way to the theatre, where I was instantly enchanted. Starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany at their luscious and plummy prime, with tall ships, glorious music, production design to die for… it was swoonworthy. If you haven’t seen it, treat yourself! And then maybe… check out the first book? (Hint: it’s called Master and Commander.)

I have often thought that when I die I will be plopped in an armchair, reading. Given how frequently I return to the O’Brien series (the whole of which I would characterize as an unimprovable masterpiece) it is reasonable to assume that the tome that drops to the floor with a THUMP from my lifeless hand, alerting whoever is in the house with me that I am stone cold dead, will be Master and Commander, or Desolation Island, or The Far Side of the World, or The Yellow Admiral.

But enough of the sales pitch. I am here to discuss millers.

In the 3rd book of the series, H. M. S. Surprise, Stephen is conducting an experiment on rats. Several of the midshipmen on board are hungry, and so steal Stephen’s rats and eat them. Jack explains to his puzzled friend that the sailors eat rats, which they call “millers.” The name was chosen for two reasons. One, because when the rats get covered with white powder from romping through flour barrels, they look like tiny human grain millers. Two, because calling the rats “millers” will, in Jack’s words, “make ‘em eat better.” Which is to say, if the sailors just called them “rats,” the rodents wouldn’t be as enticing. Calling them “millers” makes the vermin more palatable.

Accounts from the time report that millers - cleaned, skinned, and neatly gutted - were often sold from the deck by midshipmen. They were fried in leftover fat, sometimes first dredged in flour, or roasted over the coals of the fire. Sailors contemporaneously reported that they were delicate and fine and as tasty as rabbit. I do not doubt it.

So why discuss millers now?

Well, I have lately been doing a lot of reading about prepping, specifically the strain of writing focused on the anticipated societal collapse brought about by global warming. The prepping focus tends to be on living in a presumed future where agriculture has collapsed, the supply chain is in tatters, and public infrastructure like the electric grid, transportation, and communications have broken down.

Please bear with me: you may or may not think that societal collapse is coming. Whether it is or not, the literature is both instructive and fascinating.

Subscribe now

There is much material online about prepping. While there is no centralized database tracking this activity, there are some stats from individual websites and hubs.

UK Prepper Hub says:

• 49% Britons have battery-powered items at home, such as a torch

• 47% have a supply of tinned goods such as baked beans and canned fruit

• 37% keep a power bank at home to keep their mobile phone charged

• 20% have access to a portable gas hob, such as a camping stove

• 17% have a stash of cash at home specifically for emergencies

• 15% have an analogue radio

The key takeaways from this overview on Reality_Studies are:

• Approximately 1 in 16 Americans is a self-described prepper; 4 out of 5 practice at least basic readiness.

• Texas and the Mountain West remain hot-beds, but young coastal urbanites are a fast-growing segment.

• The prepper economy rivals the outdoor-recreation market and is growing faster than U.S. GDP.

• Diversity is expanding: younger, more progressive, and more female preppers are reshaping product and content demand.

My little Google friend, queried in a crafty number of ways, consistently posited that between 20 and 26 million people worldwide (mostly in the US) consider themselves “preppers,” although this does not take into account how the definition of “prepper” may be wildly different across the globe.

However you enumerate them, however, people are preparing for collapse. You might be among their ranks.

• Are you growing a regenerative garden?

• Are you working with friends to build community in the event of a catastrophe?

• Do you have a curated list of recipes that involve cans of chickpeas or dry lentils or home canned sauerkraut?

• Are you stockpiling canned goods or rice and dried beans?

• Are you compiling a spreadsheet of contact information for local disaster resources?

• Do you have a fully kitted out go bag? Is your shed stocked with tools and spare parts and the like?

• Do you have a generator?

• A gun?

• Is your house hardened against marauding intruders - say, with enhanced door locks and fastenings and reinforced windows?

Are you prepared to eat rats?

I am willing to bet that everything in that freeform list of items - the garden, the go bag, the shed, the beans - is something you have thought about.

I am also willing to bet that my last question is something you are less likely to have considered.

I am neither a climate scientist nor a statistician, but I can read, and based on what I am reading, I think it’s jumping the gun to expect dystopian societal collapse in even the next 10 years. I’m fairly sanguine that there is enough redundancy in the system to see the fairly well-to-do cohort in the industrialized west through a couple of decades of near normalcy (albeit punctuated with ever worsening climatic conditions).

Poor folks, people now living with food insecurity, and others in precarious situations will not be as lucky. And anyone already wiped out by a derecho or wildfire or flash flood or similar calamity is preemptively exempted from this sanguine outlook - but even those folks might be back on their feet fairly soon, given residual strength in the systems that attend to such matters.

Share

Nevertheless, I think it’s instructive to ask yourself the question: what about millers?

Are you prepared to eat rats?

Of note: as the world warms, urban rat populations are increasing.

So… what if all else failed? Would you be able to catch them? Kill them? Skin and clean them? Cook them?

The world that’s here, with climate change advancing and emissions rising and no substantive action from anywhere to help or stop or ameliorate or even prepare on the most basic community level, will bring us challenges we haven’t even begun to imagine. This is uncharted territory - and like those medieval maps we’ve all seen, at the periphery of the known world, here be monsters.

Preppers are filling in the blanks, although, I think, with an often over-enthusiastic focus on lawlessness and strife in a climate crisis degraded world.

Still, while it might be horrifying to contemplate, if you want to survive and the Costco shelves are empty and you’ve run out of canned tuna and the power lines are down and it won’t stop raining… you might need to ask yourself the question.

Am I prepared to eat millers?

Quoting the mighty BBC here:

Sea ice has been disappearing from East Greenland, allowing giant whales to take advantage and move into previously inaccessible areas.

That is the conclusion of a decades-long study that has recorded - and filmed - hundreds of the world’s biggest whales including humpbacks, minke and fin whales, feeding in ice-free seas along the coast in summer.

None of these marine mammals were historically found here as they have been locked out of the coastal waters by ice. Now, as climate change warms the sea and melts that ice, they have adapted.

Scientists describe the result as seasonal Arctic “feeding frenzies” - part of a major regime shift in the ocean environment along East Greenland.

The last few paragraphs of this remarkably mildly-phrased piece raise the issue of climate change being potentially not good for the whales, who it is acknowledged might be losing their habitat. You’ll also see that in the screenshotted image’s caption, if you can read font that tiny.

Nowhere else in the piece is any deleterious impact to the oceans mentioned.

Nowhere is any consideration other than these specific whales talked about.

Nowhere is there any serious discussion of what “adapting” might mean in this context. Or the normal timescale for true “adaptation.”

Nowhere is it pointed out that melting arctic ice might be, say, BAD for a thing.

Nowhere it is whispered that sea level rise could be catastrophic for huge swaths of humanity.

Nowhere is it pointed out that “warming the sea” and “melting the ice” is not the good thing that it sounds like phrased like that. 1

Nowhere is any peep heard about how fucking unusual this is. How gobsmacking. How astonishing. Just, “yeah, hey, saw some whales having feeding frenzies up here where there used to be ice - no big - pretty neat, huh? - pretty sure it’s not related to anything else. Cool pix of the whales, too, huh?”

Share

Have we moved - in the space of just a couple of years, mind you - right from not reporting at all (or reporting as “both sides” nonsense involving “scientists” who “do not agree”) straight to “ho hum yeah it’s getting warmer - cool animal factoid, though, innit” low energy drivel like this?

This is a story about WHALES, friends. And not just any whales - fucking NARWHALS, once of the coolest creatures ever to come down the pike. Because they have a flipping pike on their heads!!! Like, what?! Damn. If you can’t make narwhals compelling, or at least use them in the headline, you’re failing at your job.

(Hi, Boris!)

And this is also a story about Greenland - a stunning place under extreme pressure from global warming - and about climate change, which is, I dunno, kinda important in the scheme of things?

Do you mean to tell me that the talented, highly qualified writers and editors at the BBC cannot drum up some appropriately serious story about ”Fate of Arctic Hangs in Balance” or “Unprecedented Whale Feeding Frenzy at the Top of the World!” rather than this innocuous drivel?

Subscribe now

I am sorry, but the headline…

Giant whales move into Greenland waters as ice disappears

is pathetic.

As for the lede? It is phrased as a GOOD THING for the whales. Which it may be briefly, but only in the short term and when considered very out of context. FFS.

My mind is officially fucking blown. I never drop this many F bombs, either, so you know it must be. Fuck.

What do you think?

Share

I live in London, UK. It’s been hot here this summer. Ridiculously hot. Not as hot as Spain or France or Greece, but HOT.

It’s also been dry. Great swaths of this “green and pleasant land” are brown and sere from a punishing drought. The grass is so crunchy that I half expect some food influencer to reach out of the sky with a giant fork and drag it back and forth across Hampstead Heath, making that “shhhhRK shhhhhhRK!” noise that proves the crust is crisp.

Seeing wildfires in France and Greece and across the Iberian Peninsula was mind boggling, but fires there are not quite as far out of the norm as one might think. Wildfires in WALES, though? FFS.

To say that this collection of lush, drenched, mossy little countries was not prepared for the heat is an almost comical understatement.

Only 5% of homes in the UK have air conditioning. Compare that to 25% in France and an average of 10% - 20% across most of Europe. (In the United States about 90% of homes are air conditioned. That includes the family farmhouse I keep banging on about: a 1913 four square plonked in the middle of a vast ocean of cornfields that looks like an outtake from Little House on the Prairie but is, in fact, air conditioned. Our last apartment in Seattle, which was NOT air conditioned, was an oddity in the US - and a peculiarity of the cool, damp Pacific Northwest.)

Here in the UK, most businesses employ what is called “air cooling” in the summer, which is decidedly not the same thing as air conditioning - and which doesn’t do Diddly Squat Farms in 85F+ degree heat. Sitting in a pub with the doors flung open in desperate hopes of a passing breeze is in no way pleasant or relaxing.

UK buildings are constructed to keep heat IN. This is because they were built in a land where that was mostly necessary. A snug, cozy, waterproof dwelling was the ideal - huge windows, cross-drafts through open spaces, and expensive air conditioning was not.

Infrastructure, including railways and other public transport, was also designed and built for cooler, damper weather. Rails buckle in the heat. Buses have tiny windows that barely open, and let in just a trickle of moving air. There is drainage aplenty (for shedding the formerly expected “pissing down” rain) but precious little in the way of pale colored roofing to increase albedo. And so it goes.

If you read climate-related news, you might have noticed a recent uptick in discussions of what the next few decades might hold. One recent story that caught my eye opined, “life will be less Mad Max and more Gaza, Cuba, or Ukraine.” Honestly, that seems a reasonable assessment. (Although as a Mad Max franchise nut, I’d tweak it a bit: if you’re going to envision yourself living in the Mad Max universe, think of the first film, where Max Rockatansky begins his journey as a cop on an official police force, with a home, a wife, and a child, living through collapse, not in the thick of it. That all comes later.)

In any event, it all starts where you live.

I’m going to quote my 2016 self.

Something essential about climate change that most conversations about it fail adequately to convey is just how inescapable one’s local climate is.

Climate varies over the face of the globe, obviously. Some people are chilly and damp in Scotland, while others live in Miami Florida (hot and wet), or Hyderabad Telangana (tropical wet and dry), or the American West (mostly on fire this past summer). The local climates of this cerulean globe are both varied and, up until now, largely hospitable to human life. This is, after all, where we evolved.

You may have a favorite - mine’s someplace like Stornoway - but you can live anywhere. Humans have thrived on Mother Earth for millenia, adapting happily to the varied yet relatively stable local conditions wherever they’ve settled down.

But what’s the same for 99% of people, no matter the local climate, is this: wherever you are, in that moment, that’s where you’re stuck. Whatever your local climate, if you don’t have lots of freedom and enough money, then without the heroic determination it takes to flee, you must deal with it.

But what if your local climate becomes unbearable or uninhabitable, for even part of the year? You can’t change it back, so what do you do? What happens next?

Thus far, 2015 was the deadliest year for heat in India. In Telangana, almost 600 people died, victims of a deadly heat wave that made news the world over. In all, over 2,300 people perished from the heat.

And everyone there (except for the well-to-do, of course) was stuck.

They were stuck outside in the sweltering heat with no shade or water, doing day labor. Stuck being old and infirm and more vulnerable to dehydration and exhaustion. Stuck being delicate little kids in a heatwave that brought temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit – which was just the temperature, not the heat index.

Where you live will be a major factor in how you survive the ever-intensifying climate crisis. Where you live will determine your food supply and availability of potable water, the adequacy of your shelter, how or if you get power and fuel and a connection to the larger world via phone lines or a hand cranked radio receiver or wifi.

Subscribe now

Where you live will make a huge difference to how and when to start preparing. No one is suggesting that everyone up stakes and move. That isn’t feasible or possible for many. Economic constraints are particularly tight right now, with the Trump economy in shambles and the grim death grip of toxic late-stage capitalism around our collective throat.

If you can move, where to? You can check risk before you choose a spot - although these days it doesn’t look like there are really any safe “climate havens.” But if you do move (say, from hurricane alley, or the fire-plagued Berkeley Hills) to somewhere a bit more stable in the upper midwest, you will need to compare your options based not just on traditional concerns like how close you are to a good middle school, but on modern, climatey things like how high the river might rise in your new neighborhood. You’ll need to check evacuation routes in areas that might flood or burn, vet community resources (is there a local cooling center/robust volunteer network/active planning for mitigation, etc.). You might choose not to move to a hopelessly backwater MAGA dump if you can find a better spot in a state with a bureaucracy that shows some commitment to helping citizens prepare, or could potentially be motivated to do so.

In the United States, for example, management strategies - like Louisiana’s coastal master plan and California’s wildfire mitigation program - exist at the state level.

On a grander scale, governments around the world will certainly be forced to take action to mitigate the worst - the most obvious - effects. It will be financially ruinous to ignore sea level rise, for example, but even more financially devastating to simply do nothing. Mass relocations from low-lying areas might be undertaken by governments with a huge population in an area of certain inundation.

The federal government changes plans along with administrations, so here’s hoping we get a Democrat back in office in 2028.

There are lots of resources online to explore an area, whether it’s a new spot, or where you’ve been for the past 40 years. Frankly, you likely know a lot already about your current risk. And once you know that - as well as we can know anything of the perilous future, that is - it is time to ask a LOT of questions.

How safe is my neighborhood - my subdivision - my block - my house?

Your position in the landscape is also important. Are you in a suburb? Out in the boondocks? In a funky walk-up on the Bowery in Manhattan? City vs suburban vs rural will shape how you think about your community and the networks you should be building.

Will it be hotter? (Yes.) Will it be drier? (Probably.) Wetter? How will this affect the growing season? If I want to start a garden, or save seeds, what do I need to plan for? Will my basement storage be adequate? Should I put in a shed? If the power goes out and we don’t have A/C, can I use the attic/crawl space for convection cooling? Can I afford a generator? Where do I put it, and how does it work? Can I schedule an appointment with an electrician to run through my options?

Stop.

[Sound effect: the SCREEEEEEEEXXXXCCCCCCCCCCHHHH of a needle being dragged off an LP mid track.]

Stop.

I made it a good deal farther than that utterly banal electrician suggestion before stopping, but that mundane detail really was the nail in the coffin of this planned piece.

I’d fleshed out a pretty decent project plan, in fact. I’d started a RACI and an SBAR and everything! It felt like the fun old days in my career, planning communications strategies for tech upgrades at a major regional hospital system. I was logging questions and compiling data and enumerating considerations - like space to garden and soil quality and growing seasons and food storage and energy requirements and communications plans and the construction of networks of helpers and solutions for people reliant on medications or mobility devices - but then I stopped.

