So what’s everyone thinking? Move to Vermont to close out our dying years in 70 degree weather?
The billions living in already marginal places near the equator will die or leave. That's where the real humanitarian disaster will be, and it will be far beyond precedent.
But yeah, lots of stuff will be worse.
But definitely more careers than “climate refugee.”
So I expect we’ll continue to have them.
But we won’t have the kind of camps they had in Jordan that had millions of refugees from Syria or something.
So I think we’ll have “normal” refugee camps that help place thousands of people. But not “end of the world” style camps with the population of Mississippi.
People seem to be catastrophizing what’s going to be a different future into something much worse than it likely will be.
At this point I'm legitimately resigned to just dying in the food riots. There doesn't seem to be a way to clever my way out of this one. If I'm in the right place at the right time, maybe I'll die of old age. Otherwise, I'll die in middle age. My grandfathers only lived to their mid-fifties, so it wouldn't even be that unusual.
Too many unknowns, embracing prepping and farming just seems like a cope when no one even knows what exactly the situation will be. Maybe food is plentiful but it's raining so hard in VT that roads get washed out and trucks can't get to your area.
It just feels like anywhere near a major city is likely to have either a few hundred thousand starving people roving the countryside or nuclear fallout on the wind. VT is close to Boston and Montreal.
Even a military compound could easily be overrun with enough hungry people. There's only so many bullets when people are frantic and hungry. So it's not like I'm going to be successful hiring armed guards and putting up barbed wire.
One could try to live on a sailboat, but open sea piracy is real, and it'll be very hard to fish when the oceans are dead from acidification.
If the food supply is disrupted due to weather, it'll be a very small number of people even in the US who survive. Societal unrest will likely kill more than actual starvation.
I spent some time there last month and it's unlivable when it's that hot. You have to have some way to mitigate the heat or you'll pretty much just die. It's literally harder to think when it's that hot.
I'm going to build big stone walls three meters thick and ten meters tall to keep out fire and regulate temps. It will be like the Forestiere Underground Gardens[1]. The "Grow Bio-intensive"[2] folks say you can grow a complete diet for an adult in five acres. So, yeah, basically I'm going to build a "climate fortress" and stockpile emergency supplies to give to people when/if uh emergencies happen.
I don't know what most people are going to do. Frankly, the situation is starting to look pretty sketchy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens
In a word, robots. But I really really hope it doesn't come to that. If things get really "Mad Max" ... I don't know that I could actually kill people, even to save my own life (I have no children nor spouse.) I would basically have to give up?
> how about water supply for the crops?
Moisture-sealed greenhouses. I've got a well, but I want to make integrated water recycling systems. Then I can "top off" from atmospheric moisture as needed.
The Grow Biointensive system claims to be a complete diet and require no fertilizer. The trick is that 60% of your crop is so-called "carbon farming" that produces a lot of compostable material in addition to food (e.g. corn, fava beans).
My rough calculation says 20 acres is about 1000 feet per side, 3 meters is 10 feet, 10 meters is 32 feet. So you'll need roughly (1000*10*32*4) 1,280,000 cubic feet of stone. That's a cube just over 100 feet per side. That's a lot of stone! If you're planning on something like that garden in Fresno, are you planning to excavate it from the land itself? If you could slice 1.2 feet of stone from the entire 20 acre property you'd have enough, but you'd probably need to move a lot of topsoil to get to it.
If anything the engineering effort for the walls the by far the most impressive part! A thousand years from now they'll wonder what it's purpose was.
For moving them I'm making pick-and-place bots (probably simplified delta-bots, but the actual form isn't fixed yet) that will also scan and sort them.
The tail wags the dog here, eh? Because I have essentially nothing but rocks I concocted this plan to make use of them. I can also build things like "sand batteries" to store heat. And because the rocks come in all different colors I could make patterns in the walls and floors and roads, etc...
> A thousand years from now they'll wonder what it's purpose was.
Ha! Right? I should add some weird features just for future archeologists? "We believe the frog eating a banana had religious significance." Embed some titanium spheres in a wall in the shape of the constellation of Pleiades --but as it was millions of years ago? Make the whole thing look like the base of one end of a vast bridge? Or like the foot of a huge statue? The possibilities are endless!