What Are You Doing To Prepare For Climate Change?

[dr_codex]

It seems pretty clear that individual efforts to change eating patterns, recycle, take the bus, and the rest of it, (all of which I do), will make little difference. Even the international agreements on taking action on climate change are unlikely to make much difference. Nothing will stop the coming major changes in climate at this stage. It is too late. The only question is how bad it will be and how well different countries are able to adjust to the changes.

This. And the best estimates are... not so bad (at least in the US). Expected costs by 2090 are about $500bn/year when US GDP even at modest growth will be around $80tn. Not trivial (and we should do more to mitigate it), but that doesn't make it a top three issue. The trade war, health care, and the changing demand for labor are all already imposing a higher burden than this.

Even projections about flooding just assume no response on part of cities. NYC is investing $10bn in flood barriers that'll protect the city in the medium-term, which is pocket change compared to the 1.7tn of Manhattan's real estate value alone.

Calculating only the financial cost to the U.S. is pretty parochial way to do the math, and is telling about the scope of the social problem.

NYC is never going to build those fancy sluice gates, although it will probably find a way to spend the money tackling urgent infrastructure problems, one inch ahead of each increase in sea rise. (Raising the BQE, reinforcing the FDR Drive, etc. etc.) There will be no political will to sacrifice the North Shore of Nassau County, southern New Jersey, and southern Connecticut. There will also be no political will to save the South Bronx. The opposition is mobilized, as it was not when the same calculus left parts of New Orleans to drown.

[apl68]

Other than making sure my finances are in order and voting for politically progressive candidates, I will admit that I'm not doing much. I would happily give up my car if I lived in a city that had excellent public transit, but my current city is terrible in that regard. I live in an apartment with very little direct sunlight, so I don't garden, I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't want to give up traveling. It's not that I don't care about climate change—I do—it's more that I don't feel empowered to do much without there being political willpower to implement structural solutions.

I live at a relatively high altitude far away from any oceans, so I figure my city will be relatively safe compared to coastal areas. But at the risk of sounding nihilistic, I've also decided that I'm okay with having a shorter lifespan than my parents and grandparents if the world descends into chaos. I've lived a good life and I've been able to do most of the things that I wanted to do. I don't want to die tomorrow, but I also don't think I have to live to 80 just for the sake of proving to the world that I can. (At the rate finances in the U.S. are going, I'll be lucky if I have any retirement at all, so what's the point?).

Anyway, I'd love to hear other viewpoints that are less cynical. What should we be doing?

Well, I drive a small car, walk and ride a bicycle much more than I drive (I've made a point all my adult life of living within walking distance of work), and set my thermostats several degrees below/above my comfort level at home to save on energy (You can save a LOT if you snuggle under a comforter during the winter and use a fan to take the edge off the heat in the summer).  I eat less meat than I once did, though I'm hardly a vegetarian.  I don't really do these things for the sake of climate change so much as out of a broader belief in trying to live simply and avoid extravagance.  Plus some years of chill penury when I was younger made me used to being thrifty.

I believe in taking broader societal action to mitigate climate change and support it in principle.  It blows my mind how many people are in denial or just shrug it all off now that the radical changes in climate are manifest.  It reached 70 degrees on Christmas day where I live, for crying out loud!  Winter is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in our region.  The climate scientists very obviously know what they're talking about, so we ought to be trying to follow their advice about ways to mitigate the changes.

All that said, I just really don't see any reason for optimism that the problem will be successfully controlled.  Even without the denialism, ordinary people don't show the stomach for making the kinds of radical, costly, disruptive changes it would take.  I don't see how any political system, short of some imaginary utopian eco-dictatorship, could be up to a challenge this huge.  The use of hydrocarbon fuels has just been too much a fundamental part of our way of life for too long, and has gained too much momentum to be stopped within the necessary few decades.  And huge as it is, this is only a part of an even wider problem the human race has of making unwise and extravagant use of its technologies whenever it has the opportunity. 

As for what we should be doing--well, keep trying to take reasonable steps to live in a more environmentally sound way as individuals, and keep advocating for more environmentally sound policies.  The right thing is worth doing, even if it seems increasingly unlikely to succeed. 

I can't help noticing what a striking resemblance the world we're producing through climate change bears to the world of the last days described in the biblical book of Revelation.  Massive fires of the sort we're seeing in California and Australia, massive die-offs of sea life, massive loss of fresh drinking water, the drying up of the Euphrates River, and global warming itself--they're all there in that book written two millennia ago.  Whether one believes in biblical prophecy or not, the world in anything like the form we know it appears to be coming to an end by the latter part of this century.  Those of us who do believe in biblical prophecy at least have the comfort of believing that a better world than we humans have ever shown ourselves capable of creating is coming.  That doesn't excuse any complacent inaction in the meantime.  On the contrary, it makes us even more responsible.  We need to be warning people to get ready for what's coming.  Even if it means posting something about it on a board where 99% of the people who will see it will undoubtedly think you're crazy.

