Unnatural disasters

[Bird on a Fire]

Every year brings more unprecedented "natural" disasters. Massive fires in areas that don't normally burn. More of the very powerful storms. Water shortages, floods and landslides.

These are going to keep getting worse. More forest areas (and other habitats) are drying out, because they no longer get fully rewetted winter. The sea is accumulating heat every year (see the collapse of Arctic sea ice, and many glaciers).

The EU and US are currently toying with 2050 as the date to achieve net carbon neutrality. So even if everyone else gets on board with that target, these disasters will keep getting worse every year for the next thirty, plus however many years it takes to get back down to a "safe" level (and realistically we'll choose some level of increased risk) plus however many decades it takes natural systems to revert to their previous dynamics.

Reversing a change can take a lot longer than the change itself took, depending on the particular interrelation of feedbacks in that system. For instance, dry soils get compacted and more impervious to water. A forest that burned in a week takes decades to regrow. We don't know how long sea ice would take to recover, but f.cking ages.

So society needs to be thinking hard about how we mitigate these risks. EPD has given an overview in the Stonegate Train Crash thread of the state of climate preparedness in UK railways. Extrapolate that to every country (most of which will probably be less prepared than the UK) and every facet of the globalised supply chain: transport infrastructure, coastal cities, agriculture - none of it is ready for what's coming.

Rapid changes to energy production and land use would be much, much cheaper and simpler (we already have most of the knowledge, but lack the political will - for climate preparedness we don't really know what's necessary or where, and to be honest never fully will). Unfortunately, they require nations and intergovernmental organisations to take big, binding commitments that would threaten some business interests, and so are dismissed as unrealistic. The haphazard appearance of fires and water in unwanted places is much less obviously a systematic problem.

So, for the rest of our lives we're going to be hearing about people burned, drowned or starved to death because rapid climate transition was considered too costly to some sectors of the economy, and too complicated to sell to voters. Almost all of those deaths will be the poorest, within and between societies.

How can we do better than this?