Industry's Parting Gifts

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We are going to need some widgets made. They do not have to be as sophisticated or as complicated as the widgets we have today. For instance, once it is no longer possible to launch satellites, we will no longer have satellite navigation systems such as the Pentagon-run GPS or the joint Russian/Indian GLONASS. To compensate, we will have to go back to using radio beacons, so that boats can find harbor entrances in the fog. Another example: once laser printer and ink-jet technology no longer exists, we will need to bring back the humble old teletype. Add to that all of the other humble adaptations that will be needed once the electric grid and municipal services first become unaffordable, then cease to exist.

Countless items will have to be manufactured, one way or another, using local means, because imports are also going to first become unaffordable, then cease to exist. These items will have to be far more robust, longer-lasting and maintainable than the consumer products of today. A population reduced to a permanent state of camping out shares certain characteristics with astronauts and deep-sea divers and others who live and work on the edge: their reliance on their equipment is absolute. In such situations, an unreliable or unmaintainable product is worse than no product at all, because it gives a false sense of security. Making such high-quality items is by no means technically impossible; things can be made so well that they will last a lifetime and even become heirlooms. This, then, should be the new main thrust of industrial activity: to manufacture and distribute products with the understanding that this process will run out of resources and stop. These products must be designed to outlive the process by which they are made, by as long as possible.

How would one organize such a production scheme on an industrial scale? Is it even possible? If it is not, then the only recourse is to have this done by garage, basement and backyard tinkerers, using plans shared over the internet. In fact, this seems to be what is happening, and it very well may be all that ever happens. If that is the case, then production volumes will be much lower than what can be attained with mass production techniques, leaving a huge unmet demand, and a far more precipitous drop in living standards than is really necessary. But let us imagine for a moment that we can do better. How would we go about organizing such an effort? Here are some thought experiments—projections, if you will—based on what I've observed over the years. I present three scenarios—not a complete list, I hope, but these are all the scenarios I can think of without straining my imagination. I hope that you can do better.

Suppose you have a company that sets out to make a widget. Let's call it Company A. Its founders are all engineers, of an uncompromising sort, and the widget they design and manufacture is of tremendous longevity, durability and overall quality. Taking full advantage of economies of scale, they design a single, universal model that uses the maximum possible number of interchangeable, off-the-shelf commodity components, optimize it for mass production, and stockpile a gigantic inventory, including all the custom spare parts that they feel would ever be needed. To make sure that their product is sufficiently idiot-proof, they even test it on selected members of their own families. The engineers concentrate on what they feel is important, neglecting questions of marketability and competitive pricing, and the result is that Company A's widget cost double of functionally comparable widgets sold by the competition.

When consumers refuse to pay so much more than they feel they have to, Company A's widget fails in the marketplace, and the company is liquidated. Its remaining stock of widgets is eventually sold at a large discount, while Company A's investors get almost nothing. Those who are lucky and clever enough to buy one of these widgets go on to use them for the rest of their lives, never needing to buy another one, because, being grossly overdesigned and overbuilt, they simply never fail or wear out. In spite of Company A's failure as a business, the reputations of the engineers do not suffer at all, because, after all, their product is a tremendous technical success. Furthermore, since the installed base of their widgets never goes down, the engineers remain in demand as consultants, called in whenever issues do arise. Some of them form a small company that maintains an inventory of spare parts, and uses it to recondition and service their widgets far into the future. Eventually, long after the names of Company A's competitors are all forgotten, its name enters the language as the generic term for the widget it once made.

Now suppose you have another company, Company B, which makes a similar sort of widget. Its founders are all MBAs who are mainly interested in things like growth strategies, market penetration and continuous profitability. They are superficially interested in the widget itself, as consumers or from a sales and marketing perspective. The internal workings of the widget are, to them, best left up to the engineers. They do hire some smart engineers to start with, but don't give them much of a voice in making strategic decisions, and manage them by doling out bonuses and promotions for things like new features, shorter time to market, and lower production costs. They see to it that the widget they make is competitively priced, fashionably designed, and quickly obsolescent, so that consumers are ready to pay again and again just to get the latest features and designs. Durability and longevity are not a concern, since one or two years of semi-reliable service is all that's needed for Company B to come up with a new, improved version that consumers can be persuaded to buy given a sufficiently generous trade-in offer.

They work to boost revenue by offering an extended warranty or a service plan (made necessary by frequent breakdowns), charging for premium customer service (made necessary by their normal customer service, which consists of a robotic phone maze backed by a few trainees in India who just read aloud from Company B's public web site in a listless, stuttering monotone) and offering numerous enhancements and upgrades (made necessary by annoyances or missing functions within the base product). They also build a profit center out of selling spare parts. They see to it that their product does not contain any commodity parts, and that no parts are interchangeable between model years, so that every replacement part has to be purchased through a dealer. Company B does quite well, becoming profitable, doubling in size several times, and gains a commanding market share.