I wouldn't consider my view of what's happening to our world either cynical or nihilistic.  But it's definitely apocalyptic--in the original sense of the word.

[Parasaurolophus]

I try to live with a relatively small carbon footprint of my own (although my biggest contribution probably comes from having become vegetarian),

Your biggest carbon contribution or your biggest carbon reduction contribution comes form being vegetarian?

My understanding is that vegetarianism is a lower carbon impact than being a traditional meat eater.  I am a vegetarian for that reason.

My largest contribution to reducing my carbon footprint.

Anyway, I'd love to hear other viewpoints that are less cynical. What should we be doing?

Individual contributions do make a difference. Just not at the scale we need. If there was ever a time to focus on individual contributions, it's long past--but that's not to say that changes in behaviour at the individual level are pointless. If we want to get serious about addressing climate change, the kinds of top-level solutions we'll have to implement in and impose on industry will entail significant changes in behaviour at the individual level. And the more people are OK with those changes (because they're not far removed from their lived reality), the easier it will be to generate the bottom-up pressure we need to ensure that those solutions and mitigation efforts are actually employed.

What we need are big, broad-spectrum political solutions that target the bulk of our carbon contributions, which occur at the industrial level, not the personal level. So what we need to do is to agitate for those measures. We need to actively oppose new pipelines, fracking, etc. We need to actively protest against subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. We need to agitate for a just transition, for a better social safety net, for adequate healthcare for all, etc. All these issues are inter-related, and no progress will be made on any of them if we don't stand up and demand it from our leaders. We need to remember that this kind of huge, transformative change will only come from the bottom-up. We can't sit around waiting for top-down solutions. And we need to remember that the longer we dither, the more entrenched the problem becomes and the harder it is to implement solutions to it.

[Stockmann]

My main contribution to reducing my carbon footprint is not driving much - I use mass transit to get to work, for example. Voting or other political engagement in my case is entirely pointless, as here the parties are in agreement about doing essentially nothing (and certainly nothing more than the little that is already being done), and the folks now in power are the most pro-hydrocarbons party of them all.
In terms of preparing, I guess the answer is nothing. I'm faraway enough from oceans or large forests to not worry too much about the direct impact of rising sea levels or fires. As for the worst case scenario, of civilizational collapse, I don't think there's much I can realistically do to prepare. For lesser catastrophes, I've diversified my savings, including into gold.

[downer]

One of the important aspects of climate change is that it is not just about rising sea levels. It is about changing and destabilizing weather patterns. It is also about the ensuing political change -- that may involve people from coastal areas moving inland, but also more international immigration and refugees. Maybe we can avoid global war, but when we look at the increase of nationalism in many countries and the rise of populist movements, that seems harder to imagine. There have been predictions of a huge farming crisis and food shortages, although I can remember those predictions from my youth, and so far the farmers have been able to increase productivity, so maybe that will not be so significant.

Preparing for all of that on an individual basis involves risk assessment that is hard to do in the long term. Maybe self-sufficency would be good -- but most people are vulnerable to extreme weather whatever their location. Probably being rich would help.

I recycle and reuse and I try to minimize my use of the world's resources in various ways when it does not interfere with what I want to do. (I do fly falrly often.) I do those things more for to appease my sense of guilt rather than out of a belief that it will make any difference. I do address some of the issues in my teaching when I can, in an effort to raise student awareness.

But these days, with the USA largely ignoring climate change, and even Western Europe doing relatively little about it, I'm less inclined to waste my time with individual efforts of being a good ecological citizen. It seems that the only thing that will really get people to make real changes to society is the dire predictions coming true.

[pigou]

It seems pretty clear that individual efforts to change eating patterns, recycle, take the bus, and the rest of it, (all of which I do), will make little difference. Even the international agreements on taking action on climate change are unlikely to make much difference. Nothing will stop the coming major changes in climate at this stage. It is too late. The only question is how bad it will be and how well different countries are able to adjust to the changes.

This. And the best estimates are... not so bad (at least in the US). Expected costs by 2090 are about $500bn/year when US GDP even at modest growth will be around $80tn. Not trivial (and we should do more to mitigate it), but that doesn't make it a top three issue. The trade war, health care, and the changing demand for labor are all already imposing a higher burden than this.

Even projections about flooding just assume no response on part of cities. NYC is investing $10bn in flood barriers that'll protect the city in the medium-term, which is pocket change compared to the 1.7tn of Manhattan's real estate value alone.

Calculating only the financial cost to the U.S. is pretty parochial way to do the math, and is telling about the scope of the social problem.