Share

I was first struck by the obvious futility of offering anything more or better than what’s already been written. There are reams of terrific resources out there. Anyone who wants to grow a garden or raise chickens or install a water purification system or start a commune or learn how to farrow pigs or start a rescue team in their suburb can find a book or a website and get started right away. I’m not a subject matter expert on anything you need to survive. I am definitively not the best resource for saving seeds or digging a well or stocking your tank house with bluegill or for, well… anything, really. And while I might be able to craft a concise project plan, there’s actually no new ground to cover on the basic subject matter: your unit of survival.

But I do have a few modest things to offer:

1. I have thought about it - a lot.

2. I grew up financially poor.

3. I am old.

I’ve only been thinking and writing about climate change for just over a decade, but I’ve been alive since the 1960s. I remember the first Earth Day. I was here in the before times, when we didn’t have internet or hot and cold running entertainment or closets full of cheap fast fashion or “on demand” anything. I was here before “the algorithm.” I learned to cook when what we could afford was what the Younglings now call “struggle meals.” I saw cars get small during the energy crisis of the 1970s, and then large again because people are short-sighted and stupid and politicians are bought off by Exxon and BP and Shell. My parents drummed a mantra into me:

• Use it up

• Wear it out

• Make it do

• Or do without

What that meant was “suck it up” because there’s nothing else available, and you’d better enjoy what’s in front of you.

So rather than proffer some half-assed survival advice when you can get that anywhere, allow me to opine about the deep truth that needs to be told. (BIG DISCLAIMER: this is for the rich folk in the house. The people with disposable income and choices to be made. The people in that well-to-do swath of countries where demography is not necessarily destiny.)

Humans - all of us - must get ready for the slow-motion devastation that’s coming. Global heating, and the resulting inevitable system collapse, is here. To navigate the next few decades, we need to have done two things.

One: viscerally understand and accept that this is ACTUALLY HAPPENING. Things are not going “back to normal.” Taking this on board is necessary in order to take the leap. By definition, someone who is looking back cannot move into the future. Someone who is hoping against hope that “things will get better” won’t be able to throw things overboard and change what they need to in order to walk forward.

Two: be willing to do whatever it takes. Abandon preconceived notions and let things go. Possessions, home, habits, job, neighborhood, state, country, perhaps even family and friends... It is time to muster the courage to drop the old life and stride beyond it into whatever the future holds. This will be a mental step at first, but it’s likely soon enough to manifest in the meat space where your flat screen TV and Cuisinart and second car and fashionable barrel jeans and air conditioning and 401K and Uber eats account and fresh bakery bread and casual shopping on Amazon and burgers and deli case halloumi skewers and riding lawn mower and faith in government and hopes for your children’ s future live.

Nothing will be the same again. We’ve fucked it up. We’re doomed. Even if we toppled the current fossil fuel dependent system tomorrow and reverted to zero emissions, temperatures would continue rising. Sure, they might only rise for 10 or 20 years, but we aren’t going to stop emitting now. What is happening is locked in.

You don’t need me to post links. If you are still reading this you already know what’s happening. You can look up the specifics for yourself.

My contribution here is not a project plan. It’s not a primer on how to survive, although that is what I had originally planned.

My contribution here is a wish. A hope. A secular prayer and a doubting Thomas’s benediction.

We can, and we should, revolt. We can, and we should, implode the current system and stop using fossil fuels. But that’s on a parallel path. Where the real life rubber meets the road - in the non-theoretical realm of dealing with bad weather and broken food webs and heat and drought and flash floods and power outages and scarcity - we need to jolt forward into a new paradigm in order to survive.

Want to make it through? Get ready to rumble. Get ready to do shit you’ve never done before. Get ready to learn things you thought had died out with your ancestors. Get ready to be bored, read an actual book, learn to garden, play the fiddle, build a fire, dig a well, and be happy on a can of beans and a couple of carrots a day for a few weeks. Get ready to pool resources, do without, buckle down, and get to work. Get ready to get your hands dirty.

There will be weeks and months of lovely sunny skies and abundance on the Hy-Vee shelves. There will be intermittent and increasing calamities and nightmarish disasters. It won’t be predictable, smooth, or predictable. But as long as you are alive, it will always be worth the struggle.

This world is a gorgeous, magical, transcendent place. There will be beauty about you. There will be kids and grandkids and neighbors and nieces and nephews to cherish. There will be music and books and nourishing lentil soup and love. It’s worth fighting for. And the sooner you make the mental leap, the sooner you can start prepping.

Just last year an old high school friend and her wife sold their enormous 5 bedroom house in Traverse City Michigan and downsized to a newer home. They were “empty nesters” and wanted a cute little bungalow somewhere sunny. They found “the perfect house!” (please read that with a “SQUEEEEE” intonation) in… wait for it… San Diego.

Why San Diego? Well, coming from Michigan, they wanted sun. And the beach. And since their kids were long out of school and established elsewhere, they had nothing but work holding them in Traverse City - so they took early retirement and upped stakes. Neither of them bothered to check for wildfire risk. Given their zip code, I’m not sure how they managed to buy insurance - and I haven’t dared to ask. They now live in a neighborhood with a higher wildfire risk than 95% of all communities in the United States. Gulp.

In 2005 it didn’t really occur to anyone to check the possibility they’d be visited by death and destruction by climate - even in known “hurricane alley” spots like New Orleans. Hurricanes happened and people knew they might get caught, but the prevailing gestalt was different. You accepted the (smallish) risk, bought insurance, and went about your life.

These days, however, there are ways to check your locality for climate-related risks like floods and drought and wildfire, and it seems like a smart thing to do. There are quite a few options for lessening risk now that the climate shit is hitting the fan hard. But what are they? How to know what to do or where to turn to prepare for the inevitabilities of the heating planet? How do you start? What is frivolous or overly panicky, and what makes sense?

Note: this isn’t about “victim shaming.” No one can foresee any one individual natural disaster. And many people have reasons for staying in a tornado or drought or flood prone area - kids, a job they can’t leave, obligations to extended family… the list is long. For so many of us, we live where we live, and we’re stuck. Nevertheless…

While the corporate media still isn’t reporting adequately about climate, and the Trump administration is a howling wilderness of anti-science stupidity, across social media and in the misty general zeitgeist awareness seems to be locking in that we are headed for some STUFF. There’s been a shift in the discussion - from not talking about the climate to maybe not mentioning it explicitly, but nevertheless worrying about wildfires and parched fields and weird growing seasons and early blackberries and invasive insects bearing disease and catastrophic flooding and failed crops and the relentless damned HEAT.

It is baldly apparent that something is wrong. It is blindingly obvious that we have an accelerating problem. But what’s the timeline? What do you do NOW?

Failing a catastrophic “one fell swoop” incident that wipes out multitudes in an instant, humanity will continue to persist, probably for decades. Life will go on in ways that are broadly recognisable. The heat will get worse. The rain will get heavier. Both floods and wildfires will be more devastating. Crops will fail - but not all of them all at once, and initially in ways we can manage by moving supply chain widgets around, buying from other sources, or releasing from emergency reserves. We’ll run out of stuff, but not everything, and not all at the same time. If there’s no bread, there will be chips, or tortillas, or dried beans. And then maybe a little bread again. Stuttering stops and starts. COVID style interruptions.

Daily life won’t break down immediately. There’s enough slack. There are enough reserves and workarounds and air conditioning manufacturers.

Life will get grimmer and hotter and stormier and rainier-yet-also-drier and more ecologically depleted and, frankly, more dangerous, but we won’t see a full Mad Max style “collapse” for some time.

And that means that we HAVE TIME to prepare. We HAVE TIME to work on our “units of survival.” We have time to collaborate with neighbors, make plans for the worst, pull together prep. We have time to move if we can manage it, to grow crops or raise chickens, to stockpile beans and seeds, and do whatever might help cushion the blow in the near term.

Even if, like me, you believe that the near term is all we have, isn’t it worth doing everything possible to make the time that remains us less wretched and hungry and painful?

Subscribe now

I would be remiss if I did not suggest that we also have time to do more. We have a little time to stand up and demand action from our governments, which are after all still intact, still more-or-less functioning, and still replete with our tax dollars that could be leveraged to save lives rather than line politician and lobbyist pockets and make more wars.

We have time to go out on national strike. We have time to organise rolling work stoppages. We have time to elect leaders who will make actual changes, not just promise green hopium and nibble around the edges of the problem.

We have time to pull down the fossil fuel economy and replace it with something sustainable. We have time to attempt a controlled implosion of the extractive capitalist system, rather than wait, paralysed, until collapse occurs with no intervention and it all rains down on us like Vesuvius pulverising Pompeii.

If one million people showed up on the National Mall this November we could stop Washington DC dead in its tracks. We could make demands. We could force change. We could call for accountability, and accept nothing less.

But if we are not going to do any of that, and it seems that we are not, then we still have time to make the coming years less dangerous and brutal for ourselves.

We have time to make more sensible decisions, if we can. We have time to make plans, to build our knowledge base, and to build local resources like a flood rescue and action team, or a neighborhood wildfire rescue squad, or an HOA-based group of “buddies” for elderly or less mobile members of our community.

To tackle our now and future climate each of us has two jobs: preparing for an instance of immediate peril and prepping for long term survival.

The first is easiest and most straightforward, and you have probably already done it.

Know what’s likely to come up.

Do you know all the climate risks in your neighborhood? You might know already - but you might be surprised by what you find - an “inland flood” risk, for example, that you did not realize applied to you.

There are lots of handy websites that show your risk by house number or street or neighborhood. Find out what’s most likely (through least likely) to happen to you, then build a plan with that in mind. Here are 3 useful links, as a start.

• Climate Check

• Wildfire Risk

• FEMA’s National Risk Index

If you’re a home owner you can also speak to your insurance agent. They can help you determine not just risk, but where there might be fillable gaps in your coverage.

Find your evacuation route.

• Like the nearest exit in an airplane, it might be behind you! Or at least, not where you expected, or on your normal way home.

• Contact your county or municipality to see if they have ready-made disaster plans. I found flooding evacuation routes and emergency numbers to call in a trifold flyer on the desk at the library, of all places! But I could simply have called City Hall or the county government offices.

Know where help will come from.

• Bookmark - and print out - contact information for first responders like the sheriff’s office, EMT, fire and rescue services, the Red Crescent and Red Cross, Catholic Charities, and more. Learn what they provide and under what circumstances.

• Learn the disaster warning protocols where you live. Personal example: I did not know that the weird little answering machine looking box on a shelf in the farm kitchen was a tornado alert device until it SQUAWKED at us loudly one thundery evening. (It scared the bejabbers out of my husband. 🙂) Now I know and I will pay attention to it.

Pack and stage a “go bag” or two. Another go bag. Another go bag!

• The go bag will have emergency supplies for about 3 days, including 3 days’ worth of lightweight, non-perishable food for each person - like protein bars and tuna pouches. Water is heavy, but most go bag instructions have good advice for how best to pack it.

Reach out to your current and future crew. Ask:

• Where can I stay if I can’t stay at home? Are there shelters nearby? How are they accessed? Can we go as a group? Do they take pets? (Get your pet carriers wrangled so if you have pets, you can quickly pack and transport them.)

• Can I tag team with friends, relatives, neighbors - anyone?

• Who has what skills? (You might be surprised at what people can do. For example, I know of a Peace Corps volunteer who has training and hands-on experience in both flood and wildfire preparedness, and unless I asked I would never have known that. Similarly, check with older people. Folks over 70 have lived through a lot and plenty of them have mad skills that you might not suspect.)

• Who has a generator - a sump pump - a tornado-secure basement - extra bedrooms - high ground to run to? Can these resources be pooled?

• Get everybody’s contact information, and not just on your phone. Print this contact list, on paper, like a Luddite. Then stash a copy in your car’s glove box, another in your backpack or purse, and a third in your go bag itself. Email copies to out of town contacts, just in case. (Bonus: getting your list in their email may prompt these folks to think about their own disaster response situation!)

• Stash important papers in a metal box and keep it near the primary go bag, or where you plan to exit the house. Also scan these documents and send them to yourself, as a back-up.

That’s a non-exhaustive recap of how to prepare for immediate peril - for a cataclysmic event, but one that is discrete in scope and finite in time. (It’s likely that you’ve already made these preparations, or have a list downloaded from a knowledgeable source and are planning to get busy.)

And that is, oddly enough, the “easy” bit. You plan, pack a go bag or two, get your papers in order, reach out to neighbors, get pamphlets from the library, print out a contact list - and hope for the best. You go about your life in the mild sunshine or pleasantly pattering rain and hope nothing happens. And of course, in the case of a massive derecho or onrushing flash flood or a “fire cloud” generating wildfire, there are no guarantees. But there are preparations you can make, even if they only end up being useful for your peace of mind.

The second job, preparing for long term survival, will be the subject of my next post here. I am not an expert, but I have read lots of them and I have not just “thoughts,” but some personal experience that drives me to don my project manager hat and, in the words of The Martian, try to “science the shit out of” some of this long term survival stuff.

This is where we’ll talk about moving, if you can. And gardening. And storing food. And water purification and electricity generation and how to live without lights or running water, and a lot more.

Again - not an expert. But my hope is to provide a jumping off point and a spark of inspiration for anyone looking to make a safer place for themselves in the midst of the coming storm.

Please stay tuned, and be careful out there.

I posted the following on DailyKos in March of 2016. I suppose at the time an uninhabitable future still seemed far-fetched.

Does it seem so far-fetched now?

Something essential about climate change that most conversations about it fail adequately to convey is just how inescapable one’s local climate is.

Climate varies over the face of the globe, obviously. Some people are chilly and damp in Scotland, while others live in Miami Florida (hot and wet), or Hyderabad Telangana (tropical wet and dry), or the American West (mostly on fire this past summer). The local climates of this cerulean globe are both varied and, up until now, largely hospitable to human life. This is, after all, where we evolved.

You may have a favorite - mine’s someplace like Stornaway - but you can live anywhere. Humans have thrived on Mother Earth for tens of thousands of years, adapting happily to the varied yet relatively stable local conditions wherever they’ve settled down.

But what’s the same for 99% of people, no matter the local climate, is this: wherever you are, in that moment, that’s where you’re stuck. Whatever your local climate, if you don’t have lots of freedom and enough money, then without the heroic determination it takes to flee, you must deal with it.

But what if your local climate becomes unbearable or uninhabitable, even for part of the year? You can’t change it back, so what do you do? What happens next?

Thus far, 2015 was the deadliest year for heat in India. In Telangana, almost 600 people died, victims of a deadly heat wave that made news the world over. In all, over 2,300 people perished from the heat.

And everyone there (except for the well-to-do, of course) was stuck.

They were stuck outside in the sweltering heat with no shade or water, doing day labor. Stuck being old and infirm and more vulnerable to dehydration and exhaustion. Stuck being delicate little kids in a heatwave that brought temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit – which was just the temperature, not the heat index.

There is no reason to suppose that the coming summers will be anything but the same, if not worse. Yes, next summer may be cooler, because that’s how these things work. We get a jagged upward trend line – always going higher in the end, but juddering up and down year-to-year. But remember that the ten hottest years globally have all happened since 1998.

And we’re stuck. We’re all stuck. That is, we’re stuck until it becomes literally unbearable. And when it does become unbearable, and you decide to flee, where will you go?

What do you do when the pavement melts? What do you do when your town’s power grid fails, and the lights go out? What do you do when your village burns down? What do you do when your city is drowned by a hurricane? What do you do when food shortages cause wide-spread civil unrest, and there’s shooting in the streets?