But then the troubles begin. First, given the short replacement cycle of its widget, it becomes harder and harder for Company B to contain costs while continuing to increase production. Costs of key inputs, such as certain metals, plastics, energy to run the plants, and shipping and distribution costs, all start going up, making their widgets more expensive to produce. At the same time, it becomes increasingly difficult to pass these higher costs on to the consumers. Concerted efforts at cost containment, championed by senior management, burn up more money than they find in savings. Second, turnover among the engineering staff starts to creep up, and after a while employee retention becomes a major problem. An effort is made to boost recruitment, but paradoxically this only increases the turnover rate, until the average tenure of an engineer is shorter than the time it takes to learn the product.

As development timelines slip and defect rates increase, management throws money at the problem by hiring high-priced consultants and engineering methodology snake oil salesmen, all to no avail. Lastly, although Company B manages to hold on to its market share, the overall size of the market starts to shrink as consumers run out of money and curtail their purchases, holding on to their outdated widgets until they fail, then learning to live without them. Eventually Company B is acquired by a foreign company, which crates up and ships off the few pieces of the operation it finds useful and auctions off the rest. As Company B's customers try to eke out a bit more life out of their half-broken widgets, the average resale price of Company A's widget soars well above its initial list price, and its proud owners go around looking insufferably smug.

Company C is not really a company but a consortium organized by a group of activists who correctly perceive the great need for this widget and decide to tackle the issue head-on through tireless community organizing. Their initial concept includes plans for the widget to carry a "100% Sustainable" label. A group of retired community college professors takes several months to define the technology selection criteria that would allow the project to meet the 100% sustainability requirement. In the end, they decide that the widget could be made out of hand-worked clay baked in a solar oven, but only if the oven itself is exempted from the 100% sustainability requirement. It could also be hand-woven out of wicker and bamboo, provided that these were subsequently composted and the compost returned to the soil where the wicker and bamboo were grown. However, the widget can't be made to work without the use of Nylon, Vinyl, Neoprene, epoxies and other fossil fuel-based synthetics, nor can it operate without components made with mined, increasingly scarce elements such as tantalum, gallium and lithium.

The organizers then move to drop the "100% sustainable" requirement and to shift their focus to "Serving community at every level." Production of the widget is to include hands-on job training programs at community colleges and vocational training centers, assembly tasks would be done by groups of mentally and/or physically challenged individuals, while testing, kitting-out and packing would be performed by religious groups (in conservative states) and groups of people with alternative sexual orientations (in liberal ones). From the outset, the consortium is plagued by scandal. The "Made with Pride in the USA" decals turn out to be made in China. The Visual Installation Guide is never printed in Braille. Worst of all, due to communication difficulties caused by static and noise on the line during conference calls, the lesbians (who were to lovingly pack completed widgets in wicker baskets hand-woven by Haitian orphans and filled with organically grown straw) turn out to be not lesbians at all, but eager out-of-work Thespians (of both genders, and barely half of them gay) and Fezbians (perfectly conventional males with convincing falsettos united by their predilection for wearing a fez). The consortium collapses in acrimony and mutual recriminations without shipping a single completed widget. Out of sheer frustration, one of the organizers, laboring alone, succeeds in assembling a single working widget, and donates it to the Smithsonian.

Based on the foregoing, it would appear that the choice is between failing at something and failing at everything. Company A makes excellent widgets but fails to pay back its investors. Company B makes money but its widgets quickly become useless trash. Company C entertains us with its feckless shenanigans but fails to produce any widgets. I really do hope that I am missing something. Is there a Company D out there? If so, please tell me, because I would really like to know.

Hold Your Applause!

[Update 3/30: All books have been shipped out, either 1st class mail (in the US) or international air mail. I still have a few copies left, so if you really really want one, please donate appropriate sum via PayPal to natasha dot same last name as me at gmail.com and we will mail you a copy.]

[Update 3/12: There have been some delays with the printing, and now the books are going to ship from the printer to me next Friday, March 19. They will arrive some time during the following week, and I will get them out to people as quickly as I can. Once again, thank you for your patience.]

[Update 3/7: The books are due from the printer in another week, and there is a big pile of addressed envelopes waiting for them, with first-class postage applied and customs forms filled out. Once the books are finally here, it should take me another week or so for me to sign them all and carry them down to the post office. Thank you for your patience.]

