Environment Opinion

Fight or flight: Adapting to the climate crisis

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(Image via Cristian Ibarra Santillan | Wikimedia Commons)

If politicians continue to destroy our planet's resources and burn the atmosphere, there may be nowhere left to run as civilisations are reduced to nothing. Chris Johnson writes.

WHEN IN DANGER, humans have a “fight or flight reaction”, built into all humans and many animals on this Earth.

We can adapt to nature: storms, floods, droughts and fires all increasing in size, duration, frequency and devastation. We have – and will – do it by running away today and tomorrow. Humans cannot stand against the forces of nature, but we are now hearing politicians and business leaders saying humanity will or can adapt to human-caused climate change.

We will all run away: from the fires or you burn to death; from the floods or you drown; from hurricanes, better be underground, but not where it's flooding or consequential landslides from excess water; from drought or you die of thirst; and like King Canute, we can resist the ocean levels rise.

As we run away, we leave our civilisation, our social lives and our communities behind, never to be the same again.

But we can adapt, we are all told. It's too late (so they tell us now) to stop CO2 from entering the ecosystem. So humans will basically run away today, to run away another day. All that infrastructure we depend on hasn't got legs, or haven't you noticed?

The nexi of distribution systems based in cities, especially at sea level will slowly get inundated. The closeness of ports, railways, airports and freeway systems, which work efficiently and effectively because they are so close, won't be close — or only if you are a scuba diver. Perhaps the retrieval systems in the movie Waterworld won't be so far away.

The big question, very carefully not addressed, is that as we adapt (run away), where do we run? The people at sea level, or increased flood zones, or that used to live in dry areas that are now deserts, when the fires come and your back is to the sea, a lake or a steep mountain range. Where do all those people go in the short term? Most importantly, in the long term, they become climate refugees or ecological disaster refugees.

We pump up all the groundwater from an aquifer that takes 10,000 years to fill. We poison the lakes and rivers with not only human sewage which in the long term is at least biodegradable, but myriads of chemicals that aren't. And, of course, plastics. How do we run away from plastics, when they have even been detected in Antarctica?

And when we have run away, we still need to be fed, watered, housed and our waste products removed, for millions and then billions of people. We have all seen refugee camps. In the next 50 years, how many people will live in those? Not from war, but from essentially our own stupidity and pigheadedness, because we cannot and will not stop spewing CO2 in the atmosphere.

Will refugee camps have good education systems, or any at all? We will be committing the young people of the future to a life of ignorance and where does population ignorance lead to in times of survival? The human solution to so many problems — war and death, without the resources, either material or personnel, to heal people. Like before the invention of penicillin, when you die from a scratch. It will certainly be the survival of the fittest, or perhaps the most brutal.

We cannot adapt in any positive or permanent way to the effect of the climate crisis, except to retreat from our level of civilisation, no matter what that level is in the world. All civilisations will be reduced. The more complex, the more interdependent, the more they will be reduced, as what we call civilisation adapts to climate change.

That's the beauty of adaption to the climate crisis — it's really simple for all to understand: we will be running away from everything.

Ponder that for a while, then demand leaders to stop CO2 output now.

In the same manner, we will be running away from many of the advantages (dare I say luxuries) of today's civilisation, but due to inaction since 1992, we have no choice. Not only do we have no choice, but at least the next three generations have no choice either. We have made that decision for them.

Adapting to the climate crisis is not the safe sinecure the politicians say. Just predict the effect of about three billion climate refugees. Whether it's one or six billion, it makes not much difference. Your children and your grandchildren won't be surviving and if you are young, you have no hope.

 

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Fight or flight: Adapting to the climate crisis

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