What a lot of people are going to do is summon the heroic determination to flee.

Environmental migrants will not all stay within their own countries, either. The terrified white Americans in the GOP are going to be well and truly hysterical when climate change refugees begin to arrive in earnest.

It’s axiomatic that the majority of the GOP are wrong about climate change. But they are also, in their entrenched denial, going to be the most surprised and horrified when more and more people start coming to the United States from places outside of this country that have been rendered uninhabitable by global warming — places with drought, with flooding, with disease — and places below sea level swamped by the rising waves.

The GOP is already ranting about “illegals” and “caravans” and freaking out about the recent influx of people from Afghanistan (not climate related, but illustrative) – can we even imagine their level of shrill, nationalist hysteria when waves of immigration begin from Africa and the Indian subcontinent?

The refugee crisis isn’t going away. It’s going to get worse, and bigger. It’s going to come here. Environmental migrants are going to arrive on our shores.

In addition, many of us will likely become climate change refugees as well. Because that’s really what you are now, if you moved to live with your sister-in-law in Minnesota because your house was incinerated in one of this summer’s wildfires in California.

And that’s what you are if you still haven’t been able to move back to New Orleans since the storm that washed away your home. And that’s what you are if you don’t have your apartment in Brooklyn because it’s a ruined, stinking, water damaged shell after the recent catastrophic flooding.

So we look at the stories about the refugee crisis and we are shocked by the horror of the situation, and marvel at the guts and grim determination – or just plain desperation and panic and no other options – motivating the hundreds of thousands fleeing from war, from persecution, and from poverty. All those exhausted, hungry, frantic Syrian and Afghan and Senegalese moms and dads and kids, all those Nigerian and Serbian aunts and cousins, all those Iranian and Iraqi dispossessed shopkeepers, nurses, professors and office workers, all fleeing to the West.

And here’s where I circle back to stuck – and to local. Here’s where I think it’s important to drive home the terrifying fact that we are all stuck here together on our friendly local only known inhabitable planet!

It’s one thing for people to flee unbearable local conditions. It is quite another to get off a planet that is increasingly inhospitable – and uninhabitable – all over.

If there’s gunfire in the streets and bombs going off in your city, you might be able to make it somewhere that’s at peace. But what do you do if the climate of your entire planet is altered beyond your wildest imagination? We aren’t there yet, but we do not have a lot of time before the global s*** hits the fan… and when it does, what then?

As the global climate continues to change, there’s nowhere else for us to go. We’re not all going to fit into Alaska, or Switzerland, and anyway, you can bet your sweet bippy that your friendly neighborhood oligarchs are busily making sure they’ve got the best real estate all wrapped up, just in case they turn out to have been wrong all along about climate change.

We. Are. STUCK.

Carl Sagan said it better than I ever could, so I’ll close by quoting him.

That’s where I ended the piece a decade ago. Nothing has changed since except to have gotten worse. The system is chugging along, grinding up the wild and devouring fossil fuels and belching out carbon emissions and now we’ve added AI data centers and the world’s first trillionaire and Donald Fucking Trump to the mix.

Do you have a plan?

You know some of what’s likely to happen where you live.

It might be on a flood plain, or at the confluence of two rivers, or on land reclaimed from a swamp.

It might be in a place where the grid has always been a little strained in summer because of the need for air conditioning and green lawns and golf courses, and now the grid could go down more often and more unexpectedly, and not come back up for weeks.

It might be in “tornado alley” or along the hurricane-plagued Gulf Coast.

It might be in LA or the beautiful Berkeley Hills, where there are wildfires. Hell - these days you could live in northern Wales and still get wildfires.

It might be anywhere at all that there are crop shortages.

The point is that it’s possible to predict, a bit, what might happen, and be prepared for it: not in a weird beard / suspect politics / tradwife-adjacent / ”prepper” way, but in a way that could give you a few minutes to get out, a plan for what do when you get there, and a group of people to work with or to call or with whom you can share supplies or food or vehicles or a generator or two.

Watching the BBC the other day I was struck by a couple who were vacationing in France and had to flee a wildfire. They were staying in a pretty holiday home near a small hilltop village. They didn’t know which road led quickly downhill toward water. They didn’t know who to call for help. They hadn’t been told how to turn the emergency radio frequency on, or that such a resource existed.

But they weren’t at home, in their local conditions, in their house. So panic and flailing is understandable. But you don’t have to panic and flail when the shit hits the fan at home.

Sure, if the tornado hits without warning and rips your house into the sky, that’s curtains. Those things happen. But mostly these days there is some warning, and time to grab your go-bag and hit the bricks and escape, be it from a Category 5 hurricane or a wildfire or just a horrific heat dome.

If you don’t have an emergency plan for your place, why not? Do you know where your local cooling center is? Do you know your neighbors, and if any of them have sandbags they can share? Do you have a generator, or a solar panel or a solar battery pack? Where do you keep them? Are they charged up? Do you know if there’s the equivalent of the Cajun Navy in your town, and how you’d contact them? If there isn’t, could you start one?

Some preparations cost money. Some cost nothing. Some costs can be shared, if folks in your cul-de-sac or your HOA or your condo development or your Brooklyn building get together before disaster strikes and make a plan of action.

A climate change-fueled disaster might never befall lucky you. But it looks increasingly likely that this misery and pain is going to spread itself around pretty generously. Better to be safe, as they say, than sorry. Or if not safe exactly, then armed with whatever preparations you can muster.

Sometimes survival is as simple as knowing which way to drive through the roaring flames. Or having enough sandbags, or a neighbor who knows to look out for you. Or an air conditioned place to go.

My friend Lisa has her plans in place. Do you?

This summer, as the climate crisis barks furiously at our door, it is interesting and instructive to examine the common ways in which humanity is looking at its approaching doom.

It strikes me that the ways in which most people think about the climate crisis can be broken down into three rough buckets. Which bucket you fall into is probably a decent predictor of whether you will decide to prepare for what’s coming in your neck of the woods, and whether you’ll be on the barricades when the climate revolution comes.

Let’s dig in.

What, Me Worry?

Group 1.

Some folks aren’t worried. Some folks still don’t believe that the climate crisis is happening at all, although this number has decreased. These people do not see a crisis, and so have nothing to worry about. Also in the “what, me worry?” camp are the cohort who truly think that more CO² in the atmosphere is going to be better for the plants, and that the heat waves going on across the globe are just spells of lovely sunny, summer weather.

The “what, me worry?” crew will not be preparing, because there is nothing to prepare for.

If and when the shit truly hits the fan where they live, they are likely to be “on the barricades,” but not in a constructively planned or effective way: they’ll feel massive, horrific betrayal. They might riot. It happens.

It Won’t Be That Bad

Group 2.

These are our fellow travellers who “believe” that the climate is changing and have some idea of what is coming. They’re concerned enough to listen to political messages, and perhaps even to vote for representatives who promise “green new deal” style policies. Yet this understanding is detached and impersonal on some level. This group of folks have taken the knowledge on board, then performed the requisite mental gymnastics to create a road map that does not include a path to their personal destruction.

• These folks are sure that while something is going on, it really can’t be civilisation threatening, and anyway it’s all going to get sorted.

• They might buy into the climate hopium peddled by politicians who continue to talk about net zero.

• They may place their trust in what the redoubtable Jeff McFadden calls “renoobles.”

• They may think that by recycling and turning off the water while they clean their teeth they are making a good deal of difference.

• They may point to a personally lowered carbon footprint, and think that this summed over a largest number of people, is really enough to do the trick.

• They send you information about the “new green economy” and think that Exxon and Shell and BP are telling the truth about the world saving powers of algae-based fuels.

This group is not worried enough to begin to prepare for what is coming. You may or may not be among them, but if you are, I envy your calm and sanguine headspace.

If and when the revolution comes, the response from this cohort is likely to be panic and thrashing. They’ll feel that they have been “doing enough” all along, and will be blindsided.

Doomers

Group 3.

This is the “climate woke” crew. They know collapse is coming. They were at the climate march in 2014. They post about global warming on their socials. They are paying attention and they are furious with the status quo. These are your friends who cannot look at a graph of future heat projections without focusing on the very highest, direst, reddest line on the chart.

This group has read a lot on the subject and can discuss the finer points of the current science. They don’t need to have Skeptical Science bookmarked - their knowledge is advanced. Their arguments are marshalled. They don’t “believe.” They KNOW.

Oddly, many of these people are also not preparing personally, or doing political work, or organising, or mobilising their local community to be a “unit of survival.”

Why? It’s twofold, I think.

• On one hand, there is paralysis and inaction because of stark fear.

• On the other, some have made a decision to do nothing because they have given up - convinced that there is no possible way to alter the outcome, or to save themselves.

These are the people who pooh-pooh any talk of political action because “the game is rigged” and “bought-and-paid-for politicians won’t do anything” and “something something lobbyists” and “the oligarchs just want us dead.”

I have chatted with people who are convinced that their neighborhood will be overrun by cutthroats and vandals and ravening MAGA hordes brandishing long guns and demanding food and so… why do anything at all? It’s inevitable. Their fate is sealed. My talk about preparation and community mobilisation and rising to fight for a political class that takes care of us citizens is brushed off as naive, hopelessly foolish, and even a little bit dim.

It’s easy to understand this mindset. It is oddly tempting to succumb to the notion that collapse is rushing toward us like a tsunami with such force and inevitability that it would be pointless to put up a puny display of resistance - resistance being, after all, futile.

I am convinced that folks, particularly young folks, who think that there is no point in preparing for their personal future because there will be no civilizational future are not stupid. They are not misled. But they might be missing something.

So…

(1) The people who don’t “believe” in climate change won’t act personally or politically because… nothing ain’t happen and what are you global-warming-panic-attack freaks all het up about? Fair enough.

(2) The folks who know that the climate is changing aren’t convinced it’s dire don’t revolt because they think the answer is a “transition” to a “new green economy” featuring “renewables.” And they are trusting the process.

(3) The people we call “doomers” won’t rise up because they’re convinced the danger is insurmountable and don’t see the point.

In my humble opinion, Group 2 is too sanguine. I am not for a moment convinced that there is any meaningful “transition” or that any currently serving politician has any intention of upsetting the apple cart enough to make real change to energy and infrastructural policy.

As for Group 3, their fatalistic outlook is not wrong, if considered in the fullness of time. But it keeps them from seeing another shorter term, and less sexily dystopian possibility.

And that possibility is… drum roll… that for awhile at least things will go on - mostly as they are now, and probably for a goodly chunk of time - for, say, 20 to 30 years.

Group 2 is of course wrong about the “transition to green energy.” As it stands, there will be no new economy that stops emissions from rising. But at the same time, for at least the short term future - and even taking this summer and this year’s Godzilla El Niño into account - any collapse will be more localized than global.

Failing a catastrophic “one fell swoop” incident, humanity will continue to persist. Life will go on in ways that are broadly recognisable. The heat will get worse. The rain will get heavier. Floods and wildfires will be more devastating. Crops will fail - but initially in a way we can manage by moving supply chain widgets around, buying from other sources, or releasing from emergency reserves. We’ll run out of stuff, but not all at once. If there’s no bread, there will be chips, or tortillas, or beans. And then maybe a little bread again. Stuttering stops and starts, COVID style interruptions.

Even if humans don’t revolt en masse and demand systemic changes (a climate revolution), daily life won’t break down immediately. There’s enough slack. There are enough reserves and workarounds.

Life will get grimmer and hotter and rainier and more ecologically depleted and, frankly, more dangerous, but we won’t see a full Mad Max style “collapse” for some time.

And that means that we HAVE TIME to prepare. We HAVE TIME to build community locally, to collaborate on our “units of survival,” and make plans for the worst. We have time to pull together: to move if we have to, to grow crops or raise chickens, to stockpile beans and seeds, and do whatever might help cushion the blow for a lot of people in the near term.

Even if you believe that the near term is all we have, isn’t it worth doing everything possible to make the time that remains us less wretched and hungry and painful?

We also have time to stand up and demand action from our governments, which are after all still intact, still functioning, and still replete with money that could be leveraged to save lives rather than line the politicians’ pockets and make more wars.

We have time to go out on national strike. We have time to organise rolling work stoppages. We have time to elect leaders who will make actual changes, not just promise green hopium and nibble around the edges of the problem.

We have time to pull down the fossil fuel economy and replace it with something sustainable. We have time to attempt a controlled implosion of the extractive capitalist system, rather than wait, paralysed, until collapse occurs with no intervention and it all rains down on us like Vesuvius pulverising Pompeii.

If one million people showed up on the National Mall this November we could stop Washington DC dead in its tracks. We could make demands. We could force change. We could call for accountability, and accept nothing less.

But we have to do this TOGETHER. All of us - those who aren’t acting because they still have hope, and those who aren’t acting because they have none. And we have to do it, more or less, NOW.

The “what, me worry” folks aren’t going to join us.

But the people in the other two groups are a clear majority of citizens - not just in America, but worldwide. There are enough people who know that the climate is changing, know what the broad strokes outcomes will be, and should be incentived to take one last ditch stand against the grifters and tax cheats and lobbyist controlled dark money layabouts in the “halls of power.”

Share

Reaching out to both groups to form a coalition of action is the only course of action that will get us anywhere. And that will be a heavy lift.

Together, we collectively bear responsibility for voting the current set of do-nothing scoundrels into office. We gave their power to them, and I think it is fair to say that we all expected more.

Group 2 probably expected to see emissions go down because of all that green new economy jazz. It is demonstrably clear that that outcome did not happen. Emissions are rising. France and Spain are burning down. Group 2 should be easy to motivate to revolt now because they feel cheated, abandoned, and lied to. I know I feel that way.

Group 3 have the power of realism on their side. They can SEE the harms coming our way. They are terrified. But they may have lost focus on the handful of decades left before the dystopian “end” that they presume is inevitable.

That handful of decades is key to an end that preserves what we can and that spares as many of us as possible. If we act, we can leverage humanity’s powers of care, collectivism, and compassion to fight for a dignified exit, not one where people are brutalized by panic, mayhem, and raw throated violence.

No one lives forever. But that’s no reason to abandon people to their fate if we have any other options.

Subscribe now

We can use the coming handful of decades in personal preparation, and in building resilient local communities.

We can also use the time to crash the system that got us here, and to do it in a way that, as far as possible, serves the greater good.

The people we voted to administrate this system - the people we gave the power - are not using it to save us. So it’s time to take that power back.

I should probably apologize up front for a rant, but... will you allow me to vent briefly?

I am soooooooo very tired of the Social Media Heat Olympics right now. Not familiar with this phenomenon? You soon will be if you read enough of the comments on a story about a heat dome, or spend much time on the socials chatting about global warming. (Clears throat.)

I rant at you from London, where it was recently quite brutally hot, for a definition of “brutally hot” that apparently did not satisfy some people as being sufficiently warm.

While doomscrolling through story after story about the heatwave in northern Europe and the UK, I saw lots of scoffing. Lots of it. A surprising amount.

I am calling this scoffing the “Social Media Heat Olympics.” These games are a variation of a genre of discourse that crops up after many natural disasters. It’s the “so you think YOU have it bad?” stance. The “welp, y’all must be whiny babies if you let that bother you” posture. It is combative or dismissive while masquerading as helpful. It is “corrective” commentary that hides beneath a veneer of “providing context.” The writers appear to frame someone else’s suffering as potentially undeserved - presenting themselves, wittingly or not, as grading the discomfort and health risks of others on a curve.

