Like me, you’ve probably spent some time wondering what your life will look like by the year 2030. Conversations around climate change have settled into three main groups. You have the climate deniers who believe it’s all a scam. You have the climate activists who demand urgent action. Now we have climate minimizers, who assure us we’ll be okay in a world with 2-3C of warming.
Well, let’s consider what’s happening now:
Farmers in the U.S. have already abandoned more than 30 percent of their winter-wheat fields this year. It’s the biggest drop in production in 100 years. Grain traders predict it’s going to get worse over the summer. It was a hard winter across the midwest, hit by drought and severe cold.
Even Fox News calls it “devastating.”
It’s not looking good for beef, either. The nation’s cattle inventory is reaching all-time lows this year. As of April, inventory was down 4.4 percent. Again, drought is hitting pastures hard. It’s driving up the cost of feed. Worse, the long-term data shows a clear overall decline over the last 20 years. Even when the beef industry “expands,” we’re producing less than we did during the 1990s. Most agriculture experts will tell you: Beef is in decline, and prices will only go up from here.
For the first time ever, nations are seriously considering a plan to vaccinate chickens and turkeys against avian flu, during the worst outbreak in recorded history. During the last 18 months, the global poultry industry has culled 200 million birds. It’s been having a real impact on prices. All that sounds great for vegans, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that our breadbasket is slowly failing. If it’s not drought and heat waves, it’s the growing threat of disease.
It’s not just in the U.S., either.
Asian countries have already been seeing record-breaking temperatures as high as 112F. China is bracing for another summer of extreme heat, alternating between drought and flooding. Experts predict it will threaten “to disrupt more commodities, even niche ones like rubber and peanut crops.” As of April, drought has already caused delays at 80 percent of the country’s rubber plantations.
Back in February, Britain was rationing fruits and vegetables.
According to CNBC, stores were limiting the purchase of tomatoes, peppers, and cumbers “to three items per customer.” The cause? Extreme weather across southern Europe and northern Africa.
Experts predict that even coffee is going to become a luxury item as climate change kills off 50 percent of farmland by 2050. We’ve already seen coffee farmers in Central America abandoning their fields.
Does this sound like fearmongering?
These are all reported facts.
Here’s the big picture:
We haven’t even crossed over the 1.5C threshold yet. That’s the number climate scientists have told us to stay under, if we’re going to avoid the worst fallout of global warming. Recently, they predicted there’s a very good chance that we’ll breach that limit within the next few years, decades earlier than expected. Artificial intelligence models are predicting it’s guaranteed.
Climate scientists have held back from making detailed predictions about what our lives are going to look like by 2030. They hedge. They don’t want to get blamed for causing panic. They talk in relatively vague terms. Nobody wants to be wrong. Climate “alarmists” like Bill McGuire or Gaia Vince have painted vivid portraits of what to expect down the road. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the rise of climate minimizers over the last few years, people who consider themselves experts who go around insisting that 2C of warming won’t be that bad.
Increasingly, the mass media has started to condition us for life in a 2C world. They’re already working on their minimizer rhetoric.
Are we surprised?
For the last year, they’ve worked hard to convince everyone to accept mass death and disability at the hands of a virus. It’s starting to look like that’s the strategy of choice for unavoidable climate change.
I’m not afraid of sounding like a doomer.
Here’s what I think we can reasonably expect our lives to look like by the year 2030. I think it’s important to talk about. I’m not trying to scare anyone. I’m trying to prepare them, rationally and emotionally.
First, I think we can expect inflation to continue. The vast majority of politicians and economists still live largely in denial when it comes to climate change. They’re not factoring it into their models. It doesn’t matter how much the Federal Reserve keeps hiking up interest rates. That’s not going to help, either. The real problem here is twofold. First, there’s just straight-up corporate greed.
Second, the midwest and southwest are sinking deeper into a geologically predictable megadrought. Climate change is going to make it even worse.
We’re talking about a second Dust Bowl.
Large parts of the U.S. are already seeing the return of dust storms. Earlier this month, a dust storm caused a 72-car pileup in Illinois. More and more, farmers are reporting drought on par with the 1920s and 1930s. As a farmer in Nebraska told local news: “It’s just wildly dry here…and this is the wet season, so we should be soaking up a lot of rain… that’s a little bit scary.”
Severe weather in general will keep getting worse.
According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, severe weather in 2022 cost the U.S. more than $21 billion in crop losses. That’s a minimum estimate that doesn’t even include livestock, structural damage, or other factors. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration calls 2022 the third worst disaster year in American history, with the worst happening in 2017. So anyone trying to claim that we’re seeing less severe weather is…lying.