[Update 2/26: the cover thumbnail is now shown as it is printed, not the placeholder that was there up until now.]

Two years and just under a million unique visitors later it is time for this blog to ask for something back. But instead of an endless beg-a-thon, I've decided to give my readers something valuable in return for their donations: anyone who donates in excess of $20 will receive a numbered, autographed copy of a limited edition book which contains five of the most significant (and longest) essays I have published between 2005 and 2009. The meaning of the title should be obvious: since 2005 I have been predicting that the USA will go the way of the USSR, and although many of my detailed predictions of how collapse will unfold have already been reported in the press as facts, and any number of knowledgeable people will tell you that the collapse scenario is a perfectly plausible one, as of this writing the actual, sudden, unmistakable collapse hasn't occurred yet, so don't clap just yet. Nobody can tell you with any certainty exactly when this will occur, or how much longer the various web sites on which my articles have been published will stay up, but obtaining a copy of this book (which I had designed, typeset and printed at my own expense) will put in your hands an odd sort of history book: one written before the historical events it describes take place. Donating to this blog is the only way you can obtain this book, because it is strictly a promotional item and is not designed to be offered for sale. I will send out copies of this limited edition on a first-come-first-serve basis, while supplies last. Please click on the "Donate" button and donate any amount you want, provided it's above $20, to reserve your copy. Please add a little extra for international shipping if you are outside US.  Thank you!

Products and Services for the Permanently Unemployed Consumer

Developing and marketing products for a shrinking market poses an interesting set of challenges. Even if a company does an outstanding job and is able to steadily grow its market share, these gains are negated if the market itself continually shrinks by an ever larger amount. For instance, a company might have an outstanding electric vehicle design, but it is destined to fall by the wayside during a time when the number of consumers that qualify for a car loan is trending downward, the used car market is glutted by repossessions, and federal, state and municipal governments are unable to upgrade their car fleets because their budgets are far in the red.

Consumer product development caters to individuals who live in houses or condos, have jobs to which they commute by car, and generate a steady stream of disposable income. This is the group to which the business press often refers collectively as "the consumer": one often reads that the consumer is retrenching, that the consumer's credit is tapped out, that the consumer's disposable income is shrinking and so on. The consumer is not growing. What is there left to do except design and manufacture fewer and fewer products?

The answer is as simple as it is surprising. The consumer is not melting away; the consumer is mutating and evolving. In the United States alone, half a million people a month (in round numbers) are being shed from the workforce. Although this is often portrayed as a temporary condition, job creation is not expected to pick up pace any time soon, and few people are willing to forecast when it will again exceed population growth. Even a rose-tinted economic scenario has to admit that there is a high probability of new energy price spikes triggering new recessionary periods, which would drive unemployment higher.

Therefore, more often than not a job loss will set a person on a new career path, one that comes with a new set of challenges and options. Most significantly, these formerly employed people often no longer have sufficient income to afford the two items that dominate most household budgets — the house and the car, and all of the expenses that are associated with them. Medical expenses form a third category, and are highly variable, depending on a person's age and medical condition, and range from zero (for the healthy uninsured) to arbitrarily large (medical expenses being the largest single cause of personal bankruptcy).

Does permanent job loss mean that someone is no longer a consumer? In some cases the answer is yes: some people continue to spend as if they still had a job, and the inevitable result is eventual destitution. Once they run out of unemployment benefits, savings and credit, their purchasing ability decreases to the barest minimum provided by food stamps. I don't mean to sound harsh, but this makes them rather uninteresting from a new product marketing perspective.

But other people may be quick to shed their biggest categories of expense, walking away from their mortgage and their car loan, allowing their medical insurance to lapse, and developing a new lifestyle that is well within their new budgetary constraints. They may couch-surf, take advantage of house-sitting opportunities or rent a spot at a campground by the season. For the cold part of the year, they may head south and, again, camp out. They may look for seasonal employment, do odd jobs for cash, or use their skills to repair or make and sell items for cash.

With their largest expenses gone, their disposable income may actually be higher. However, their needs and requirements are quite different, and since most product offerings target the settled, fully employed consumer, they are in some ways under-served. This is an area where new product development opportunities abound, and companies that gain a share of this growing market segment and build brand loyalty among this fast-growing consumer underclass will lock in a decade or more of profits and rapid growth. As a marketing strategy, it is not just recession-proof but actually recession-enhanced.