“Wow, I live in Tucson and we regularly have highs of over 105! We use evaporative cooling and no worries - we get through it just fine!”

“Not sure how you can complain from Paris when tens of thousands of folks in the global south have it so much worse almost every single day!” (Unsubtle subtext: “your bitching about the heat reveals your privilege.”)

“Thousands of folks on the Indian subcontinent have been dying and no one has paid attention to that catastrophe.”

Sadly, there can be more than a splash of truth in those comments.

It does get far hotter in the American South and Midwest than it does in Great Britain.

Tucson - and Chicago, and Atlanta, and New York City - do normally get hotter than London and Manchester and Edinburgh. It is of note that all of the British Isles lie NORTH of the northern border of the US and Canada, but it’s understandable that this geographic detail doesn’t spring instantly to mind when lay people are comparing places that, to them, read as broadly similar.

And people have indeed been suffering in the global south for years, while most of us privileged folks up north pay scant attention. There is a conversation to be had here. In fact, there MUST be a conversation. The record is a hissing and a shame and yes, blathering about a heat dome in Paris can feel like white Americans waking up to the horrors of ICE in Minneapolis only after Renee Good was murdered. There is no sugar coating that. I do not want to hand-wave this away.

But:

It is also true that it is hot. IT IS VERY HOT. It is also, depending on where you are, rainy, flood-y, drought-y, wildfire-y, hurricane-y, derecho-y, crop failure-y, and sea level rise-y. Sometimes it is more than one of those things at a time! And it is happening all over. The signal is now so strong that corporate-bought governments and craven media outlets struggle to tamp it down.

France has recorded 2,025 “excess deaths” from the heatwave thus far - but there is also a heat emergency in the United States, where even hardy, tough as nails, rootin’ tootin’, flag waving Americans are gasping, and passing out, and dying in the heat. In New York City, emergency room visits have spiked “as brutal heat grips over 180 million.”

Temperatures over 30F are miserable and deadly in places where infrastructure was not built with that heat in mind - places like northern Europe. But climate crisis-fueled heat is also miserable and deadly in places - like Texas and California - where infrastructure was constructed to accommodate higher temperatures. People in London are more blind-sided, and have far fewer air conditioned places in which to seek refuge, but folks die in sub-40F temps in Atlanta and Chicago, too.

Similarly, a deadly flash flood is as much of a calamity in a place where high waters were mostly anticipated as it is in an environment where no one expected flooding to occur.

A wildfire that kills people and destroys enormous swaths of property is just as tragic in places where populations think they are prepared as it is in a neighborhood where there is no history of such an event at all.

Any event that kills hundreds or even thousands of people is dire. The piling up of one event after another, on continent after continent, is more than just dire: it is an existential crisis. It is a global emergency. There is plenty of suffering to go around without people devolving into sniping over who has it worse and who isn’t prepared and who has the right to actually complain.

When the local weatherperson comes on with a chipper smile and a report about how “elderly and vulnerable people” are most at risk in the latest heatwave, it is worthwhile to bear in mind that they are deflecting from the seriousness of the situation - because we are ALL “vulnerable people.”

Even a young, fit person can easily succumb to heatstroke if they exert themselves in high heat. Young, fit people tend to be the ones on construction sites, driving buses, working in your garden, delivering packages, pulling a shift on the line in a hot restaurant kitchen, fighting fires, working security: all of those jobs where being outside in the heat and at the ready cannot be done as work from home or in an air conditioned office

.And of course less young, less robust, less fit human bodies are also vulnerable. It’s not only pensioners and medically fragile people who die under a punishing heat dome.

As for children? They are at significantly higher risk in heat than adults, according to Save the Children UK, and not just because they heat up three to FIVE times faster than adults!

All of the effects of the changing climate are dangerous - hurricanes, heat domes, sea level rise, wildfires, drought, catastrophic flooding, derechos, crop failure, habitat loss, migration of pestilent organisms - and those things are happening indiscriminately all over the world - more, worse, higher, faster, and increasingly relentless.

So this moment is not the time to compete over who’s hotter, who’s more miserable, and who is amusing to you because they seem hapless and unprepared. This isn’t a good time to throw down about who has it worse.

No. Right now is a good time to realize that we’re all one human family, living in frail, vulnerable human bodies.

This weather isn’t the new normal, and this will not be the hottest summer of your lifetime. Not even close.

It’s scary. It’s horrifying. But it’s the truth. Things are only going to get worse from here, and having a little mercy for our fellow travellers as we take this journey is the only humane course.

To quote Winston Churchill (,who, though he was tossed out as PM after WWII, often had pithy, heartening things to say):

"Let us, then, in true comradeship go forward together."

_{Dolls available from https://www.figuren-shop.de/en/matryoshka-nesting-dolls-skulls-dod}

Here’s a matryoshka doll of incrementally worsening badness, all weather-related and climate change-fueled. This is a short, simple post about a weather phenomenon that has actually been keeping me up at night. Not a lot of waffle. Not a lot of philosophical rambling. Just a quick explainer about something scary that I intend to gussy up with a cutesy metaphor: the beloved matryoshka doll, which is usually cheery and non-threatening, but which I will be using to the opposite effect - like that image up top.

Let’s start with heavy precipitation in a warming atmosphere. This is the outer doll in our matryoshka and a basic building block of the climate crisis.

The warming atmosphere doesn’t just make us feel warm. It is the foundation of the ever more extreme and deadly weather events we are experiencing. Simply put, warmer air holds more moisture. This causes stronger storm updrafts, more violent storms, and heavier and more frequent flooding. This is climate change 101.

Of note: warm air isn’t holding on to water like a sponge. Higher temperatures make water molecules more energetic, and so they bounce off of one another rather than clumping together to form drops of liquid - which means that the atmosphere is holding more water vapor.

Open that outer, foundational doll, and inside is the next one: we’ll call it the Rain Bomb Doll.

Here are a few headlines to give you a flavor.

• Southeast Texas faces rain bomb threat

• Australia: millions warned of imminent rain bomb

• Wales: rain bomb predicted to cover Wales, summer 2025

A rain bomb - also known as a downburst or a microburst - is a highly localized system that can cause devastating amounts of damage. While they are not uncommon, the addition of CO2 and heat to the atmosphere will prime it for more and more violent microbursts as we move further into the climate emergency.

Please note that the fuzzy gray ball in the center of the photo above is not a thumb smudge on the camera lens. It is a concentrated burst - a bomb, if you will - of heavy, heavy, drenching rain, falling straight down. The kind of rain that, if you are stuck out in it, makes you turn your face down in panic because you’re afraid you’re going to start inhaling water.

I am neither a meteorologist nor any type of book learnin’ scientician, so I will let the US National Weather Service describe what’s going on.

A microburst is a localized column of sinking air (downdraft) within a thunderstorm and is usually less than or equal to 2.5 miles in diameter. Microbursts can cause extensive damage at the surface, and in some instances, can be life-threatening. There are two primary types of microbursts: 1) wet microbursts and 2) dry microbursts. Wet microbursts are accompanied by significant precipitation and are common in the Southeast during the summer months.

It all starts with the development of a thunderstorm and the water droplets/hailstones being suspended within the updraft. Sometimes an updraft is so strong it suspends large amounts of these droplets and hailstones in the upper portions of the thunderstorm. There are many factors that can lead to evaporational cooling (sinking air) and therefore weakening of the updraft. Once this occurs, it is no longer capable of holding the large core of rain/hail up in the thunderstorm. As a result, the core plummets to the ground. As it hits the ground it spreads out in all directions. The location in which the microburst first hits the ground experiences the highest winds and greatest damage.

Wind speeds in microbursts can reach up to 100 mph or even higher, which is equivalent to an EF-1 tornado! Winds this high can cause major damage to homes and other structures and level hundreds of trees.

Inside the Rain Bomb Doll lurks our innermost doll: the malevolent and terrifying Derecho Doll.

A derecho is a widespread, long-lived complex of severe thunderstorms. (The word comes from the Spanish and means ”straight ahead,” in reference to the powerful, straight-line winds that can rival tornados in their devastating power.) To be classified as a derecho, this complex must extend over 240 miles and produce a continuous path of damage extending along that front, with wind gusts of 58 mph or greater.

The large complex of severe thunderstorms pushes a massive, continuous “gust front” across the land. Within the massive storm line there are multiple overlapping microbursts and downburst clusters that continually fuel the forward momentum of the system. Derechos can last for HOURS. The damage they can inflict is mindboggling - the cumulative power and punishment of many, many individual rain bombs coalesced into one violent, chaotic, terrifying force of nature pummeling houses and cars and boats and stores and gardens and chicken coops and hog lagoons and schools and parking garages and mini malls and gas stations without mercy.

In a piece in 2022 under the characteristically mealy-mouthed headline “Hints of a derecho-climate change link, ten years after 2012 storm” even the Washington Post stopped equivocating long enough to say something declarative and simple about derechos:

Climate change fuels more frequent and intense derechos by supercharging the atmospheric conditions required to trigger these large-scale, straight-line windstorms.

Derechos are, in a word, dreadful. Just as we often forget that “awesome” means to inspire awe, we also forget that the word “dreadful” means something that causes dread - that is terrifying and induces fear.

Derechos are DREADFUL.

Imagine the worst thunderstorm you have ever experienced. Now imagine it dialed up to 11 - to Rain Bomb strength.

And now imagine the fury of a line of rain bombs, coalesced into a howling wildnerness of supercharged rain and hurricane-force battering ram winds, barrelling down on your house, your neighborhood, your son’s school, your mom’s nursing home, your town.

A rain bomb is already enough to uproot trees and down power lines, produce flash floods, and cause local infrastructure to fail.

A derecho is that, and more and more and more, over a front that stretches over 200 miles. To qualify as a derecho, winds must reach 58 mph - but they can get over 100 mph which is, as the National Weather Service says, the speed of a Category 1 hurricane.

How can you outrun it? Outdrive it? Where will you go? How will you get there?

Emissions are rising. We’re consuming fossil fuel as if there’s no tomorrow. Consumerism in the western world continues unabated, vomiting out not just ecosystem destroying pollution but ever more CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The “green revolution” was mostly greenwashing and political happy talk, and anyway, it isn’t happening.

Temperatures continue to mount on our beautiful, shimmering, celestial blue globe. Our life-giving atmosphere gets hotter and angrier and more violent. Heatwaves. Wildfires. Flooding. Hurricanes. Sea level rise. Drought.

Derechos.

I’m not in the habit of fear mongering, but this phenomenon does seem like something to be afraid of. Very afraid. No?

It’s hot in London right now. HOT. This - the 2nd European heatwave of 2026 - might not be front and center in the news in the US, but here in Blighty blast furnace heat is dominating the airwaves and the internet.

Yesterday morning at 8:30 it was already 80F. At 2:25pm, as I sat down to write this, it was 94F, which the Met Office promised would be the high for this week. Today, as I wrap up my rant, my neighborhood in London (which is down by the Thames, and so should be cooler than areas further from the river) will reach a high of 88F. Balmy!

Point of personal bias: I might actually be a polar bear. I am large, scary, and have pale hair. I loathe heat and eschew the sun. When a friend called our local star the Vile Yellow Orb, I cackled with pleasure and stole the moniker for my own use. I am happiest at temperatures under 65F. I love spring and fall, and absolutely adore winter. In summer, I sweat and bitch and hug the lee of buildings to stay in the shade. In winter, I frolic in the snow and am relentlessly cheerful. (This drives my husband mad.) The colder the snap, the better. So yes, I have a personal dog in this fight.

That said, the heat right now is brutal. It’s beastly. It’s savage. Scorching - sweltering - torrid - unbearable - dangerous - debilitating. Even people like my husband - people who relish the warm sun and think it’s too cold when the overnight temps dip below 60F - are freaking out. Because it is HOT. It is very, very, very HOT.

How hot?

CNN reporting “brutal, record breaking” temperatures in the UK.

• Rare warnings: The UK Met Office has issued exceptionally rare “Red Extreme Heat Warnings” for today and tomorrow, with temperatures forecast to soar to at least 102.2 degrees Fahrenheit (39 Celsius), which would obliterate the UK’s June heat record of 96.08 degrees Fahrenheit (35.6 Celsius).

Hottest day on record in the UK, also from the Guardian.

• Across Europe, schools, hospitals, care homes and workplaces have struggled to handle sweltering temperatures that stress organs and push people beyond what their bodies can handle. Coping measures this week have resulted in trains driving slower, hospitals cancelling appointments, schools closing early or completely, and hosepipe bans.

Shops, offices, and schools are closing in the UK, reports the Standard.

• London is struggling to cope with an intense heatwave currently sweeping across the continent, as the UK recorded its hottest June day on record on Wednesday.

• A rare Met Office “risk to life” red weather warning for the capital caused widespread disruption across the city, with shops, offices and schools being forced to close.

Hottest day on record in France, from the Guardian.

• In southwestern France, staff at the Golfech nuclear plant switched off a reactor after discovering that cooling water drawn from a nearby river had warmed beyond the safe level of 28C, a spokesperson told AFP.

Record heatwave in France sparking widespread power outages, per the BBC.

• France has recorded its hottest day since records began in 1947, its national weather agency says, breaking a record set on Tuesday as an early summer heatwave grips western Europe.

• The national temperature indicator - an average of day and night temperatures across dozens of locations - hit 30C, up from 29.8C a day earlier.

Europe is sweltering under a deadly “Omega” heatwave, says Reuters.

• At least 50 die in France as heatwave persists

• Disruptions to power grid in France, schools shut in Britain

• Italy puts 16 cities on alert, heatwave to intensify

• Prolonged heat driven by the Omega block weather pattern

Here in London, in the far south of England, we are north of even International Falls, Minnesota, a city often referred to as “the icebox of the nation.”

Remember that no part of the UK is further south than the northern border between Canada and the US. That’s why sunset in London tonight will be at 9:22pm, while in NYC, it’ll be at 8:31. That difference of more than an hour speaks to how far north the UK is. It’s not expected to get hot up here. Not mildly hot, to be honest - and definitely not this hot. The fact that the UK has now broken 2 heat records already - one in May and one in June - is, frankly, horrifying.

In the north of Europe, the infrastructure was not built to withstand this weather. In the UK specifically, almost all housing is constructed to stay cozy and warm - not cool. Railway networks were built with steel that buckles in sustained 40C degree plus temperatures. Schools routinely do not have air conditioning - because they have never needed air conditioning. The UK was not set up for - was not constructed for - summers like this. Businesses are losing footfall. Schools can’t operate because children can’t learn in stifling heat. Gardens and crops are wilting and scorching. Elderly people in care homes are suffering and people without access to proper cooling are suffering and the range of what is affected by the heat is staggering, including schools, NHS facilities, zoos, transport, restaurants and food merchants, and construction.

But this piece isn’t just about me whining that I’m hot. Hundreds of millions of people are hot. People are suffering and dying in the brutal, unrelenting heat. Me? I’m mildly inconvenienced at most. I’ve got a couple of big fans, the hallway on my floor is cooled and I can open my door to let air in, and I’ve got a fridge stocked with bottled water and icy cold NA beer.

What this piece is about is the popular news coverage.

If you’re in the US you’re probably not hearing more than the odd headline. Over here, though, it is a saturation situation. And this is understandable: temperature records are falling, infrastructure is failing, people are dying.

Yet despite the gravity of the circumstances, television news about the heatwave is uniformly and gobsmackingly bad. It is silly. It is flaccid. It is deliberately obfuscatory. It skirts or hedges or ignores the central issue. It fails to connect the dots. It is partial and misleading, and that is morally reprehensible.