Meanwhile, lines at food banks keep getting longer. As pandemic SNAP benefits expire, demand is going up everywhere from Utah to California.
When you combine corporate greed with megadrought and soil depletion, it doesn’t take a genius to predict a vast expansion of poverty and hunger by the 2030s. Food is just going to keep getting more expensive.
Rationing and shortages will become the norm. We can cross our fingers and hope that the vegetation zones will simply shift, and that other states can take up the slack by growing more food.
That’s a big if.
Homelessness is going up, anywhere from 6 percent a year in some states to 23 percent in states like Oregon. Housing is just too expensive. It’s partly greed, but also driven by climate change as warmer weather brings disease and insect infestations to the world’s timber supplies. There just aren’t enough houses for people, and investors treat them more as commodities than living spaces. Again, we could adapt by replacing timber with bamboo.
We’re not doing that (yet).
Summers will become unbearable in large parts of the U.S. We’re talking about heat indexes in the 110s on a regular basis.
Forget going outside.
More people are going to rely on air conditioning 24/7. People in Arizona are already using oven mittens to open their car doors.
In an optimistic scenario, we’ll build more solar farms and wind turbines to handle the grid pressure from more people blasting their AC. In a more realistic scenario, you can expect power disruptions and curtailments.
If you’re lucky, it won’t be life-threatening.
Just extremely uncomfortable.
Severe weather is beating up our economy, despite what the deniers and minimizers say. In 2021, damage from natural disasters totaled $145 billion. Americans are feeling it, with 90 percent of us paying more for home insurance. A lot of insurance companies have started to abandon areas prone to extreme weather. They’ve been paying out more than $1 billion a year, a sixfold increase from the 1980s. Ten insurance companies went bankrupt in Florida just over the last two years. Contrary to logic, people are choosing to move to dangerous areas. They’re simply not thinking about their long-term future.
By 2030, you can expect to pay a lot more for insurance depending on where you live. It’s going to get so expensive and hard to find, a lot of Americans will simply start choosing to skip it altogether.
It’ll become another luxury.
We could go on, but I think you get the idea.
This is what the world kinda looks like now, and we haven’t even breached 1.5C of warming. So that’s what we can expect by 2030: We’re going to be paying far more for food. We’re going to be buying a lot less meat, and probably fewer fruits and vegetables. There’s going to be long lines at food banks.
A majority of Americans will be broke and food insecure. We’ll struggle to cool our homes. We’ll struggle to find insurance. We’re going to see people wind up poor and homeless than we didn’t expect.
The year 2030 is going to look a lot like 1930.
The difference is that we’ll already be in a prolonged war with China, because that’s what our politicians and military seem to want more than anything. We’ll very much feel like we’re living through a Second Great Depression, except it’s going to last longer. It will probably be the new normal.
So, a lot of us aren’t “doomed” just yet, especially if we start preparing now. That would mean moving to a plant-based diet. It would mean thinking about a tiny house or an earth-sheltered home with earth tubes instead of some huge structure on the coast or the middle of the Arizona desert. It would mean building or joining a climate-resilient community, and embracing a life that’s framed more around sustainability and homeostasis. On a larger scale, it would mean demanding better public housing and better public transportation. It would mean demanding more efficient use of resources, including water.
We’re in the business of climate adaptation now. Adapting to a hotter earth does two things at once. It helps us in the short term, but it also achieves a lot of the goals that climate optimists say they care about.
I’m writing this because climate minimizers are going around telling us not to worry about a world that’s 2C warmer. They’re trying to convince us that it’ll be fine, that it won’t really have an impact on us. You know, it sounds a lot like climate denial, just in a different outfit with different makeup.
They don’t want us to think about the future in concrete terms like food and housing shortages, and unaffordable home insurance.
If people did that, they would get angry.
They would demand action.
They would do something.
The Real Enemy is Normal. OK Doomer by Jessica Wildfire. May 26, 2023
Here’s the thing:
A Yale study on climate change communication found that 70 percent of Americans are worried about climate change. More than 30 percent of them are deeply worried. And yet, only 9 percent are talking about it.
That’s a huge gap.
Margaret Klein Salamon puts her attention on that gap in the second edition of her book Facing The Climate Emergency. It comes out in a few days. (Yes, she asked me to write about it. No, she’s not paying me anything.) Last year, I wrote about the first edition of her book and how it changed my life. Salamon’s writing has been there for me in the same way that my readers tell me my work has been there for them. When I get dragged through the mud for spreading doom, her book reminds me that it’s healthy to express our sense of grief and especially our outrage at the inaction and sanguine complacency that surrounds us.
People need to hear it. ............
No comments:
Post a Comment