In saying that the unemployed consumers are currently under-served, I do not mean to belittle the huge positive effect on their lifestyles that resulted from the recent major advances in mobile computing and communications. Laptops with wireless Internet access have made it possible for a homeless person to run an Internet business or a software company, manage an investment portfolio, or contribute to an international scientific collaboration. Any of these things can now be done from an Internet cafe or a public library, or, in fine weather, even a bench in a city park or a tent at a campground. Cell phones make it possible to give radio interviews and participate in teleconferences from just about anywhere that is within sight of a cell phone tower. Hand-held GPS units allow people to find their way around and to retrieve items stashed in the woods using their coordinates.

But even here there is plenty of room for specific improvements: the umbilical cord of the laptop power supply and the cell phone charger hampers mobility. It would not be difficult to add small solar panels to the backs of cell phones and the lids of laptops, making it possible to recharge them simply by leaving them in the sun for an hour or two. Many people would be willing to trade off certain features, such a high-powered microprocessor or a brilliant display, against reduced power consumption and a reduced need to use the power cord.

In addition to such incremental improvements, certain completely new types of devices can be designed to serve some of the unique needs of the permanently unemployed. For example, it is not uncommon for them to be living in places that lack public utilities such as running water, making it impossible to use flush toilets. A commonsense adaptation is to put together a composting toilet, using a 5-gallon drum and a toilet seat, and a length of dryer hose for the exhaust duct. A key component of this solution is the exhaust fan, which can be quite tiny and low-powered, but has to run continuously. A small computer fan connected to a lantern battery is adequate and lasts for many months, but an even better solution is a battery-backed exhaust fan powered by a solar panel that is designed to be installed in a partially opened window. Another example: a portable device that can detect the many environmental hazards that are likely to be present in such a less-than-ideal living environment: a combined smoke/carbon dioxide/carbon monoxide detector that can also detect toxic fumes from burning synthetic materials would be perfect. A device for testing the safety of drinking water would also be very useful.

In addition to such new products, the permanently unemployed would also benefit from certain services designed to fit their unique needs. For example, a campground at which campsites are paired up with garden plots, allowing people to spend the summer months growing their own food, would suit people who have plenty of time, little money, and nowhere to live. In the cities, low-priced dormitories styled after Japanese capsule hotels, and shower and locker facilities would make their lives much easier while also helping to improve sanitation and public health and to preserve public order.

We live in a time of steadily rising unemployment, and, consequently, much emphasis is being placed on stimulating job creation. To this end, the federal government has already spent a lot of economic stimulus money on a variety of infrastructure projects. An obvious question to ask is whether any of these projects have directly benefited the unemployed, beyond creating a few temporary jobs. It is a no-brainer that the jobs to create first are the ones in industries with the highest growth potential, where job creation can quickly become self-sustaining. As a matter of public policy, it would make perfect sense to provide seed money for what is bound to become a new high-growth industry segment: serving the needs of the permanently unemployed.

Collapse Gap Revisited

Richard Heinberg has done something that sorely needed doing: he has performed a Collapse Gap analysis for USA and China. In a lengthy and detailed article he argues that, just as the USA is less prepared for collapse than the USSR was, the USA is less prepared for collapse than China. This is perhaps unsurprising (few countries are less prepared than the USA). Collapse-preparedness affects how many people will be able to survive the collapse, and how bad a time they are likely to have in doing so.

But there is much more to it than that. Richard makes several excellent new points that should be taken on board. Here, I will mention just three (perhaps adding a slight personal twist to each). For the full details, please go and read the full article.

•  The governments of both USA and China are not trying to avert collapse but simply to delay it. Averting collapse would involve overcoming problems caused by fossil fuel depletion, ecosystem limits such as soil and fresh water, climate disruption due to global warming, and an economic system predicated on exponential growth. Neither government is up to the task of solving any of these, and so the obvious choice for them is to stall for time, hoping that the other one collapses first.
• Although whichever country collapses first will immediately find itself at an obvious disadvantage vis à vis the other, that advantage is likely to be short-lived. Unlike the collapse of the USSR, the collapse of either USA or China will devastate the other, with major repercussions for the other major economies. There will be no country left standing that will be capable of effecting an economic rescue. The collapse of either USA or China will trigger the collapse of the other, marking a permanent, global transition to a new state.
• Since collapse is unavoidable, the obvious fall-back strategy would be to invest in local resiliency and self-sufficiency. Since neither government appears the least bit interested in such matters, it is time for us to recognize them for what they are to us: utterly irrelevant. Paying attention to national politics can only distract us from doing whatever we can as individuals and local communities.