Headline after headline: “hottest day” and “record-shattering” and “deadly heat.” BUT WHY??? Where in these stories is the WHY of it all?!

You might call the news STUPID if it weren’t blindingly obvious that the pathetic coverage isn’t down to the people in the news business being dim or unlettered or uninformed. It’s down to a media ecosystem as a whole that is corporate-captured, craven in the face of toxic capitalism, and driven by the fiscal bottom line rather than a mission to tell the public the truth.

During the past couple of days - cowering in front of the fans, guzzling lemon water and copiously sweating - I have doomflipped through report after report on the weather conditions in England and across western Europe. I’ve watched “special breaking” bulletins and “The Big Story” wrap-ups and consumed lashings of Met Office statistics. And it’s struck me: 95% of corporate media (and many smaller, “independent” voices) are DOING IT WRONG.

Report after report covers the heat - comparing highs, predicting lows, and commenting on how unusual this all is - without ONCE delving into the causes, addressing the future, assigning blame to our use of fossil fuels, or reporting frankly about how this heat is connected to other stories, like tropical storms and drought and flooding and wildfires. Frankly, it is soul crushingly infuriating. The opportunity exists for the BBC and Al Jazeera and CNN and ITV and all the rest to tell the truth. The opportunity exists to convey vital information about the climate crisis and let people know what is coming at a time when they will be paying attention because it is miserable and hot and they are watching the weather report anyway.

With this brilliant opportunity for excellence in reporting, and for unvarnished, useful truth, the corporate-owned media (yes, I know that phrase describes the problem right there) WILL NOT report accurately or in any useful depth.

Subscribe now

(Quick caveat: yes, there is a limited amount of excellent in-depth reporting being produced by legacy print media, most notably The Guardian. I’ve linked to a few of those articles here, in fact! But the TV news - the weather reports and “breaking” heat bulletins and so forth that are widely available on broadcast TV and YouTube - is hopeless, in ways that I am about to describe. And let’s face it. Most regular folks who are not motivated to do more digging aren’t going to seek out and read a vaguely science-y sounding article in The Guardian. They’re going to listen to a chirpy morning show clip about what weather to expect this weekend, and how Harriet’s going to demonstrate how you can now grow lovely Mediterranean plants in your garden in Leeds!)

Whether from a studio with fancy graphs or from a sunny beach or riverside cafe, no live television news reporting that I have seen honestly addresses the situation. Nothing I have seen thus far has impressed me with its insights about the coming calamity. Nothing I have seen so far indicates that anyone in the C suites is telling their news and weather desks to report on the climate crisis and how it is driving this massive heat dome. Even if the words “climate” and “change” are uttered in close proximity to one another, the mention is passing, the connection suggested to be uncertain or tenuous, or the topic not worth spending any more time on.

It is quite simply soul crushingly infuriating.

I’ll take one random example - a heatwave update on ITV a couple of days ago. It almost blew the top of my head off with the force of everything that was mealy-mouthed, obfuscatory, useless, and craven about it.

I tapped out bullet points on my phone after it was over. I intended to flesh them out with captivating prose and clarity of purpose and virtuously post it here. But honestly it’s ridiculously hot in the flat (even with my much-vaunted fans and my lemon water) I am snarly and itchy, and my brain is too boiled from spending the day in 90F heat to craft a splendidly argued narrative.

So without further ado, here’s the down-and-dirty version off the top of my red-faced, sweaty head. I added headers for clarity since, as noted, I am a tad fried and I want to be as clear as possible about what is enraging me right now.

• Stupid / erroneous / misleading comparisons. ITV opened their report by comparing 2026 to a heatwave back in 1973. This is worse than useless. It establishes the notion that this wave is just one of a series, a series that was ongoing loooong ago, and so (unsaid but very much implied) how can this heat possibly be related to global warming? The clear and insidious message to the casual listener was, “well, it got hotter back when men wore comedy sideburns and a liter of shandy cost 27 pence. So hey! This is not so unprecedented!”

• Relentlessly cheerful spin. The ITV reporter actually used the phrase “fun in the sun!” Fun in the sun!? As a talking point this could get people killed. But mostly it is horribly disingenuous and completely misses the point. THE WORLD IS WARMING because humans have burned too much fossil fuel and governments aren’t doing a damned thing to try to change this. (And no, I no longer count the worthless “Paris agreement” and the annual self-congratulatory cocktail parties in Davos and at COPout.)

• Focus on a small group of people being affected, subtly suggesting that everyone else is gonna be just fine. This particular ITV report was only one of many that took pains to talk about the “elderly and vulnerable.” Yes, elderly and otherwise vulnerable people deserve attention and care, but they are not the only ones affected. A 30 year old man died on an athletics track outside of Paris this week. A 30 year old man on an athletics track doesn’t sound “elderly” to me. Or “vulnerable,” unless he had an undiagnosed health issue that only came to light when he keeled over.

• “Sideshow” problem that shouldn’t be the focus, aka, “don’t look there - look over here!” The ITV report was also not alone in hammering on the subject of “water-related deaths.” I’ve heard a lot about these drownings. Yes: it is tragic. Yes: the people are dead. But the sneaky subtext of this particular reporting is clear: look at all the frolicking going on! The casual viewer is intended to hear “folks are out on the beach, paddling and bathing! This is enjoyable!” To which I say, oops - better be careful you don’t have too much fun in the sun, peeps. If you are elderly or vulnerable, you could die. To top off the spirit of general inanity, yesterday a report on the BBC featured a correspondent doing a live stand-up in France who quoted the French Swimming Association (?), who’ve been bleating that people need to learn how to swim, because if they knew how to swim, they wouldn’t be as likely to drown while trying to cool off from incendiary heat domes. Yes - a spokesperson said that, presumably with a straight face. Please make it make sense.

• Inappropriate localization. The ITV report noted direly that the “heat is coming from Europe.” And yes, in this instance, that is a proximate cause. But this totally ignores the overarching reality that temperatures are rising GLOBALLY with climate change. To ignore that elephant in the room seems like a major omission, no? (In fact, we could widen the aperture here and also say that any report on a global warming-related weather event should also include at least one sentence tying the current event to other consequences of climate change, like wildfires or floods.)

• Oddly reassuring graphics. ITV’s production team chose for the background graphic during the weather report voice over - what? Not a hot sun. Not a sweating sufferer. Not a heatmap of northern Europe. Nope! They chose a lovely photo of lush, lettuce green grass under perfect blue skies with fluffy white clouds: an idyllic scene that was in no way an appropriate backdrop for a fucking heat dome! Other reports commit this sin of “journalism” by using film of people diving off bridges into a refreshing river, pretty revelers lying out on the beach, kids eating ice cream, or humans otherwise disporting themselves in a carefree manner. Feh.

• Baseless appeal to public opinion. There were no “man in the street” interviews in the particular ITV report that attracted my ire, but many other outlets feature them. These street polls follow a suspiciously similar script: (*) a few interviewees say things like “this is beastly!” and “my epilepsy is triggered by high heat and I hope my customers understand if I have to close the shop tomorrow” then (*) an equal number of people say they’re chuffed to bits by the warmth. Here in the UK they’re usually leathery, sun damaged white people of a certain age who chortle about how amazing this “spot of warm weather” is, and how much they love it. A BBC piece yesterday closed with the talking head grinning “make the most of it if you can!” over a shot of a bunch of middle aged women drinking spritzers at a sunny picnic table outside a pub.

The climate crisis is NOT A MATTER OF OPINION. It’s just not. And I get it - I do. If you grew up in Hull in the 1980s and your holiday of choice is Benidorm for the sun and cheap pints, these couple of sweltering weeks probably do seem like a lovely reprieve from typical UK temperatures, with spitting rain and cloudy skies. But the SUN and the HEAT are NOT NORMAL. And they are part of something that is real, and should be worrying to you, at the very least.

Alas, the average person watching a news report won’t be terrified. They won’t even be mildly discomfitted. Because they’ll hear nothing about the science and politics and physics of the situation. They’ll hear nothing about how the wildfires in America and the hurricanes in the Caribbean and the immigrants fleeing from drought in the global south and the devastating flash floods in Germany and Spain and all over the world are connected.

Instead what they’ll hear is reassurances that the heat will break soon, that a lot of people like it, that while it’s here they should have fun, and that anyway this is all just bad old Europe’s fault. And all of this useless babble will be bookended with fluffy, upbeat tripe about how Gladys down the precinct thinks it’s lovely to go without a cardie this week!

No context. No background. No science. No accurate comparisons. No connecting of the dots.

Share

Everyone reading this knows WHY, of course.

The problem is capitalism. The problem is the system. The problem is the billionaires. The problem is supine governments and filthy money and rank stupidity among the elites who seem really to think there won’t be consequences for them if they don’t protect the vulnerable people (to be clear - that is ALL OF US) for whom they could be providing a minimum standard of care and proactive defense from looming danger.

I know battling that feels impossible. The task of informing our friends and neighbors about what is coming seems hopeless. And David Suzuki thinks we need to focus on our local “units of survival” right now. But we can’t do ANYTHING - even anything hyper local to try and save our own personal selves - if the basic information about the situation is being actively withheld from the citizens of the world.

The media isn’t stupid. It is compromised, and it is complicit. Yes there are good reporters and outlets doing good work and the internet is there for anyone to ask… but the easy, lazy way in which most people consume their news guarantees that a maximum number will remain woefully underinformed about the climate crisis.

So is it unreasonable to be absolutely outraged? No.

Am I asking too much? Also no.

Should it incumbent upon average folks with rent due and kids to cart to Little League and bills to pay and a crushing load of student debt to “do their own research” to find out the truth. Of course NO.

The media has a job. They are not doing it. Scattering a few crumbs (the Guardian) or mentioning climate change from time to time (the BBC) is NOT ENOUGH.

Please talk to your friends and family. Please let them know that the train is hurtling down the track in the dark and picking up speed, and the horse is out of the barn door and the cat is out of the bag and the darkness has been unleashed and here be fucking DRAGONS.

They deserve to know what’s going on. They deserve to not labor under the delusion that things will “get back to normal.” They also deserve to understand that what we are seeing now is not a “new normal.” Climatic conditions will only get worse, and everyone deserves to know that, with no fluff and no obfuscation and no bullshit. We have not reached a point of equilibrium. We’re not in a “global warming has happened and now suddenly life will be stable again” situation. We’re headed into a dangerous future and we need to prepare.

And to that end, your family and friends also deserve to know that they have the power to make their local governments HELP THEM. They have the power to GET WHAT THEY NEED.

Look at the Flamingo Revolution in Albania. The Albanians are not lying down to let the odious Jarvanka destroy a gorgeous island habitat for a monstrosity of a “luxury resort.”

None of us should succumb to hopelessness and let ourselves be abandoned to the storm.

The climate will continue to change and the globe continue to heat. But the people we have elected to represent us can hear our voices and change their policies to help us, not abandon us.

Infrastructure. Cooling centers. Flood and fire zone relocation. Improved early warning systems. Food rationing. A hardened grid. Better supply chain management. Agricultural policy.

Make them spend our tax dollars on those things. On solutions to help. On policies to ameliorate. On public safety and remediation and mitigation and support, not on ICE and AI data centers and grotesquely expensive missile systems.

It’s too late to stop what’s coming. But it is not too late to try and cushion the blow for as many people as possible.

One place to start is to get the truth out. Fuck the wholly owned corporate media. They are failing us spectacularly here.

This topic is unsexy. The situation seems hopeless sometimes. But the gathering storm of circumstances will soon conspire to catapult the climate crisis from “dry and niche” to immediately and personally compelling for a LOT of people.

My hope is that we can somehow collectively get out ahead of it and rally people to action before we’re mired in panic and chaos. My hope is that learning the truth of what’s coming can lead to some clear-headed action and careful planning, rather than reactive hysteria. My hope is that we can act together in ways we haven’t even imagined yet.

Maybe that’s your hope, too. It might be the only hope we have left.

Thanks for listening.

Dreaming of a white Christmas. Snow drifts and chilblains. Ice skating on the village pond. Hot mulled wine. Carolers all wrapped up against the cold. The nostalgic trappings of a “traditional” Christmas in Merry Olde England, as popularized by Charles Dickens and his iconinc Christmas Carol, drive modern notions of what Christmas should look like.

We send cards starring snowmen and cut out paper snowflakes to hang in the window. We sing songs about the cold and the snow and the winter chill. We spray white chemical foam on our windows and hang plastic metal tinsel on our Christmas trees, aping icicles hanging from our very hygge eaves.

All of that expectation of a white Christmas is a curious relic of a brief period in history; specifically, of the years 1810 to 1819, a decade that was the coldest in England since the 1690s, and the decade into which Charles Dickens was born.

This cold spell - the brutally cold winters, the frozen Thames, the crop failures - were largely driven by a short spell of climactic change unleashed by ash from major global volcanic eruptions that temporarily blocked out the sun. It’s called the Little Ice Age.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812.

As a child, his London Christmases were white, and frigid, and atmospheric. He wrote about them - the public adored his works - and down the decades this vision of fluffy cascades of snow and icy rivers and chattering teeth and folks well wrapped up against the wintry blasts persisted. Even now, when most of us in the former British colonies (and those of us in England and the Commonwealth) think of Christmas, we think of cold and snow.

It took only a decade or a little more - a brief blip into which a brilliant and influential author happened to be born - to transform cultural memories of the lived reality of British winters, which had been prior to 1810 and are now mild, wet, and not particularly snowy - into arctic idylls of gardens rimed with hoarfrost and dancing spangles and dustings of snow.

In the end, of course, the volcanic ash left the atmosphere and the weather returned to British normal. But the image of Christmas popularised by Dickens lived on, in our hearts and in our expectations.

Share

Now zoom forward a couple of centuries. Consider that the effect on Dickens of the Little Ice Age - that single decade of deep freeze - was that it became his normal. And in the same way, the children of Gen A will consider their childhood weather “normal.”

The differences are:

(1) What Gen A will consider a normal winter won’t be Jack Frost nipping at their toes. Their normal (year-round, actually) will be HEAT.

(2) Unlike the Victorians who experienced the Little Ice Age, we are not “going back.”

• After that cold snap there was a fairly expeditious return to the winters of 1700 and 1800 (and 1500 and 1100, etc…).

• After the record global temperatures of 2023, 2024, and 2025, there will be no return to anything approaching temperatures in the early 20th century, or the 19th or 18th centuries. The baseline has shifted up.

According to NOAA, “global average temperatures have risen by approximately 1.35C to 1.47C since the mid-19th century (using 1850–1900 as the pre-industrial baseline.”

Is anyone under the impression that a cooling trend will set in soon - bar an event like a massive volcanic eruption on a scale massive enough to cool the Earth? And even if there is such a massive event, is anyone under the impression that the effects will not be temporary, as in the Little Ice Age?

Emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise. That means that the Earth will continue to warm.

Subscribe now

We’ve all seen the “hockey stick” graph. It’s not changing trajectory. The atmosphere and oceans will continue to warm as emissions rise - and despite bold and misleading talk of “renewables” and the “green energy transition” - rise they will. Weather will get wilder - more dangerous - more unpredictable. Summers will get stickier and unhealthier and more unsurvivable.

But for someone born in 2010, this will not seem anomalous. This will seem normal. NORMAL. The baseline for someone born in 2010 will be a planet that has permanently warmed about 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels. The baseline for someone born in 2024 (the end of Gen A) will be warmer still.

Someone born in 1936 or 1956 or 1976 or 1996 has memories of a calmer climate, less punishing heat, fewer (and less devastating) hurricanes, and wildfire seasons that were fairly clearly delineated, not ongoing month’s-long ordeals of blazing madness.

