Faster Than Expected

As you may know, our civilization is going to collapse soon.

The effects of climate change are increasing exponentially. 2023 was the hottest summer on record, and numerous indicators (global mean air temperature, mean sea surface temperature, and Antarctic ice shelf area) are currently completely outside the bounds of all historical precedent. July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth and was likely the hottest month in the past 100,000 years. The Amazon is in a drought so severe mighty rivers are nothing more than streaks of sand in the jungle. Last week, Acapulco was destroyed by a surprise hurricane, powered by warm seas and completely outside all predictive models. Runaway methane releases have begun as permafrost melts. All of this, according to climate scientists, has been “faster than expected.”

Sometime soon – maybe as soon as next summer – we’re going to experience a shock that will fundamentally change the underlying assumption of abundance at the core of the way we do things. Something beyond the massive heat domes, atmospheric rivers, jet stream disruptions, fires, hurricanes, and floods we have already seen. Simultaneous drought throughout the northern hemisphere breadbaskets would do it. So would a sudden jump in sea levels from the collapse of a major ice sheet. A heat event that kills a million people, depending on where it is, could wake people up as well. Or perhaps a violent storm demolishing a major city in a developed country. All of these are on their way – faster than expected. 

Many poorer and less fortunate countries are already in collapse, running out of water and food and suffering political, economic, and social chaos. This year’s rice harvest has been the lowest in decades, leading to sharp rises in price. To preserve their own supply, India (the leading producer) has banned some rice exports. Even in richer parts of the world, a major crop failure will mean drastic inflation in the price of foodstuffs (far more than we’ve seen already), throwing millions into hunger and desperation. For the poor of the world it will mean famine, war, migration, and death as swathes of the planet become uninhabitable.  Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Venezuela and a few others are in collapse now. Dozens of other countries are on the brink.

This year we are likely to hit the milestone of 1.5°C of warming above baseline – a supposed red line that international climate negotiations have long held as a limit we should not cross. Scientists say it was “faster than expected.”  Staying below this level of warming would mean an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 350 parts per million (ppm) or below. We are currently at 420 ppm and rising, faster than expected. Accordingly, the goalpost has been moved to 2°C, a level of warming that even the chronically understated scientists at the IPCC say will have serious negative consequences. Falling food production, intense storms, droughts, fires, floods, and deadly heat: all of it further increases the stress on polities the world over. 

One part of this mosaic of misery has not gone faster than expected: the implementation of solutions to the crisis. Despite all the very earnest, capable, and dedicated people working on the latest developments in carbon markets, carbon capture, alternative energy, forestry, geoengineering, and AI; despite the electric cars, the vegans, the protests, the offsets; despite the negotiations, the studies, the investments and divestments, the pronouncements and goal setting; despite it all, nothing we have done remotely approaches the scale of the problem.

The reality is that averting global disaster is impossible at this point. 

Too much warming is already baked into the system: the lag between emissions and warming means that what we’re feeling now is from a couple of decades ago. But almost half of all anthropogenic carbon emissions have taken place since the 1990s, and every year sets a new emissions record thanks to annual fossil fuel subsidies of $7 trillion globally. Yearly greenhouse gas emissions are currently closing in on 55 gigatons per year. 

We’re looking at sea level rise that will displace one tenth of the global population, over 600 million people. We’re looking at famines that will affect even formerly developed countries. We’re looking at extreme water shortages, huge and unpredictable storms, fires, and rolling pandemics. There will be drastic shifts in where it is even possible to live.

We’re already in the middle of a mass extinction that is proceeding a thousand times faster than the carbon-release-caused Permian-Triassic extinction, which was the most severe known extinction event and took place when our ancestors were basically scurrying paleo rats. That time, 90% of marine animal species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species were snuffed out. Plants were nearly eliminated as well. 

The only way to begin to address the problem would be to immediately dismantle the fossil carbon industries and have no further emissions—ever. This is not going to happen, and even if it could, it would throw the world into crop failure and economic seizure all by itself. So instead we stumble towards the cliff, faster than expected. 

So now what?

It’s time to accept that our way of life is about to change irreversibly for the worse, and to figure out how to position ourselves to survive, and maybe even thrive, in the coming reality. 

We don’t know how big the changes will be and how fast they will arise, but history is littered with huge, seemingly eternal polities being quickly demolished by relatively small climate perturbations. The Classical Mayans, the Ming Dynasty, the Roman Empire and many many others all met their demise in part because of changes to the climates they operated in. We’ve got the biggest civilization ever, and the biggest climate changes ever. 

In effect, we know that our quality of life is being degraded, and that degradation is accelerating. Our choice at this point is between accepting this degradation passively and watching our lives crumble around us, or changing our lifestyles now to manage the direction of degradation and steer it towards something that will continue to be fulfilling and will set the conditions for happiness even in the midst of worldwide trauma. 

Personally, I want to be living in a sustainable, locally integrated, fossil-carbon-free community that is a net exporter of food and culture, and is filled with the people I want to spend the rest of my life with. And I’d like to ramp it up faster than expected.

In practice, this means assembling a bunch of competent and community-minded people on a sizable chunk of land and starting to grow our own food. Or maybe it means finding an existing community and joining or expanding it. 

I think we can do it thoughtfully and create a community that fosters a fulfilling life in the midst of chaos; a place where we can start to heal the Earth in our own small way through living regeneratively; a place where everyone has a sense of belonging as together we hunker down and see what happens.

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