Surviving Climate Chaos

"Surviving climate chaos requires communities and ecosystems strong enough to cope with the near-random local impacts of climate change. Their strength depends upon resilience, resistance and flexibility, three consequences of system integrity. Preserving and restoring the integrity of communities and ecosystems is needed everywhere, and quickly since active Arctic, equatorial and oceanic tipping points threaten total climate breakdown. This might be postponed by extreme efforts to conserve carbon-dense ecosystems, decarbonise economic systems and recapture greenhouse gases, but climate chaos everywhere is now inevitable. Adaptation efforts by 158 Paris Agreement parties reported since 2015 are converging on community-based and ecosystem-based strategies. Case studies in Bolivia, Nepal and Tanzania confirm that these are the correct strategies for surviving climate chaos, where success depends upon local empowerment through forums, ecosystem tenure security and environmental education. This approach, when replicated, networked and shielded by governments, offers the best way to strengthen societies against climate chaos while achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Its usefulness is highlighted for national and local government officials and aid professionals with key roles in promoting adaptation, for students, researchers and teachers, and for all people who live under threat of climate chaos"--

A practical and comprehensive guide to surviving the greatest disaster of our time, from New York Times bestselling self-help author and beloved CBS Sunday Morning science and technology correspondent David Pogue. You might not realize it, but we’re already living through the beginnings of climate chaos. In Arizona, laborers now start their day at 3 a.m. because it’s too hot to work past noon. Chinese investors are snapping up real estate in Canada. Millennials have evacuation plans. Moguls are building bunkers. Retirees in Miami are moving inland. In How to Prepare for Climate Change, bestselling self-help author David Pogue offers sensible, deeply researched advice for how the rest of us should start to ready ourselves for the years ahead. Pogue walks readers through what to grow, what to eat, how to build, how to insure, where to invest, how to prepare your children and pets, and even where to consider relocating when the time comes. (Two areas of the country, in particular, have the requisite cool temperatures, good hospitals, reliable access to water, and resilient infrastructure to serve as climate havens in the years ahead.) He also provides wise tips for managing your anxiety, as well as action plans for riding out every climate catastrophe, from superstorms and wildfires to ticks and epidemics. Timely and enlightening, How to Prepare for Climate Change is an indispensable guide for anyone who read The Uninhabitable Earth or The Sixth Extinction and wants to know how to make smart choices for the upheaval ahead.

Explains how communities and ecosystems everywhere can be strengthened to survive climate chaos.

Environmental and human catastrophe looms ever larger for planet Earth. From the need to build sustainable cities to house growing billions to transforming the international trade system to tackling run-away climate change, positive, powerful action is ne.

A thirty-thousand-year history of the relationship between climate and civilization that teaches powerful lessons about how humankind can survive. Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history’s mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought. The challenges are no less great today. We face hurricanes and megafires and food shortages and more. But we have one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: the past. Our knowledge of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the last decade, to the point where we can now reconstruct seasonal weather going back thousands of years and see just how people and nature interacted. The lesson is clear: the societies that survive are those that plan ahead. Climate Chaos is a book about saving ourselves. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani show in remarkable detail what it was like to battle our climate over centuries and offer us a path to a safer and healthier future.

Climate Chaos provides readers the latest consensus among international scientists on the cascading impacts of climate change and the tipping points that today threaten to irreversibly destroy the delicate balance of the Earth’s ecosystems. The book argues that deregulation and an expansion of fossil fuel extraction have already tipped the planet towards a climate that is out of control. This crisis will cause massive human suffering when extreme weather, pollution and disease lead to displacement, food and water shortages, war, and possibly species extinction. The repression of science creates an existential crisis for humanity that has reached crisis proportions in the twentieth-first century. The scale of the crisis has prompted a call for geoengineering, large interventions into the climate by technological innovation. However, the history of colonialism and slavery make the technological and monetary elites untrustworthy to solve this humanitarian and planetary crisis. While the elites have always cast certain groups of humanity as expendable, the climate crisis makes a true humanist and egalitarian movement based in human rights and dignity not only aspirational but also existentially mandatory. The crisis demands that we remake the world into a more just and safe place for all the world’s people.

First Published in 2010. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The climate change is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.