As memories of that closer-to-pre-industrial weather - with its summer bugs on the windshield, gardens loaded with butterflies and bees, and balmy evening breezes - fade, so we incrementally and collectively lose the possibility of being quite as shocked and outraged as we once were by what is happening to Mother Earth - to our home.

It’s a little scary to think about that, isn’t it, as we head into the coming El Nino and the ever-warming future racing implacably toward us? How will we communicate urgency and fear to a younger cohort who don’t understand what they were never able to experience? Like Dickens in the snow looking around at the “normal” frozen Thames, they’ll look about them and see heat domes and drought and think “home sweet home.” That’s just how humans, with our very short life time horizons, work.

Seems like us Old People need to speak up louder and bang the drum a bit more insistently that what we experienced as normal is being utterly lost, and it would behoove everyone to pay attention.

No?

Last week was hellish.

Not last week in my life. My life is great, all things considered. I’ve got it pretty easy. But the weather? OMFG GAH. Absolute GAH GAH GAH. Yes: there was a heatwave. A blazing, muggy, oppressive heatwave in the UK, usually a land of gorgeous damp and clotted cream clouds and dripping fog and stiffish chill winds in summer and glorious boggy squelchiness.

How hot was it last week? It broke records, including the record for the UK's hottest day in May (34.8°C at Kew Gardens, which is not - repeat NOT - in Rome) the hottest May overnight minimum (21.3°C in south London and it was just as grotesquely hot in west London, where I am) plus multiple “tropical nights,” where temperatures stayed above 20°C overnight.

There’s already a Wikipedia page.

People died. Only 11 people, and not from the actual heat, apparently - but 11 people did die. The Wikipedia piece says, “During the heatwave, at least 11 people died in water-related incidents across the country, including nine children; these deaths prompted the Royal Life Saving Society to issue a warning that warmer weather sees an increase in accidental drownings.”

Rail transport and water supply were affected, in ways that seem small and piecemeal, with low level impacts. It’s the sort of granular, non-lethal, “not that big of a deal” stuff that’s mounting as the climate crisis continues. A signal easily swamped by “business as usual” or “it’s just summer, silly!” or “everything’s back to normal now, folks” hot takes and mainstream media messaging.

It’s creeping up on us. It won’t be noticed by lots of us boiling frogs - particularly the younger ones, who float easy (if sweatily) in the rapidly heating broth and simply do not remember the Before Times.

Hell - I’m old, and I don’t remember the real OG “Before Times.” My memories of cooler temperatures, perfect growing seasons, and fecund swarms of insects are put to shame by what must have been the reality in 1923 or 1847 or 1672.

It’s the death of a thousand cuts. It’s inattention. It’s mis- and dis-information. It’s a compromised media. It’s billionaires. It’s a country (the United States) that grows people with no sense of history. It’s laziness. It’s knee-jerk reactionary politics. It’s business as usual. It’s enthusiastic denialism. It’s the GOP. It’s Amazon. It’s AI. It’s relentless consumption.

Collectively, we’re doing almost nothing to stop it.

Governments and corporations talk about “net zero” and the “green economy,” and emissions continue to rise.

El Nino is coming. The next few months will shatter records for sweltering heat, and it will all be reported as “summer.” Next year, the same will happen again.

Crops will continue to fail, and those failures will be worse and worse. Hectic weather will worsen. We’ll see dust storms and ever more ferocious hurricanes. Hailstorms will pelt unsuspecting neighborhoods. Airlines will deal with increasingly problematic clear air turbulence. The arctic will keep melting. The glaciers will continue to recede. Tropical diseases will march north. All of this will be reported - if it is reported - as discontinuous, freakish, and unrelated. And after every fire and storm and flash flood and heatwave we’ll all move on, averting our eyes, moving along in our own personal slipstreams, oblivious to the coming collapse.

The planet is burning. Almost nobody cares. Almost no one is blaring a sufficiently terrifying alarm. AI data centers are creeping like toxic fungus across the landscape. Amazon and Temu bestride the land, numbing an ever more avaricious populace with cheap, gimcrack gewgaws and toys.

London is burning.

And the beat goes on.

(Photo: Israeli security and rescue forces at the scene of an Iranian ballistic missile strike in Tel Aviv, June 17, 2025. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90))

In 1913, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr published his model of atomic structure, known unsurprisingly as the Bohr model. Combining Ernest Rutherford’s description of the atomic nucleus and Max Planck’s theory about quanta, Bohr’s model explained what happens inside an atom and developed a picture of atomic structure. As I understand it (and I am not a physicist) Bohr was the first to realize that electrons travel in separate orbits around the nucleus and that the number of electrons determines the properties of an element.

Bohr described atoms as being constructed of small, positively-charged nuclei surrounded by negatively-charged electrons traveling in circular orbits around them. Electrons could move from one level of orbit to another - from one state to another - and when they did so, it was instantaneous.

This model differed from and improved upon earlier models by positing that electrons move in orbits of fixed size and energy. The energy of an electron depends on the size of the orbit and is lower for smaller orbits. Radiation occurs when the electron jumps from one orbit to another - from one state to another. Instantaneously. It’s a mind bending notion even now. A quantum jump - something moving from one state to another - BLAM! In no time1.

New York City was resplendent on the morning of September 11, 2001. Spring in the city is glorious, when everything is fresh and green and the moist mungy grime of summer hasn’t set in yet - but autumn may be even better.

The sky was the blue of Venetian glass, and there was a fresh breeze off the East River. I’d been at my desk on the 16th floor of 180 Water Street for about 45 minutes, and was wading through a database of application forms, when suddenly there was a THUD. It was a deep, heavy, muffled thump, as though something weighty and large, going fairly slowly, had slammed into the side of the building at street level. Bus crash?

I walked over to the window and looked down. Nothing to see - just the usual clot of taxis and food carts and people rushing in late to work. I went back to my desk, sat down, and instead of diving right back into my task, glanced out the window. It was like looking into a snow globe. Sprinkled everywhere in the bright blue sky were thousands and thousands of tiny specks that, when my brain was able to adjust, abruptly resolved themselves. They were 8.5” x 11” pieces of paper. Countless thousands of them high in the sky, as though a giant had tipped over a filing cabinet.

It was at this point that things began to get a little bit more frantic. Someone in a corner cube piped up, “A plane hit the World Trade Center!” Even then, the quantum state remained the same. Even then, with a swarm of resumes and intake forms and bills of lading and print-outs of emails swirling madly 16 stories up, it was a lovely morning, and everything was fine. Even then, we had no idea.

I ran to the window again, craning to see what I could see. Nothing. We were on the wrong side of the building, facing east. My boss Sunny, a cheerful, intrepid woman, said, “Hey - let’s run downstairs to Duane Reade and get a box camera!”

There’s a certain breed of New Yorker who is ever ready for an accident as a lark, and a spectacle. That kind of New Yorker runs toward danger, just to get a good look at all the excitement. So off we went down the elevator and rushed up the block to the drugstore. We bought a box camera (remember those?) and began to make our way across town, jostling through the usual crowds toward the twin towers. It couldn’t have been much more than five minutes from that initial ‘thud.’

At this stage, word on the street was that a small plane had accidentally crashed into one of the towers. There was precedent for this, of course. The Empire State Building was hit by a military plane in 1945, and there was a near-miss the very next year. A plane hitting a building could only have been an accident. Anything else was, at that point, literally unthinkable.

As we walked along snapping pictures of nothing much – all we could yet see from our angle was a faint plume of smoke and the tiniest bright spark of flame – men with transistor radios passed out information like hors d’oeuvres at a party. One guy on his cell phone was narrating what someone else was watching on TV. Most people didn’t even know anything was out of the ordinary, and were headed to work, or to get coffee.

Then the second plane hit the south tower, and everything changed. Two planes: this was no accident. Our quantum state jumped – in an instant – from a morning on which an unfortunate accident had happened and we were taking a larky walk to get a look, to a day on which the United States was under attack by an unknown enemy. It was that fast, and there was no going back.

After the jump, there was panic. People began screaming. A Vesuvius of boiling black smoke rose in the west over the towers, while a gout of fire and debris slammed down the street toward us with the trainwreck momentum of a tsunami. We ran, heading back east, toward the river.

People were flooding out of office buildings into the streets. As we passed the pay phone on the corner we saw Sunny’s assistant standing in line to make a call and grabbed her, yanking her with us as we sprinted toward Fulton Street Fish Market. From somewhere in the melee in front of our building a kindly, Humpty Dumpty face rushed toward us - a co-worker with a desperate crush on Sunny, who knew she was awaiting knee replacements and had grabbed her sneakers on his way out of the building, so she didn’t have to flee for her life in sexy girlboss pumps.

Subscribe now

In my memory, that day inhabits two entirely separate spaces: before the quantum jump and after, when things would never be the same.

What do you worry about when you worry about climate change? I worry about a lot of things: hurricanes, wildfires, bomb cyclones, food shortages, heat waves, drought… and I also worry about quantum jumps - or at the very least, rapid acceleration.

But this post is not about climate change. It’s about the war in Iran.

The world went to bed on Friday in the midst of the swirl of Trumpian ravings about tariffs and the increasing stench of the Epstein files. Business as usual this year, in other words.

On Saturday morning, we woke to war.

To the average lay person like me, the leap seems quantum. From the already ghastly state of global affairs (the dismantling of democracy in the United States, the unraveling of NATO, crumbling alliances with European powers, cartel violence in Mexico…) to something an order of magnitude worse that might threaten the globe with annihilation, with the vast nuclear arsenals of China, Russia, Israel and the United States looming as background.

It’s not like this was entirely unexpected. The situation in the Middle East was already bloody turmoil. Wikipedia already has a page up, from which I quote:

Israel and Iranian proxies have been engaged in conflict since 1985, which escalated into a series of direct confrontations in 2024, and a 12-day war in 2025 that also saw US strikes aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities. A month and a half before the attack, Iran massacred thousands of civilians during the largest protests since the Islamic revolution, and US president Donald Trump promised that “help is on the way”. In the following weeks, Iran and the US engaged in indirect nuclear negotiations mediated by Oman, and a second round of nuclear talks had been scheduled to be held in Geneva. The attack was preceded by the largest US military buildup to have occurred in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But the jump from tense negotiations to outright war feels like the jump we made on that sunny September morning so long ago: before the planes hit, and after.

Friday: tensions, worries, threats, street violence in Tehran, gut feelings of doom.

Saturday: massacred Iranian school children, Ali Hosseini Khamenei dead, bombs raining down on Tel Aviv, Doha, and Dubai, Iranian attacks on US military installations, and serious adults talking seriously about nuclear war.

There’s already a surge of curdled cynicism about why, exactly, Donald Trump would choose NOW to start a war against Iran. To draw attention from the Epstein files, right?

Share

Is that it? Or is it something else? Will the public ever know? Trump is lying blithely about “liberating” the Iranian people to take back their government. That cannot possibly be the reason. I’m watching the coverage unfold and am certain that the path to this was a convoluted and perhaps impenetrable trail of money and influence that we may never unravel.

Jared Kushner has reared his empty, pampered head. The Saudi royal family is likely involved. It’s a “follow the money” story at bottom - or is it?

On 9/11, the terrorists boarded the planes hours before the attacks. They’d been plotting and training for months and years before that. And when the passenger doors closed on American Airlines Flight 11, American Airlines Flight 77, United Airlines Flight 93, and United Airlines Flight 175, the weapons were locked and loaded. The outcome was all but inevitable.

The outcome here - war - was probably also all but inevitable.

But it still feels like a terrifying quantum jump.

____________________________

We’re converging on The Farm again soon. That’s the farmhouse and modest scrap of land in Iowa that I am always banging on about.

R and I will be arriving in mid-May. Aunt S will enter the picture on April 1st, bearing with her several packets of seeds, including Good King Henry and Turkish Rocket, both ancient perennial vegetables not sold in the Burpee catalog or on the seed rack at the hardware store.

She’ll plant these up along the fenceline (the rocket) and behind the old daylily bed (the Good King Henry, which likes full sun) long after R and I have fucked off back to London. In our zone, there can still be a hard frost at the very end of April.

She ordered the seeds online.

She did the research about how and where to plant them… online.

She’s decided NOT to have chickens this year, and reached this conclusion because of the research she did… online.

I initially learned about Good King Henry… online, on YouTube.

I’ve been researching all of my climate change palaver for this Substack… online.

I still use Skeptical Science when conversing with climate change deniers: an online resource for discussions being held… online.

There are myriad excellent websites and videos about gardening, raising chickens, growing zones, crop hardiness, how to plant, where to plant, how to cultivate and tend, when to harvest, and how to store and preserve what you’ve grown… online.

Resources for EVERYTHING we need to handle the changing climate around us - local weather conditions, wildfire forecasts, storm tracking updates, emergency planning, community organizing, lists of cooling centers, evacuation routes - all of that… online.

None of this will be available if and when the grid goes down. In the event of a power outage, even if your phone and laptop are charged at the outset, your battery will be flat in no time, so it won’t matter if there’s internet.

The sensible thing to do, it seems, is to start planning now for when the lights are out and you can’t get online.

Right now, almost no one is expecting to be in such a situation for more than a few hours - or days. Certainly not a week or more. And definitely not longer!

Here’s the Washington Post:

After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico was in the dark for 181 days, 6 hours and 45 minutes

(The graphics at that link are amazing, BTW.)

If you don’t live in Puerto Rico, you might be tempted to shrug and think, “grid’s solid where I am in affluent Miami Beach - so I’m not worried.”

And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Storm Uri crashed into Texas in 2021 with Arctic conditions that took down the grid. Millions of folks were affected. All of Texas’s 254 counties suffered some effects of the monster storm. But the power was only out for 3 days.

Hurricane Sandy in 2012 took out power for some customers for up to a week.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was worse than that, with some people spending up to 45 days without power.

But if you assume that most US municipalities will be able to repair the grid and power back up within a reasonable amount of time, that’s probably a safe bet - for now. Puerto Rico’s experience with Hurricane Maria was certainly an outlier (and the island’s experience was exacerbated by a concatenation of circumstances not all of which were directly related to the hurricane).

Like those pernicious investment firm ads say, however, “past performance is not a guarantee of future results.”

I prefer to be on the safe side.

Disasters are going to pile up. There won’t always be time to fully snap back and completely recover between one cataclysm and the next. Money will run out.

Share

So what I can prepare for, I will prepare for. One of my projects this year is to PRINT THINGS OUT. The public library has a printer and it’s dirt cheap to use, so I’ll be compiling instructions for lots of things that I won’t remember how to do without looking them up online. I’ll be printing out planting and harvesting instructions for Good King Henry and Turkish Rocket, for example - plus recipes!

There’s already a county flood evacuation route guide posted on the fridge with an ear of corn magnet. I plan to head to the county seat and City Hall and see if there’s similar information in hard copy, then print out anything else I can find on the web that pertains to tornados, flooding, drought, and prairie wildfires.

I’m also buying books.

I’ll get a copy of the Farmer’s Almanac and a beekeeping book from Thiessen’s. Aunt S has a marvellous and comprehensive guidebook for raising chickens. We have books about food preservation: drying beans, preserving meat, and how to harvest root veg deep into the winter - deep sources of information that we haven’t yet managed to stuff into our heads. We need the written word.

My list isn’t triaged yet, and it isn’t complete.

As the years flow by without a major disaster (god willing and the creek don’t rise, as my Grandpa Scott would have said), I’ll have to update my library. Print out updated information. Post new flyers on the fridge.

As the years flow by I will also have a better handle on what I will need, allowing me to curate and refine my library.

