I want to plan for the effects of climate change. Where can I read what effects are likely to happen, when and where? I want to know what systems I can or can’t rely on, which places will be more hospitable etc.
I’d like something concise and accessible for a lay person. A short book would be preferable.
There are many regional studies, unfortunately where I am from (the US) it is only really insurance companies talking earnestly about how bad future climate change will be quantifiably in a given area, climate science is dead here otherwise by design. Where roughly do you live in the world?
I keep my location quiet online, but insurance company reports is an interesting avenue
That makes sense!
Well here is an example from the company First Street in the US. This report has a breakdown for each state.
https://firststreet.org/research-library/the-cost-of-climate
(just search for “the cost of climate first street” the pdf is freely available you don’t have to enter in nonsense name and email to get it from my link, I just don’t want to randomly link to a pdf directly it feels sketch lol so I linked to the report information on their website)
This is really the only place here that fossil fuel money can’t obliterate the truth since Insurance companies are also very rich and actually have a vested interest in having a clear vision of the future risk environment (and for their customers having a clear vision of the future), the academic world is fucked and you can’t really rely on them being able to tell you how it is actually going to be since they have no money and the institutions that should be defending science just rolled over to Trump soo…
Hopefully it is different elsewhere in the world :(
A quick search shows a book called How to Prepare for Climate Change by David Pogue might be a good place to start.
Where can I read what effects are likely to happen
Where can I read what effects are likely to happen, when and where? I want to know what systems I can or can’t rely on, which places will be more hospitable etc.
The thing is, you can’t rely on man-made systems when climate disasters hit your area. You have to be self-aware and self sufficient for a few days and cooperate with the people around you. You should also expect that no place is safe from climate disasters.
You should also expect that no place is safe from climate disasters.
Deserts and low-lying coastal regions are more susceptible, surely? There must be places that will be less at risk, even if not from human effects such as migration.
Even at high altitudes, you are not safe from climate disasters, such as landslides, floods or the unthinkable like this
https://bsky.app/profile/extremetemps.bsky.social/post/3lvipmejt7c2i
it is very difficult to find a place that has a less risk from climate disasters. Even in places that are less directly at risk from climate disasters, we have to think about the impacts of crop failure, global famine or wars for water.
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells
This is kind of the long and short of it. “Preparing for climate change” is doomsday prepping. There is no place you can move to and expect to never face struggle, if only because you will have to contend with refugees and a breakdown of critical supply chains, in particular food and clean water. “Land that is not underwater, on fire, or an unlivable desert” will be a prized commodity and you will be contested for it if you happen to be living on it.
Reviews suggest it predicts extreme outcomes without communicating confidence levels, i.e. it’s unrealistically alarmist. I might read it bearing that in mind.
Thanks, interesting. Written six years ago, has climate science changed its forecasts since then? I don’t know how fast the science moves
The fairly active Sea Artic Ice internet forum is a great resource with generally very high quality discussion between various experts.
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/
Check out the Science and especially Consequences subforums under AGW for really good starting points.
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/board,25.0.html
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/board,1.0.html
I also really like the Climate Science youtube creator Paul Beckwith. His presentation style is very lowkey and straight forward, he explains climate science papers and news section by section giving nonexperts lots of context as he goes. I think Paul embodies everything a good climate science communicator should, at least for the kind of content he makes.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NDx5cn-1o9g
A good compass for orienting how MUCH things are changing vs how they did during records from the 20th century is the Daily Sea Surface Temperature data visualization on Climate Reanalyzer.org
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
Understand that if you do some back of the envelope physics calculations about how much excess heat energy is in the oceans from anthropogenic caused climate change it is in thousands and thousands of hiroshima bombs of energy. Thus not only is climate change best explained by beginning with a conversation about the heating of the ocean because it is simply The Biggest Part of it, the oceans immense heat storage capacity and vast dominating spatial extent connects all of the other effects of climate change into a complex feedback chain where quasi-stable conditions arise after periods of acceleratory extremes.
The Earth’s Climate System is the kind of tangle of feedbacks, delays, echos and distortions that would make even a noise guitarist musician blush, so the best place to begin is by understanding how the ocean functions as the main interconnecting medium of chemical and physical exchanges of energy on earth (well… besides plate tectonics but yeah that is a much longer scale…).
I recommend checking in on the basic sea surface stats at Climate Renanalyzer periodically to get a good birds eye view of where the world is at in terms of climate change.