In the past Richard has done his best to nudge governments in the right direction, especially with regard to adjusting to fossil fuel depletion, whereas I have always felt that they can go and nudge themselves. You see, from my point of view, only a fool would want to go a-nudging the Central Committee of the Politburo toward adopting better policies. Here, perhaps once there was hope; and now it's gone. Unfortunately, many people continue to believe in the miraculous properties of national politics and policy. However, Richard is no longer one of them, and this makes me a bit more hopeful for the rest of us.

Recognizable Characters in Predictable Circumstances

Act I of James Kunstler's new play "Big Slide" is now available as a staged reading via KunstlerCast, with Acts II and III to follow, and the entire text also available as an e-book.

The play is set in the not-too-distant future, after West Los Angeles has been obliterated by a bomb, Chicagoland's drinking water has been laced with Botox, the President has been suicided, gas is at $10 a gallon and mostly not for sale, stores have been looted, electricity is off for good and armed gangs in police uniforms man checkpoints and confiscate anything edible. Other than that, everything is fine. It is a story of three generations of the prosperous and privileged Freeman family, who flee the growing mayhem in New York and Boston and hole up at Big Slide, which is their family compound in the Adirondacs.

Big Slide comes complete with a stalwart and competent caretaker, a large collection of guns and fishing tackle, a nearby lake stocked with trout, a forest full of deer, rabbit and seasoned timber felled by a winter storm, a greenhouse and an ample garden plot. If only the Freemans had prepared... but then their varied needs include morphine, a replacement hip joint, a strict vegan diet and plenty of booze—all inaccessible or in short supply, now that even venturing into the nearby town has been deemed inadvisable. Also, with family tensions worthy of Anton Chekhov, can they avoid shooting each other?

Real Communities are Self-Organizing

John Michael Greer, Sharon Astyk and Rob Hopkins have made some interesting points on the topic of community, and I wish to join the fray. In all of my experience, communities — of people and animals — form instantaneously and rather effortlessly, based on a commonality of interests and needs. What takes a lot of work is not organizing communities, but preventing them from organizing — through the use of truncheons and tear gas, or evictions and mass imprisonment, or, more recently, more subtle and ultimately more successful techniques of the consumerist political economy.

Greer wonders why people don't put more work into organizing communities; after all, this is what has worked in America in the past and how a representative democracy is supposed to function. All it should take is hard work, so why don't we hop to it? To me, this smacks of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness — roughly speaking, that just because different objects at different times carry the same label ("America"), they are somehow the same object. How representative a democracy the US ever was is rather beside the point; the point is, it was once a country where people could successfully and openly self-organize, and now it isn't. Once there were strong, cohesive communities in the US, which could organize and bring pressure to bear on their elected officials. And now, as described in Robert Putnam's widely discussed book Bowling Alone (2000), there are no such strong, cohesive communities in the US, and so... they can't organize, because, I would think, there is nothing for them to organize. Existence of communities allows communities to organize; lack of community prevents communities from organizing. That's a bit of a tautology, is it not?

As an aside, I'd like to point out that the US is not much of a representative democracy any more. It's more of a hokey-pokey-ocracy: in one election cycle, you throw your right bums out and vote your left bums in, and in the next election cycle, or the one after, you do the exact opposite. (And you shake it all around in the meantime.) The bums — the Republicans and the Democrats, that is — are perpetually locked in a loving embrace, for they truly complete each other. The Democrats tend to believe that government is there to help people, which is of course impossible for a government that's chock-full of Republicans who believe in limiting the scope of government and sabotage all such efforts. The Republicans believe in limiting the scope of government, which is of course impossible for a government that's chock-full of Democrats who believe that government is there to help people, and sabotage all such efforts. You can vote for either party if you want it to fail while producing an ever larger and more useless government.

Both parties agree that the government should serve corporate interests. They are both skittish when talking about the rights of citizens, and prefer to talk about "consumers" rather than "citizens". As a nation of consumers, people in the US have no choice but to be consumers. The ones that don't have the money still get to consume things like orange jumpsuits and prison food. Foreign non-consumers also get to consume — things like depleted uranium and white phosphorus ordinance. Being a non-consumer is not an option, and the whole world must be made safe for consumerism. Organizing against consumerism amounts to biting the corporate hand that feeds you — an ungrateful and self-defeating thing to do. So you want to organize a third party? Be my guest; see you later.

Astyk makes the excellent point regarding the destruction of community through overwork and the herding of women out of the home and into the workplace. Women can't just be (unless they are rich) — they have to have an occupation, and the default occupation — "homemaker" — carries a bit of a stigma. Women have always been the backbone of any community, and the regimentation of women's lives was a brilliant move in the direction of totalitarian consumerism, because it allowed relationships even within the family, such as child-rearing, to be commercialized. Once all social interaction is centered around consumption patterns, community as a notion becomes little more than an advertising gimmick, and self-organizing properties of society become restricted to pursuing the latest commercial fashion.