And the information will be available to me not at my virtual fingertips, but in hard copy, in real life. So when the lights go out, and the internet is down, I won’t be flying entirely blind.

Will I need this library soon? I hope not. But I want to start before I need it, just like the growing stockpile of canned tuna and beans in the basement.

This week, New York City is expecting another Arctic blast, expected to dump between a foot and 24 inches of snow.

Store shelves are empty, or close to it. Anyone who did not have a full pantry is now out there panic buying, jostling elbows with other frantic people trying to lay in food before they can’t get out of the house.

Having the money to lay in supplies speaks to privilege. Having the leisure time to plan ahead speaks to privilege.

My privilege is obvious in this piece - the farmhouse, the ability to buy books and tinned food and spend time faffing about on Substack rather than working a couple of jobs to make ends meet.

But if you do have the time, energy, and bit of spare cash to do a little prep for the next disaster that might roll in, I strongly encourage you to start now, and to help your friends, relatives, and neighbors, if you can.

Climate change is here. The situation is not going to get better. And this summer… El Niño is coming.

• At least not now.

• At least not in time.

• At least not before enough people get absolutely desperate because something has personally affected them.

• At least… not in the way many of us had imagined it.

I’ll explain that shortly.

When it comes to a mass movement to protest government inaction on the climate, it’s evident that whatever mass momentum we had is gone.

The “great climate march” of 2014 was 12 loooong years ago, before Donald Trump’s first demon-haunted term in office, when many Americans quite reasonably assumed that Hillary Clinton would be elected president and a climate-focused agenda would be possible.

Great Thunberg has turned her attention to other issues, which she is framing as “intersectionality” rather than as subsuming her direct climate action into humanitarian actions.

Just Stop Oil has declared “victory.”

Despite majorities of people across the globe understanding that the climate is changing, and that government action is needed, the public writ large continues to UNDER estimate this level of support.

The media continues to fail wildly at reporting on the climate. Estimates of the percentage of news articles about climate change range from under 1% to perhaps 3% of total print output. This is not surprising for a number of reasons, one of which is that globally almost half of journalists working on the climate crisis receive threats because of their work.

And even without flagging momentum and media inattention, there are other massive fish to fry right now.

In November of 2024 the American people displayed the collective wisdom of a barrel full of spoiled clams when a not-quite-majority of us managed (with the help of the Electoral College of the Damned - which should be abolished) to once again elect that preening, predating… oh lord, you fill in the blanks here. You know the Trump adjectives by now.

As a direct result of that election, NATO is unraveling, the post-WWII western alliance is disintegrating, Germany and France and other European powers are beginning a nuclear collaboration, Putin is gloating, the Epstein files are blowing up, ICE is murdering innocent citizens, and there is so much terrifying stuff going on that it’s easy for most people to shove the climate to the back of the queue of “dangerous shit to worry about.”

What did I imagine that a “climate revolution” would even have looked like? A bunch of Americans rising up - spending their hard-earned money and risking life and limb - to travel to and storm the Capitol Building and… what? Demand new regulations? Call for an end to new drilling? Ask Congress to impose rationing?

That was probably never going to happen, although, for a delicious moment over a decade ago it did seem like the will was there.

But then - SHIT HAPPENED. The moment fled. Darker forces than we could have imagined gained power. Fascism stopped creeping, and just pounced. Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi slithered into place out of the darkness. That has all seemed far more threatening and urgent than the climate.

Americans have all the work they can do over the next three years to fight back against ICE and the weaponization of the DOJ and Trump’s assault on voting rights and the GOP’s continued attacks on women and POC and the LGBTQ+ community and, hell - everyone who isn’t white and MAGA.

Share

But the climate chickens will come home to roost.

People will begin to revolt as hurricane after hurricane hits, as flood after flood after landslide devastates communities, and as neighbourhoods swelter in the sun and counties burn in the inevitable wildfires. When bridges wash out and crops fail and prices explode and there’s no rice or pasta on the shelves of the local Hyper Market… there will be a climate revolution.

But it won’t be called that. And it won’t be a mass movement. It will be small, discontinuous revolts, against local governments, prompted by local events. You’ll see headlines like:

• Spain’s King Pelted with Rocks in Flood-Hit Valencia

• Farmers Converge on Greek Parliament: Harvest Halved in Thessaly Due to Drought

• Farmers Block Lidl Site with Tractor Barricade

• Puerto Ricans Take to the Streets to Demand Ouster of Governor Ricardo Rosselló Following Hurricane Maria

Oh. Wait. Those are real (composite) headlines. Those things happened.

Those things ALREADY HAPPENED.

It’s likely that most of the protesters did not have the climate front of mind when they grabbed their handmade signs and walked into the street to join the throng.

It’s likely that some of the protesters were climate change deniers, or agnostic, or unaware that global warming was a driving force in their local calamity.

It’s likely that many of the protesters would not have been moved to join a “climate march.”

But they turned out to protest what affected them, in their world. What hit their pocketbook. What raised their insurance costs. What washed away their bridge. What inundated their basement. What turned out the lights on their island. What incinerated their brother and his kid alive.

Seems like the revolution is happening WITHOUT the “climate revolution.”

If we want to raise awareness with people that their local tragedy is part of a wider, global crisis, we who communicate about the climate need to be more insistent - not less - that the climate is the Ur issue of our time.

Subscribe now

I have felt embarrassed in recent months for talking about climate change when ICE is disappearing my fellow Americans. I have felt superfluous when I have focused on the climate in light of what else is going on. I have felt as though I should pipe down a little and stop bothering the people who are working on issues that threaten them more immediately. If my message is “by 2100, global temperatures will have risen by X degrees…” I am not doing it right. That is the wrong way to look at it.

People will protest local disasters and local failures of government. They will be motivated by urgent, pressing needs in their personal world.

The work of a climate change communicator is to remind people - however awkward and unwelcome those reminders may be - that they are not alone. They are being affected by something so massive, and so horrifying, that the connections to others similarly affected may not seem obvious.

• You live on the banks of the Severn, and are now being flooded every single year.

• You live in southern Italy, and for a quarter of the year it is too hot to even venture outside.

• You farm a plot in Syria, and your yields are crashing because of persistent, severe drought.

• You live in northern Iowa, and your neighbor’s kid died in a polar vortex.

To most people, those things probably seem unrelated. BUT THEY ARE NOT.

That’s the whole message.

The climate is everything. Global warming - climate change - is driving flooding, extreme heat, wildfires, hurricanes, drought, human migration, clear air turbulence, landslides, infrastructure devastation, crop failures, supply chain disruption, and global political instability.

The more we are able to tell people this, and stitch things together for them, the more we are able to craft a coherent message so that we can make unified demands.

Local revolt and resistance is necessary and good. But pulling communities of calamity together in common cause is the goal.

Spain is not alone. The Berkeley Hills are not alone. West Bengal is not alone. New Orleans is not alone. Chad and Nigeria are not alone. Brazil is not alone.

• We are not alone.

• We are not flotsam.

• We are not kindling.

• We are the people of Earth.

And we can demand better, TOGETHER.

Dateline Valencia, Spain, October 2024

Violent clashes followed the government’s poor handling of deadly flash flooding in October of 2024. You can see the video at the link above.

In case you don’t recall the Spanish floods of 2024, here’s a bit of a recap from Wikipedia:

On 29 October 2024, torrential rain caused by an isolated low-pressure area at high levels brought over a year’s worth of precipitation to several areas in eastern Spain, including the Valencian Community, Castilla–La Mancha, and Andalusia. The resulting floodwaters caused the deaths of about 237 people^[1] and substantial property damage.^[2][3] Often mononymously entitled “DANA“, it is one of the deadliest natural disasters in Spanish (and European) history.^[4]

Though similar torrential rain events had happened in the past in the region, the flooding was more intense, likely due to the effects of climate change.

Here’s how Al Jazeera described the 2024 floods at the time:

Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory.

Spring forward not even two years, and here’s some reporting from Al Jazeera on February 7, 2026:

Spain and Portugal are bracing for a new storm, just days after Storm Leonardo’s deadly floods killed at least two people — one in Portugal and one in Spain — and forced more than 11,000 residents to evacuate their homes.

On Saturday, authorities in Portugal mobilised more than 26,500 rescuers as Storm Marta approached, forcing three municipalities to postpone Sunday’s presidential vote until next week due to severe weather.

Portugal is being absolutely pummelled. The AP image below shows damage from Storm Leonardo in that country this past week.

From Euronews:

Portugal's government is extending a state of emergency until the end of next week as it says it is facing a "devastating crisis" caused by a wave of storms that have killed several people in recent weeks.

“In the coming hours many will continue to face situations of extreme difficulties,” Speaking during a press conference in Lisbon, Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said.

“I would like to reiterate a very determined appeal for that in these crucial hours everyone follows the recommendations from the authorities, the risks cannot be ignored,” Montenegro stated.

“This is a devastating crisis, a crisis that will impose a long and demanding recovery process,” he added.

So we have “worst in living memory” in 2024, and “devastating crisis” in 2026.

Remember: the situation is not going to get better. A key feature of climate change is that, unless SOMETHING IS DONE, the climate will continue to get worse. Not better. WORSE.

For the Iberian Peninsula, that means (among other things) more floods.

I sometimes wonder whether most politicians (a) have any clue that when people get really, REALLY mad about something, there are going to be “violent clashes,” and (b) we’re going to be really REALLY mad about the climate very soon.

I don’t know enough above politics in countries other than the US to muse about their particular set of miserable government wretches - and I suspect some sensible pols actually are agonizingly worried about global warming - but I do know that not enough politicians, in any place or of any stripe, are worried enough. If they were, they would at least be worried about their own ratings, reelections, and hides, no? They would at least be thinking about political fallout, civil unrest, rioting, or those “violent clashes” and, one would presume, be doing something about the situation?

Again, we are too late to stop warming up to 2.0C, 3.0C, or even higher.

After two paragraphs of ridiculous hopium and a big Pixabay image of an alarm clock, even NASA gets to the point here:

Without major action to reduce emissions, global temperature is on track to rise by 2.5°C to 4.5°C (4.5°F to 8°F) by 2100, according to the latest estimates.

Never mind that “major action to reduce emissions” is not happening.

Action to save their own miserable skins from enraged mobs is also not happening.

Every disaster produces its own version of “we will rebuild!” and hashtags like #HoustonStrong. Politicians vow to send in more rescuers and more resources, and “build back better!” They say things like “it’s a long road to recovery, but we’re stalwart and courageous and strong and special!” They promise, without saying the actual words, that this disaster is a one-off, and everything will be getting back to normal.

And that isn’t sustainable. It’s not.

Things fall apart. The edges fray. The space of time between events will get narrower. There will be less time to regroup, regrow, rebuild. Resources will become scarcer. Time – money – building materials – hands to do the work.

There will come a point when we are overcome by the scale of what we have to mitigate. We’ll be battered and bruised, chivvied from pillar to post, scrounging for money, for assistance, for funding, for volunteers, for sandbags, for water trucks, for firefighting equipment, for rent money because our job just blew away, for the energy to go on.

There will come a point when promises to rebuild won’t be met because there has been too much damage in too short a period of time, and there is not enough money, and all the bluster and brave talk in the world won’t be able to paper over the fact that our governments have failed.

The politicians running those governments either do not know this, or are naively expecting us to take it lying down. The imagine we’ll believe their nattering hopium and greenwashing. They fantasize we’ll roll with the violent punches and cheerfully pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

And so far, so good, I guess. Not only aren’t people not focused (yet) on the climate in large enough numbers, but there is a lot else going on in the world for us to be enraged about.

That said, I don’t think that the “violent clashes” in Valencia in 2024 are going to be the last of their kind.

I think that people will be desperate, and angry, and maybe they won’t be clashing and rioting and burning cars in the street “because of climate change.” Maybe they won’t think of it that way. But that’s the reality.

People are going to rise up and demand better because their government didn’t plan ahead - didn’t have enough resources - shut down government agencies that could predict storms (cough cough - USA) - or had too much on their plate after the last hurricane or flash flood.

Here are just a few of the things that are going to push people to the breaking point:

• not getting services

• not being able to get back into their homes after a disaster

• broken supply chains

• no electricity for weeks on end

• slashing through impervious thickets of red tape to get emergency assistance

• paying through the nose for food because of massive crop failures (like those being reported from the recent flooding in Portugal and Spain)

Politicians whistling past the graveyard and hoping that folks won’t freak out en masse are nothing short of STUPID. Craven, gormless idiots.

The shit is going to hit the fan. It has already started. And the spray will be directed at governments who didn’t do enough to acknowledge the reality and adequately plan ahead.

So what’s the answer? There are a lot of answers.

The short answer is YES. YES they are that stupid.

But there’s another answer, and that is that we need our politicians to:

A) Acknowledge the truth.

B) Start planning for real consequences.

This might look like the government of a nation declaring a Climate Emergency and start rationing goods and services that produce especially high emissions.

This might look like governments allocating funds to projects like relocating people from particularly dangerous flood plains or hurricane or wildfire zones.

This might look like governments supporting science, and beefing up funding and staffing for agencies that predict weather events and potential disasters.

There are hundreds of thousands of words to be written about what we might do, and I’m not going to write them here.

Instead, I’m going to answer my own question and say that someone in government who hasn’t seen the writing on the wall and is not at least TELLING US THE TRUTH about the climate is gobsmackingly shortsighted and stupid. They’ll deserve what they get. And it’s not going to be pretty.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you here, straight outta 2015, THE ON DEMAND FINGER OF DEATH. First published on the DailyKos on July 15, 2015.

What I would like to point out before running the piece in its unedited entirety is that… nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed.

I will briefly note that the recent hellscape in Minneapolis has proved a catalyst to people getting out into the streets. #BLM also moved many of us to make a PHYSICAL, not just an ONLINE, stand.

But we are still largely a social media culture, and more often than not measure our successes and failures by clicks and virality. I do not think this is healthy, or even very useful. I am certain that our billionaire oligarchic overlords will not pay one iota of attention to us unless we are physically up in their faces in spaces where they cannot ignore us. So…. not your local shopping mall. And not downtown for a rally where there are face painters and fun food trucks.

We must be in front of the seats of power. In their frikken faces. In their bottom line. In front of their storefronts.

I see the stirrings of this and am so very hopeful - but for now, on the climate, we are still being mostly ignored.

So travel back with me in time to….. this.

_____________________________

I think that perhaps the defining image of American culture today is what I call the “On Demand Finger.”

You know it. You’ve seen it. It’s in a multiplicity of television ads, and I even found a few still images of it. Look familiar?

The On Demand Finger is such an all-pervasive meme that it sometimes seems that wielding it is all the average American wants to do to accomplish anything. With few exceptions (thanks, #ShellNo kayakers! and People’s Climate March marchers!) we’re mostly happy to point and click our way through as much of life - and political action - as possible. We shop online, we connect socially online, we find dates online, we work online, and we’re activists online.

It is so much easier to click “yes!” on the latest email from Aavaz or 350.org, or tweet #FeelTheBern or #ActOnClimate a few times a day (guilty!) than it is to get up off one’s butt, get out the door, and take to the streets.

It’s so much easier to point and click and tweet and comment and forward than it is to take personal action that will reduce one’s CO2 footprint. It takes much less work to continue to drive everywhere (because, hey!, everyone else still does it, and it’s convenient for Cooper’s soccer practice and Rayne’s play date) than it is to ditch the car and take the bus or bike. It’s far easier to talk or blog about going vegan that it is to actually do so. It’s easier to stay home and bitch or worry than it is to vote.