NYC is never going to build those fancy sluice gates, although it will probably find a way to spend the money tackling urgent infrastructure problems, one inch ahead of each increase in sea rise. (Raising the BQE, reinforcing the FDR Drive, etc. etc.) There will be no political will to sacrifice the North Shore of Nassau County, southern New Jersey, and southern Connecticut. There will also be no political will to save the South Bronx. The opposition is mobilized, as it was not when the same calculus left parts of New Orleans to drown.

It's just a matter of available data. Presumably, one could do an equal report globally, but it's going to be based on much less reliable figures. Nonetheless, claims by groups like "extinction rebellion" are premised on the notion that this could wipe out much of humanity, when we're talking about comfortably less than 1% of GDP cost of mitigation. Perhaps I am downplaying the consequences of climate change here, but I'm downplaying them from the level of public perception, not the level of actual scenarios in the IPCC. (Though, I'll also note that scientists have seemingly been unwilling to put probabilities on the various scenarios. Really hard to do risk planning when there is a wide range of possible outcomes and experts won't tell you how likely they think each one will be. That is left as an exercise to re-insurance companies.)

Doing policy based on emotions can be really costly. Take the response to Fukushima: Germany began phasing out nuclear power plants. Guess what they got replaced with... coal. The consequence? About 1,100 deaths per year due to the polluting effect of the new plants. The social cost (primarily health) of this switch is estimated at $12bn per year. And yes, it also increased carbon emissions, contributing to climate change. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26598

The article that started this thread also noted that cities like Shanghai might need to be evacuated, because they'll be under water. That's just not a sensible prediction and it undermines the credibility of people making the claims. Not that I'm doubting the projected sea level rise, but I'm doubting that China will just sit there and watch one of its largest cities turn into Venice without investing pocket change into infrastructure. So if that's the basis for a prediction of mass internal migration ("assume zero adaptation"), the model is fundamentally wrong and not useful.

As for NYC: we'll see, but the first defensive barriers are supposed to be finished next year. Not that city projects don't tend to take longer and cost more than projected, but I suspect the people working on Wall Street and living in the surrounding areas have enough political clout to make sure it gets done before their homes and offices are flooded.

And on Australia: yes, climate change is contributing to the severity of the fires. So do arsonists and lack of resources among fire fighters. The latter two problems are much easier to address than combating climate change. Especially because we're talking about the marginal benefit of, say, 2 degrees vs. 1.5 degrees increase from pre-industrial, not about going back to the temperature from... well, none of the agreements or IPCC reports actually define what the reference climate is, although this paper proposes we could use 1720-1800.

[magnemite]

We put up a solar power plant that was a bit overbuilt for our household needs, and sell the surplus power to our local utility, providing more low carbon power to our community.

We chose to live near work, so day to day driving is not significant.

Next steps:

Improve the insulation in our house, research a switch from our current natural gas heater to an electro-powered heat pump system. We may look into adding a small wind turbine, and the ability to store electricity in a large battery system.

We also decided that relocation (looking for a better/different job elsewhere) is not advantageous (in terms of anticipating climate changes) given where we currently live, so optimizing our home and staying in it is the plan.

[apl68]

We put up a solar power plant that was a bit overbuilt for our household needs, and sell the surplus power to our local utility, providing more low carbon power to our community.

We chose to live near work, so day to day driving is not significant.

Next steps:

Improve the insulation in our house, research a switch from our current natural gas heater to an electro-powered heat pump system. We may look into adding a small wind turbine, and the ability to store electricity in a large battery system.

We also decided that relocation (looking for a better/different job elsewhere) is not advantageous (in terms of anticipating climate changes) given where we currently live, so optimizing our home and staying in it is the plan.

I looked into solar energy some years back.  Sticker shock kept me from ever revisiting the idea.  I live in an (already) warm and humid climate where household cooling is a bigger energy demand than heating.  And getting more so in a hurry at this point--this is the third year in which our usual mild winter has been replaced by what amounts to a ludicrously prolonged month of March.  This is the second day in January with 70-degree temperatures, something unheard of only five years ago.  Less than a decade ago 70-degree highs on any day in the winter months were unknown.  Our winters are vanishing so rapidly around here that I wonder whether we've already reached some kind of tipping point here.

I don't know of anybody locally who uses household solar power, but there are large solar farms in the works in the region.

[pedanticromantic]

I'm shocked by how many people are of the "I'll be dead so I don't care" or "I'm American so I don't care" camp.
Could you be more self absorbed?

[mamselle]

Not sure it's simple self-absorption...it's also a realistic assessment of the size of the problem and the Lilliputian scale of individual humans' ability to address it in any effective way over a limited lifespan.

Turning an ocean liner around mid-sea takes time....

M.

[craftyprof]

I'm shocked by how many people are of the "I'll be dead so I don't care" or "I'm American so I don't care" camp.
Could you be more self absorbed?