Hopkins raises an interesting issue when he mentions the common criticism of intentional communities and the Transition Towns movement that it is predominantly white, educated, and middle-class. This is hardly surprising, since these are the only people who have the resources and the connections to do pretty much as they please. They can create their alternative arrangements out in the open, as long as they don't actively threaten the status quo. They can build an entire Garden of Eden if they so desire, provided they can line up the financing and pull the construction permits. That is the essence of consumer choice, isn't it? The rich get to play, while other, less privileged parts of the population, such as the immigrants, the squatters and the homeless, the chronically unemployed or underemployed, the bums (the real ones, not the ones in government), simply don't have the same options. At the same time, their need for community is much greater, and so they spontaneously self-organize, network informally, and defend their interests as best they can. They all know that "a nail that sticks up gets hammered down" and so they don't advertise their efforts or make them official or explicit.

Hopkins also makes the excellent point that the entire approach of "creating community" is patronizing and ineffective. Community regenerates spontaneously, given time, space, a commonality of interest, provided it is not too oppressed. As industrial economies continue to shrink and shed jobs, more and more people will be squeezed out to the margins of the consumerist universe, and, finding more time on their hands than they know what to do with, will start to reengage with other people in similar situations. Since their needs will often be coincident or complementary, they will form various types of temporary and informal groups. There is certainly a great deal that all of us can do to help, but "organizing" is not one of them. First and foremost, we should stop working so hard on destroying community, as we have been doing by leading overwhelmingly regimented and commercialized existences. And let's quit it with the political hokey-pokey — it's much too undignified.

The Oceans Are Coming — Part III: Remaining Afloat

Keith Farnish, Dmitry Orlov

[The first two parts of this series drew a surprising amount of vitriol from people who vehemently deny the merits of the case for adapting to rapid climate change and rising sea levels — greater even than the piece ridiculing the Teabaggers. The torrent of comment spam got so bad that I had to shut down comment submission altogether. It was probably fed to some extent by the various interests which were fighting to make the Copenhagen Conference a fiasco. I really do like giving people the ability to publish thoughtful, reasonable, helpful comments, and so as a compromise I have decided to turn comment submission back on, but only for registered users (including OpenID).  Those who wish to dispute the reality of climate change should perhaps go here.]

Had Noah built his ark and the Great Flood never materialized, he would have felt very, very silly indeed! Noah could thank God for such an accurate weather forecast. In the biblical story, once the waters receded, God told Noah that there won't be any more Great Floods, and some of us may still find comfort in this bit of divine dispensation, but rising ocean levels are a fact that more and more of us will be forced to take into account as we redraw our coastal maps. How fast are the ocean levels rising? Well, that's where we have a bit of problem. When making plans, it is helpful to be armed with the most accurate and up-to-date forecasts; laying plans for tomorrow based on yesterday's forecast seems like folly. And yet that is precisely what our incomplete understanding of climate dynamics forces us to do.

In Part I of this series, just a couple of months ago, we cheerfully wrote: "The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (that’s the big blob that surrounds the South Pole just off-centre) seems to be quite stable, and should remain that way for the next few centuries." That would have been nice, because the East Antarctic ice sheet holds somewhere around 80% of all the fresh water on the planet; if it were to melt, the sea level would go up by between 20 and 36 metres (75 to 120 feet) and coastal maps would need to be redrawn more or less from scratch. But then shortly after we posted the second part of this series, Nature Geoscience published a study showing that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet was undergoing a decline in thickness:

In agreement with an independent earlier assessment, we estimate a total loss of 190±77 Gt/year, with 132±26 Gt/year coming from West Antarctica. However, in contrast with previous GRACE estimates, our data suggest that East Antarctica is losing mass, mostly in coastal regions, at a rate of 57±52 Gt/year, apparently caused by increased ice loss since the year 2006.

"Accurate quantification of Antarctic ice-sheet mass balance and its contribution to global sea-level rise remains challenging", the authors are quick to caution. Nevertheless, the study concludes that "in contrast to previous estimates... [the new measurements] indicate that as a whole, Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise". In Part I we cited the aforementioned GRACE satellite system as a way of assessing potential ice losses from Greenland, and based on it we assumed — wrongly as it turned out — that East Antarctica would be safe. Taking into account everything that has been discussed earlier in this series, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Typically, we don't know what exactly to expect or when to expect it, but we do know that it will be worse than what we should have been expecting before. Should we wait to act until scientific certainty has been achieved? If we do, will it be too late to prepare or to adapt? Newsflash! It now appears that a couple of big Antarctic glaciers — Pine Island Glacier and Thwaite's Glacier next to it — have passed their tipping points. They have floated off the sea-bed, and will now disintegrate, resulting in as much as a half-metre rise above previously estimated sea level by the end of the century.