Now I will insert a HUGE caveat.

We Americans WORK OUR ASSES OFF. We work more than anyone else in the industrialized world.

You know the stats as well as I do, or better. We have less vacation, work longer hours, need two jobs to make ends meet. That’s not what I am talking about. I’m talking about the twin challenges of climate change that are staring us in the face. To tackle this looming global disaster-in-the-making, I am convinced we must fight on two fronts:

1) bringing it to our representatives in the government and forcing them to do the hard work on emissions and climate change regulations, and

2) making changes in our own lives to slash our rate and volume of consumption, reduce our CO2 footprint, and put BIG pressure on the marketplace to adapt.

We don’t have time to let “business as usual” take care of climate change for us, or to sign enough petitions so that Ted Cruz decides it’s time to be intellectually honest, or to tweet enough #ClimateChangeIsReal exhortations to Jim Inhofe that he steps down as Chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee and Bernie Sanders gets the post.

One new, scary estimate puts 2018 as the date by which:

no new cars, homes, schools, factories, or electrical power plants should be built anywhere in the world, ever again unless they’re either replacements for old ones or are carbon neutral

A change of that magnitude is more than just a click away. A change of that magnitude requires that we take to the streets - that we camp out in the foyer of our Senators’ and Representatives’ offices - that we throw our car keys in the basket and walk the mile and a half to work each day - that we cut beef out of our diets right now....

Share

Yet in the brave new world we’re creating for ourselves, everything, it seems, is all about our desire to point and click for everything. We like “on demand.” It moves product, that’s for sure. We like a world in which everything is accessible at the touch of a button, or the click of a mouse. We don’t need to lift a finger. All we have to do is demand it. Click – press – presto!

But consuming less and conserving more takes effort. It takes real life elbow grease, in the real world. It’s not just click, snap, result! It’s work. Going without requires effort. Cutting out meat means learning a whole new way of eating. Ditching the car means hoofing it, or taking the bus (and yes, I know I know I know about public transportation).

Making a political statement takes work, too. The bare, BARE minimum is getting out to vote. In the 2012 presidential election, voter turnout didn’t squeak up to 55%.

Voter turnout for local elections, traditionally not nearly as high, is shockingly low, and trending down.

And even voting hasn’t done the trick with climate change. We all know the system is rigged, that the GOP has gerrymandered their way into power, and that a small number of very powerful oligarchs at the top of the pile essentially hold the reins.

So what do we have left? We have our bodies. We consume with them – and we can cut our consumption and drastically reduce demand, forcing the markets to follow. If you and I and the next 50 million folks don’t buy a new SUV next year, guess what? Car companies won’t make more SUVs. If you and I the next 50 million people stop eating beef, guess what? Drastically fewer feedlots and a slashed supply chain, reducing emissions.

And we can occupy and march with our bodies. If you and I and a half a million people march on Washington, flood up the Capitol steps and demand action RIGHT NOW, guess what? Something might get done. A carbon tax, for example. Beefed up EPA regulations, perhaps.

There is much amazing work being done around the globe – political and personal work – on this issue. There are people marching, and there are people voting, and there are people making a ruckus at City Hall. There’s a global network of dedicated, passionate activists working their hearts out each and every day. If you got this far, you’re probably one of them.

But it isn’t enough.

Consumption continues to soar. A miniscule number of Americans eat a plant-based diet (our easiest big win on emissions by far, as the global livestock industry produces more emissions than vehicles), we’re buying SUVs like they are going out of style (I wish they were), manufacturing is booming in some areas, we’ve just opened up drilling in the Arctic, for crying out loud… and on the political front? Well, in between huge actions, when everyone goes home and the adrenalin wears off, those in power feel us take our foot off the gas. We can’t do that any more.

Petitions and tweets and popular entertainments don’t make a dent on politicians. People taking to the street make a difference. People coming out to campaign events – in numbers – and not letting candidates leave until they’ve answered our questions about climate change might start to make a difference.

The People’s Climate March last September made a difference. It is no coincidence, say I, that the USA and China reached a biggish climate deal in November.

Subscribe now

It’s time to take this to the next level. It’s time to screw our courage to the sticking place and do something big and game changing in the real world.

When it comes to climate change, it’s time to get up off of the couch and say goodbye to the On Demand Finger of Death.

______________________________

END OF WAY BACK MACHINE.

I might be dead in the next 10 years, so I might not see if anything has changed in the interim. What do you think? Do you think it will? 🤔

(Photo attribution: http://www.welovecostarica.com)

This post isn’t about the various weather-related disasters unfolding across the globe these Anthropocene days. This post is about the actual Earth itself.

Full disclosure: it’s a shameless re-post from July 16, 2024, when I had about 27 subscribers and almost nobody read my stuff.

So get this:

Rising sea levels caused by climate change are making the Earth “fatter” at the equator - slowing down its rotation and making the days longer.

As polar ice caps have melted, water has shifted from the poles to the equator, “significantly” increasing how oblate - or fat - the Earth is since 1900, and lengthening its days.

Adding a few milliseconds to a 24-hour day may not sound much, but it has “implications for precise timekeeping and space navigation”, the authors of the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said.

The pace of change is higher than at any point in the 20th century, they found.

MIND. FLIPPING. BLOWN.

Getting across how TOTAL and all-encompassing are the effects of a changing climate is pretty much Job One of climate communications - but it’s also one of the hardest tasks.

Most folks, let’s be honest, still aren’t really tuned in. And for the average person who thinks there are other more pressing fish to fry, looking at or thinking about climate change is a bit analogous to them holding up a cardboard tube to peer through, and then judging the fraction that they see of the entire world to be all that there is of it.

In other words, for most people, climate change is a little bit of this or a little bit of that - hotter summers, or more rain in far off places - and not much more. Weather events seem episodic and one-off. It is understandable that most people look at each episode as a standalone event (even if tragic and/or horrifying). They’re not thinking in terms of trends - or of an ever-worsening situation. Just, “oh wow! bad hail in Australia!” and “those wildfires out west seem super scary.”

The media’s presentation of wildfires and hurricanes and flash floods encourages this kind of thinking, whereby we are given to understand that every individual hurricane or flash flood or heat wave is a newsworthy but isolated singularity, not something that is part of the totality of a changing climate. It is very easy to NOT connect the dots and see that all of this is related.

I struggle - many of us struggle - to convey the MUCHNESS and WHOLE GODDAMNED THING-NESS of the climate crisis.

In order to have done our jobs properly as writers about what is going on - the utter horror show of our current predicament - we must grab people by the metaphorical throat and snap them to attention so they will refocus their gaze on climate change as not just one discrete thing among many that they can care about, but as the planet altering phenomenon that it is.

There’s got to be some key to it. Some CATCHY BUZZWORD! or JAZZ HANDS! or OMG EVERYBODY FREAK OUT! moment, right?

I’ve said this before (in my small, small voice): the climate isn’t something “over there” that you can regard dispassionately. The climate is WHERE YOU ARE NOW. Yet despite years of science and official reports and NOAA and NASA data and school strikes for the climate and massive 350 thousand plus climate marches in midtown Manhattan - this message is not sinking in.

And it’s so simple.

Everything happening now, everything that has happened in the past in human history and beyond, and everything that will happen in the future on this planet takes place within the climate.

The climate is not something from which you can stand back. You cannot observe the climate from a distance. You are in the climate now, and you will always be in the climate. Even after you are dead and buried, your earthly remains will be inside the ecosystem that is inside the climate. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE.

Or, perhaps you can? Perhaps you can build a ship to fly to the moon and live inside a lunar cave. Perhaps, like Elon Musk, you can delude yourself into thinking that Mars can be made habitable in the near term, and you (and your uber wealthy cronies and besties) can “fly away home” to a new planet, where we humans have not (yet) utterly wrecked everything.

But no. Realistically, we’re not going anywhere. We are stuck here on Earth, in a climate that is changing so rapidly that it has sober-sided scientists absolutely stunned.

(And in a piquant twist… if the “fatter” Earth throws off space navigation, well, good luck with that Mars thing, Elon.)

The difficulty in effectively communicating the hugeness of the crisis is what drew me to the story above. It’s not about a heatwave where (let’s face it, mostly far away and brown) people are dying. It’s not about wildfire season that can be waved away with “this is typical of Northern California, come ON, libtards!” It is about the WHOLE DAMNED PLANET (or at least the oceans, which cover 70% of its surface) being affected by the changing climate - which, in turn, was affected by the grotesquely selfish and evil actions of a handful of (mostly) men in the fossil fuel industry who have spent the last half century lying and gaslighting and funding contrarian “science” to keep the blinders on the populace so that they can go on making money.

Making money. A few rich, greedy, complacent bastards wanting to pad their already obscene bank balances. That’s what did it.

Sure, population growth, too many people, eating too much meat, rising living standards, blah blah blah. BUT AT BOTTOM, this horrorshow we’re heading into is the result of avarice. Blind, grasping avarice, by a very few wealthy individuals who did not care a fig for the untold thousands upon millions of people who will suffer grievously and die because of their heedless actions.

They knew. They were told. There are no excuses. We need a climate revolution to bring them to justice.

Remember:

• Asking did not work.

• Voting did not work.

• Marching did not work.

• Emissions are rising.

#ClimateRevolution

Flooding in Antalya, Turkey.

Storm Kristin in central Portugal and Andalusia, Spain.

“Massive devastation” from flooding and landslides in Greece.

Floods sweeping through Athens.

Heavy rains and flooding in Brittany, France.

An “exceptionally wet” January in the UK, which is in some outlets being touted as reprieve from drought, despite the horrendous flooding and related damage being wrecked by Storm Chandra proving that this “drought relief” is not normal seasonal rainfall.

Drowned people - drowned pets. Devastating property damage. Infrastructure ripped away and replaced by cavernous, muddy, stinking holes. Raw sewage in the city streets.

And the physics is simple: warm air holds more water, and more energy, than cooler air. Just ask The Royal Society:

Earth’s lower atmosphere is becoming warmer and moister as a result of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. This gives the potential for more energy for storms and certain extreme weather events. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the types of events most closely related to temperature, such as heatwaves and extremely hot days, are becoming more likely. Heavy rainfall and snowfall events (which increase the risk of flooding) are also generally becoming more frequent.

You know that the “climate scientists” have been predicting all of these effects, and more, for years. For decades.

But now that the chickens are coming (very obviously) home to roost, HEAVEN FORFEND any reporting include a mention of climate change except for the useless, toothless, standard preamble: “while we cannot ascribe any one weather event to global warming…”

Hey timid journalists! Why don’t we take a few trembly baby steps out onto the scary limb of truth and say THIS IS CLIMATE CHANGE, PEOPLE?

That’s all I wanted to say. Just that.

Oh, and that THERE NEEDS TO BE MORE REPORTING ON THIS IN THE MSM. Yes, even with the anti-democratic horrorshow that is the Trump regime. Yes, even with the Greenland and NATO situation swinging from wild to wilder and more incomprehensible. Yes. Even with grocery costs rising and health insurance markets in chaos.

Because if it’s too damned late for our fossil fuel-owned governments to do a thing about emissions, then how will people know what’s coming, and have even the barest chance to plan ahead?

Everybody’s got a friend who is useful in an emergency, right?

You know the friend. They show up and they’re ready.

If you need jumper cables, they’ve got jumper cables. (Are those even a thing anymore with modern cars?)

If you need a shoulder to cry on, they have a shoulder - but mostly, they’ve got the patience to listen to you for awhile before putting an action plan into place.

If someone’s died they bring a casserole, but they also have a spreadsheet and they track who has time to do what and when, who can drive folks, and who can provide childcare.

When the lights go out, they’ve got a flashlight.

If it’s flooding, they’ve got a boat.

If you’re breaking up with someone dodgy and unreliable, this friend will come at the drop of a hat in the middle of the night with a pickup and a couple of friends at the ready to help you bug out. They probably even have a spare room and the wherewithal to help you make a plan.

And then… there are some of your other friends. You know them well, and you love them. And they love you! They love you and mean well and want to do their absolute best for you, but they are what I call “flappers.”

A flapper is hesitant, unsure, hovering on the edge. They don’t show up with a tourniquet or a bandage or a shovel or a lock pick kit to get you into your home when you’re panicking. They show up with an open heart and good intentions and few practical skills. They might yelp something vaguely helpful from the sidelines, but mostly, they’re dithering and watching and making everyone involved in the situation just that little bit more nervous. Not on purpose! But because… they’re a flapper.

Sometimes these people are exactly who you need. A hug and unconditional love goes a long way in a lot of situations. But when the terrifying shit hits the foundational fan, you need a helper. You need someone useful.

Share Climate Revolution Now

Your helper friends might be gruff. They might be practical and hard-bitten, rather than emo and lovey and gracious. But they are USEFUL.

Time’s a-coming when my skill set - listening, emoting, describing the contours of the problem, educating, helping with empathetic support - won’t be the ticket. In fact, I think we are already in that time.

I don’t think of myself as a “flapper,” really. I do have pretty good instincts for problem solving, and I know a good deal about practical, common sense strategies in an emergency. But I am NOT a classic useful friend.

I’m not in the Cajun Navy. I don’t work out. I’m not an auxiliary firefighter. I don’t know how to repair plumbing. I won’t own or carry a gun. I could probably change a tire, at a push… but I wouldn’t count on me.

Instead, I’m a shy, socially awkward introvert with a splendid imagination and little in the way of upper body strength. I don’t have a driver’s license, so I can’t drive you to work, or court. There’s a lot I can do in the domestic sphere (preserving food, cooking from scratch, darning socks, keeping the house warm when the heat goes out) but there’s more that I cannot do in any sphere - like defend you with a gun, do CPR, or even organise, really, because - introvert! Awkward! Shy! Gah!

Subscribe now

Of course this is a gross simplification. People are - everywhere, and in every particular - on a spectrum. I am useful in some situations, and a flapper in others.

But I can do better. I can understand my own quirks, particularities, and limitations, and resolve to train myself in other capabilities. I can understand that if civil unrest breaks out - if there is violence in the streets - if the supply chain collapses - if crops fail - if the United States is cut off from the civilised world and embroiled in civil unrest - I can do more. I can do better. And I can learn that now. Here’s what I’m doing so far:

• I’m getting a driver’s license, and plan to trade our ridiculous old BMW 428i convertible for - well, I haven’t decided yet. Something practical and USEFUL, that is for sure.

• I’ve already started getting in shape, so I can shovel snow and haul things and dig ditches and physically pitch in.

• I am reading Substacks to learn practical skills, and starting to put best practices in place.

• I am reaching out to community members in my local area, and I’m networking, with an eye to knitting together the Blue network that I know is possible in the Red State hellhole that’s my official residence. The area is small, but I’ve actually got a database going with info I can share with others - who lives where, who can provide what, who is prepared to…

• I’m enrolled in courses in first aid and CPR.

• I’m working in my aunt’s regenerative garden.

• I’m probably gonna get some chickens. And maybe a few goats.

• I already know how to can, so I am buying Mason jars and lids and getting my act together for this harvest.

• I am grabbing my little brother when I see him in March and getting him to teach me simple car repairs, and a little woodworking.

In short, in my small way, I am working on being USEFUL.

I will still be an emo flapper in many respects. But I am working on stiffening up my skills to be more than that. If and when the time comes (and you know what I am talking about) I want to be more than a pillowy, comforting presence. I may never be hard core or bad-ass, but I want to be as USEFUL as possible, no matter what comes our way.

Let’s hope it never comes to that. But I’m going to prepare as though it will.

It is never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks. And whatever is coming down the pike… we’re going to need every trick in the book.

What do you think?