Probably.  I can't speak for anyone else on this thread, but I'm someone who has made some efforts to reduce my carbon footprint (eg I walk to work) but not others (eg I still fly about twice per year).  I'm aware of the magnitude of the problem and I support the types of major social, political, corporate, economic, etc shifts necessary to solve this problem.  But I'm also aware that individual changes can only get us so far without those major society-level changes.  And I am not willing to sacrifice my mental health or significantly compromise my quality of life if it won't make a difference.

So, I'll vote and advocate for the big changes and continue to make small changes in my life.  If we start making the big society-level changes, then I'll be fully committed to Team Humanity.  But if I'm the last generation of my species able to die of something other than the effects of climate change, I'm going to see as much of this amazing planet as I can while I can.

It's self absorbed, but not so much as the people denying any of this is even happening and the corporations making it worse.

[pigou]

I'm shocked by how many people are of the "I'll be dead so I don't care" or "I'm American so I don't care" camp.
Could you be more self absorbed?

Reducing carbon emissions is a solved problem: a carbon tax and a trade zone that imposes a tariffs on goods from countries that don't have a minimum prize on carbon. Whether it gets implemented is a political question that is largely not tied to whether you can convince another 5% of the population to believe in human causes of climate change or to support the specific policy -- much less whether you can convince them to fly less. And the fact that politicians talk about voluntary agreements and non-binding promises suggests there is zero will to make any of it happen.

In the EU, the number of airline passengers has hit a record height last year. So has the sale of SUVs (as a share of all cars). We don't have a proper counterfactual to say what would have happened without Greta and climate protests, but I'd be pretty confident in proposing a precise zero effect. If her actions and appeals don't influence consumer behavior, what makes you think yours would? So we're back to the impact of you as a single consumer. Whether you choose to fly or whether you bike to work has exactly zero impact on the climate. Your actions don't cascade to influence billions of people, and even if they did, consumer decisions aren't primarily where carbon emissions happen.

How many of the people who pledge not to fly actually fly a reasonable amount and are changing their behavior? Among the people I have seen on social media, they're perhaps forgoing their annual vacation. The people who fly between the US, Europe, and China on a weekly basis? Not cutting back on flights. Heck, they're probably not even cutting back to economy class (which emits much less carbon per seat). Fun fact: Apple has 50 business class seats between SF and Shanghai -- daily. That's on top of private jet travel: e.g. Tim Cook is required by his board to have his own jet and companies like NetJets offer private planes on demand to other senior executives. Demand for those rental jets, for what it's worth, is growing... and those emissions swamp out many households' total annual emissions in an hour of flight time.


It's not defeatism to acknowledge that, while a lot of people may express concern about climate change, they're not taking actions that are consistent with viewing it as an existential threat. How many Democrats would vote for a Republican if he pledged to support a carbon tax? I doubt that's a winning strategy. And even many Democrats wouldn't support a carbon tax if it were tied to eliminating other regulation like fuel standards, or if the money were returned to people rather than spent on various social programs. That makes it hard to push policies that can get bipartisan support, i.e. that can actually happen.

[Hibush]

Reducing carbon emissions is a solved problem: a carbon tax and a trade zone that imposes a tariffs on goods from countries that don't have a minimum prize on carbon. Whether it gets implemented is a political question that is largely not tied to whether you can convince another 5% of the population to believe in human causes of climate change or to support the specific policy -- much less whether you can convince them to fly less. And the fact that politicians talk about voluntary agreements and non-binding promises suggests there is zero will to make any of it happen.

It's not defeatism to acknowledge that, while a lot of people may express concern about climate change, they're not taking actions that are consistent with viewing it as an existential threat. How many Democrats would vote for a Republican if he pledged to support a carbon tax? I doubt that's a winning strategy. And even many Democrats wouldn't support a carbon tax if it were tied to eliminating other regulation like fuel standards, or if the money were returned to people rather than spent on various social programs. That makes it hard to push policies that can get bipartisan support, i.e. that can actually happen.

These are both good examples of identifying something that limits action to reverse climate change. That identification alone is an important academic contribution. Identifying approaches to overcoming those is also amenable to academic study, albeit by another subdiscipline. 

I think it is valuable to find the academics who can advance the next steps when we hit the limits of what we can do in our own subdiscipline. The more common action is to throw up our hands when we realize we can't take it farther ourselves, and attributing it all to politics.

Engaging ones scholarship with society is critical, so that we study what is really happening among people. Teamwork helps a lot.

[writingprof]

My current plan is to enjoy myelf now and check out when it gets bad.

This is my plan as well, though he gets cranky around Christmas and isn't much fun to be around. And don't even talk to him about reindeer flatulence as a contributor to global warming.

[secundem_artem]

I recycle.  Beyond that, not much. 

And that grim little goblin shaking her finger at the UN is going to change precisely nothing.