We are not in a position to face down the ocean, saying "This far, Ocean, and not a centimetre further!" Our worst-case scenario is that our worst-case scenario is going to continue getting worse and worse. We cannot limit our planning activities to this or that mythical upper bound. When our knowledge fails us, our myths are there to guide us. The success of Noah's mission did not depend on having an accurate estimate of how high the waters would rise, because his arc floated.

* * *

Were the advances all gradual, as are experienced from day to day on the deep ocean island chains of Tuvalu, Mauritius and The Seychelles (where the governments, perversely, still encourage mass tourism by carbon-spewing jet aircraft) then the threat to the thickly settled low-lying coastlines of the world could, possibly, be managed in an orderly manner. Managed retreat would certainly be a possibility. The threatened areas could be redesignated as flood-zones, to be used only for low-value farming and aquaculture. Coastal inhabitants would be gradually resettled further inland. As swaths of coastal real estate are knocked down to make room for more sea, abatement procedures would be followed to prevent the coastal waters from being poisoned by toxic chemicals or choked with floating debris. In preparation, new navigation channels could be dug and seawalls and jetties constructed further inland.

But no such opportunities will present themselves in most places where cyclones smash into the coast, inundating mile upon mile of lowland with salt water. Storm surges can suddenly overtop shoreline defences that seemed sufficient the day before, spreading their watery fingers across fenlands and farms. Then the storm sewers back up, breeding typhoid-spreading rats and malaria-spreading mosquitoes wherever the water pools in stagnant reaches. In such cases, emergency evacuation and resettlement remains the only option. But emergency management capabilities are restricted, and will become completely inadequate as the frequency of such emergencies continues to increase.

As we showed in Part II, especially with the story of the Netherlands, you can only hold back the tide for so long before the inevitable happens. What is crazy about the way we occupy the coastal region is not that we do it at all — there is a good living to be made there, as the crofters of North West Scotland found prior to the Clearances, and as the seemingly daredevil occupants of the Sundarbans do today. No, what is crazy about the way we occupy the coastal region is that civilized humans assume that the coastline is fixed. Civilized humans are wont to stand at the water’s edge and not so much dare it, as deny that the sea can take what they feel is so rightly theirs. Yet anyone with a rudimentary understanding of coastal geomorphology knows that many coastal regions are dynamic, their relative stability dependent on the strength of the currents and waves and the resistance of the material from which the coast is built. Shingle and sand move with the dominant current along the shore, depleting one part of the coast and building up another. Where the coast loses its protective skirt, the water can rapidly eat into the land, causing slumps and falls which themselves are carried away by the water. Some places are luckier than others – and it is a matter of luck – to be blessed with mangroves, salt marshes, coral reefs or natural shoals that reduce the impact of the waves and undersea currents. Other places may be more resistant to change: a granite or basalt coastline will withstand the harshest of conditions for eons, even long after all the soil has been scoured off by storms. Most shorelines are continuously moving. When the sea cooperates, it is possible, for a time, to constrain them using embankments or dikes. But the sea always wins in the end. The sea is the ultimate wilderness. We may play its game and sometimes even win, but it will never play by our rules. This much we know and it would be foolish of us to think that it could be otherwise.

Just how foolish? Here is an example from New South Wales, Australia, where the local council have forcefully rejected the do-nothing option:

The “do nothing” option will not be considered by Port Macquarie-Hastings Council as a response to the management of coastal erosion at Lake Cathie, says the council’s coastal and estuaries committee. Local campaigner and Lake Cathie resident Leslie Williams said that local Illaroo Road residents were pleased to see this option removed and that consideration would now focus on alternatives such as beach nourishment, seawalls and planned retreat.

PMHC’s development and environment director Matt Rogers said the “do nothing” option had been dismissed in the report to go before the next council meeting, as the council recognised the impact of that option on residents and was unacceptable. The council will also consider moves to permit residents to make contributions to protection work, while development applications for Illaroo Rd. properties would not be accepted until the erosion issue was resolved.

Notice that last bit? It would appear that development applications will not be accepted until Illaroo Rd. is made safe from the rising oceans. Given the latest ocean rise forecasts, this is a perfectly sensible procedural delay (not to be confused with the "do nothing" option). Illaroo Rd. will be underwater for a short spell — just a few thousand years — but then, with luck, the Earth will enter yet another ice age, glaciers will grow again, the waters will retreat, and, in due course, Illaroo Rd. properties will be developed.

