More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be.”
Mitigation means trying to stop climate change: Replace fossil fuels with clean power. Eat less beef. Fly less. Grow trees instead of clear-cutting them. Adopt smarter farming and industrial techniques. Drive less. Have fewer children. Adaptation means coping with climate change: Build seawalls. Raise houses. Move farmland to cooler regions. Plant heat-tolerant trees. Buy out homeowners in flood-prone areas. Suffering. Well, you’ll be reading plenty about that.
For the record, climate is not weather. Climate is
measured in decades; weather is an hourly or daily measurement. Climate is regional or global; weather is local. Climate is the average of weather.
That’s why the effect of climate change is not just “hotter summers, milder winters.” It’s warmer weather and colder weather, record heat waves and record cold snaps. It’s more flooding and more droughts. It’s wet areas getting wetter, hot areas getting hotter, and dry areas getting drier. It’s much heavier rainfall and much nastier superstorms. It’s tornadoes gettin...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
About half of all coral reefs have died since 1980, and the rest may be gone by 2100.
Figure I-6. The average surface temperature of the world’s oceans, shown here in degrees F deviation from the 1971–2000 average, has climbed steadily since 1880.
Climate chaos is the better term. Or global weirding.
We’re an affected species, too; we’re losing our habitat.
By 2050, the number of “climate refugees” is expected to grow as high as 1 billion people. By 2070, 19% of the planet’s land surface will be uninhabitably hot (up from 1% today).
Hurricane Katrina alone displaced over a million Americans.
Studies show that higher temperatures lead to lower productivity; lower PSAT test scores; more bar fights, shootings, rapes, car thefts, and murders; more suicides; more power outages; and smaller beaches.
The greenhouse effect has already pumped enough new heat into the oceans to keep warming the planet for decades.
The IPCC estimates that by 2050, about 200 million people may have to move—1 in every 45 people on earth.
Flagstaff, Arizona (elevation 7,000 feet), is enduring such a flood of refugees from Phoenix’s blistering heat that locals joke about building a wall.
Chinese investors, who, in the last ten years, have spent billions of dollars buying up real estate in Canada. Already, Chinese buyers own 14% of all homes in Toronto, and a third of all the homes in Vancouver.
Before you hunt for the perfect new homestead, accept that every place is affected by climate change.
Rule 1: Get Away from Oceans
If you’re having trouble imagining the flooded future, then visit the Surging Seas maps at ss2.climatecentral.org,
Rule 2: Move North
University of Maryland’s future-climate calculator (fitzlab.shin yapps.io/cityapp) shows you how hot and wet a city will be. When you click a city dot on the map or choose its name from a menu, you get to see instantly what present-day city it will feel like in 2080.
Overall, a typical North American city will feel as hot as though it has moved at least 530 miles south.
Figure 2-7. The cities that make the best climate havens—with the lowest likelihood of wildfire, hurricane, heat waves, water shortages, drought—are around the 42nd parallel or north of it. (Or at high altitude, like Denver.)
By the beginning of 2018, 38% of the entire contiguous United States was in drought.
Sea-level rise. Visit ss2.climatecentral.org, where
you can drag a slider to see the flooding effects of each foot rise in sea level where you live. You can see the effect in Figures 2-2 through 2-4, earlier in this chapter. (NOAA’s https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ is similar.) Flooding. FEMA’s interactive map site (https://msc.fema.gov/) shows the current likelihood of any address to get flooded. This tool is essential for figuring out what kind of flood insurance you’ll be required to carry. It’s also hard to interpret without the guidance in the box on page 201.
Heat, rainfall. The Climate Explorer (https://crt-climate-explorer.nemac.org) offers the National Climate Map tool, which lets you split the screen. On one side, the historical average temperatures; on the other, the typical future temperatures. Using the pop-up menu at top left, you can change the map so that it’s showing rainfall, thawing days, days over 80°F, and so on.
State by state. At https://statesummaries.ncics.org, you can click your state on a map to read a detailed report about how its climate has changed in the last 150 years or so—and how climate change is likely to affect it in the coming years. Detailed graphs cover each state’s susceptibility to heat wave, sea-level rise, days of freezing, and a lot more. Brought to you by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
You can read the full governmental write-ups at https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/, or you can just review the following capsule summaries. Figure 2-10. These are the U.S. regions the government’s climate-change assessment report describes.
In particular, the Northern middle states—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Western New York—are shaping up to be the most climate-proof regions in the United States.
In 2018, Austin had a record 51 days over 100 degrees; by 2100, that number will more than double.
by 2100, two-thirds of California’s beaches will be gone.
The poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet. Alaska, in fact, has already warmed twice as much as the rest of the United States.
By 2080, Anchorage—Alaska’s most populous city—will be 24 degrees hotter than it is now, and 3.5 times rainier.
Today, 50% of the earth’s population lives in cities; by 2050, it’ll be 75%.
“The number one fear that I have, and that many people in the national-security world share, is that there will be bacteria and viruses—they’re already thawing out in the tundra—and that mankind will be exposed to those,” he said in 2019 (months before COVID-19 emerged). “It’s only a matter of time before we have significant public-health outbreaks that are associated with climate change.”
Since the 1980s, we’re recording power outages ten times as often.
Thanks to these government programs, you can get back nearly half of your outlay. There’s that 26% tax credit, of course, but your local government, state government, and utility company may offer further rebates. To find out what’s available in your neck of the woods, enter your zip code at the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency, www.dsireusa.org.
winter. So an important part of survival gardening is preserving your crops through the off-season—a process that gardeners call putting up.
“With climate change, we’re going to have so many crop losses in places like Florida and California. Growing your own food is a buffer from those, and from price fluctuations.”
Dry beans. “Dry beans,” like pinto, navy, kidney, and black beans, are extremely easy to grow. They’re incredibly good for you, delivering fiber, protein, and antioxidants, and they’re also good for your garden because they restore nitrogen to the soil.
Other pulses. Chickpeas, lentils, and peas are, like dry beans, members of the pulse domain, meaning the subset of legumes that produce dry, edible seeds inside pods.
Green beans. Easy to grow, easy to eat, and easy to put up: rinse, slice off the stems, pull out the dental-flossy thread down the middle, blanch (boil for three minutes, then plunge into cold water), pack into airtight bags or bowls, and stuff into the freezer.
Some crop species are known as warm-weather crops: beans, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, melons, peppers, zucchini, squash, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, watermelon.
“The whole idea of going out in the spring and rototilling your garden—that is so 1960s,” says Via. “No-till gardening is the way to go.”
So what are you supposed to grow instead of grass? Clover. If you want a sea of green that won’t raise the eyebrows of the neighborhood association, here you go. No watering, no mowing, no fertilizers, and you can walk on it. It’s incredibly cheap, on the order of $4 for a 4,000-foot yard. You can even buy seed mixes (for example, see www.earthturf.com) that combine microclover with low-maintenance grass. Since clover is nitrogen-fixing (gets nitrogen from the air, feeds it to the roots), the clover fertilizes the grass, and the entire thing looks just like a regular lawn.
Figure 4-6. Microclover mixes can look exactly like grass—but they’re self-fertilizing and don’t require mowing.
The United Kingdom’s carbon emissions have dropped 42% since 1990—during which time its economy has grown 72%.
Figure 17-1. U.S. carbon emissions have dropped by 11% since their all-time peak in 2007. Some of that comes from the switch from coal to natural gas and improved car-emission laws.
If you’re a typical American, you eat 222 pounds of meat a year. That’s 2.5 quarter-pounders a day—about twice the protein the USDA recommends.