* * *

Apart from such "proactive" approaches, those living low-lying coastal areas around the world really have just two choices:

1. Keep denying the reality of climate change and the effects of increased storm energy and sea level rise; or, with similar naïveté, accept that things are changing but assume that their political leaders will somehow be able to deal with it.

2. Face reality, take matters into their own hands, and find ways to adapt. Take to higher ground, or remain near the coast but prepare for a life afloat and on the move.

* * *

If you are thinking of ignoring everything written so far in this series and making your decisions based on the business-as-usual scenario our political leaders love so much, we would urge you to reconsider — while you have the option. Even if sea-level rise does not achieve the catastrophic levels that are becoming more and more likely with each new scientific study, your ability to adapt is going to be constrained by the way you get around. Your speed may vary, but overall it will be inversely proportional to the speed at which the current petroleum-based transport infrastructure falls apart, as the reality of crude oil's terminal decline and resource scarcity begin to hit home. Before too long, you will be on foot — if you are still on dry ground, that is — and, if not, you will need a boat of some sort. Having an internal-combustion engine to push it around is certainly a convenience, but you wouldn't want to be left stranded due to lack of fuel.

One can reasonably imagine that certain internal combustion vehicles will stay in sporadic use longer than others. On the water, smaller motorised craft — dinghies, launches, and tenders — use little fuel, are very energy-effective for the services they render, and so are likely to persist for some time. On land, the pay-off per unit energy is much lower, and so internal-combustion vehicles are likely to be relegated to the realm of pure luxury from whence the "horseless carriage" originally emerged. Limousines for weddings and hearses for funerals will perhaps remain motorised the longest, moving slowly over unpaved roads, since people would still be willing to pay extra for dignity on special occasions. We can also foresee that certain groups, such as governments, mafias, armed gangs and other social predators will be able to secure a supply of fuel the longest. It is difficult to imagine that such a winding-down can transpire uniformly smoothly and peaceably. Inevitably, geography will be the determining factor: remote population centres, to which fuel must be brought overland, will have their supply curtailed long before those that are close to pipelines, railway lines, seaports or shipping channels. In communities that find themselves without access to transport fuels, much of the remaining economic activity will centre around gathering the necessary resources in order to escape, and they will steadily depopulate, leaving behind the old and the sick.

We can foresee that road traffic will be greatly reduced, as paved roads revert to dirt and become eroded and, in places, impassable, as bridges collapse from lack of maintenance, and as predation by both local officials and highwaymen increases both the costs and the dangers. Both pedestrian traffic and caravans of pack animals will try to evade official and unofficial predation, opting for the less popular, more circuitous footpaths instead of the direct and open road. Canals and other navigable waterways will once again play a much larger role in inland transport, with barges pulled by draught animals along towpaths and with sail-boats carrying freight and passengers along the sea-coasts. As the sea-ports that currently serve container ships, bulk carriers and tankers are submerged under the rising seas, the current hub-and-spoke transport networks will collapse, and smaller coastal communities will once again find ample reason to want to build and provision ocean-going vessels, to make seasonal migrations and to trade with faraway lands.

* * *

At the same time, the need for transport will only grow, as millions of environmental refugees diffuse across the world looking for a new place to settle, and, not finding any, remain perpetually on the move. Rapid climate change is putting an end to the last ten thousand years of unusually stable climate. It was this rare episode of climate stability that has allowed agriculture to develop and flourish and previously nomadic tribes to settle down in one place without starving. It even allowed agrarian societies to produce such large food surpluses that cities and towns could become established, eventually growing to millions of inhabitants, all fed using cash crops grown elsewhere. As the climate reverts to its chaotic historical norm, people everywhere will be forced to abandon such sedentery patterns of inhabiting the landscape in favour of the more usual migratory and nomadic existence, minimising the risk of starvation by diversifying food sources across large geographic areas, and making seasonal migrations to avoid extremes of hot and cold.

Even as the rising oceans devastate many coastal areas, the areas far inland will become far less welcoming. Global warming will make extreme weather events, such as the 2003 European heat wave, which resulted in 37,451 deaths, an annual happening. Many inland areas, such as much of the southern United States, which are currently only survivable in the summer thanks to widespread access to air conditioning, will no longer be survivable. Ocean water's moderating effect on climate will make the coasts seem relatively inviting in spite of the erosion and the flooding. However, erecting permanent structures on such an impermanent terrain seems like a foolish thing to do. On the other hand, being able to take to the waves is an insurance policy that might pay you double if you are smart enough. Not only will seas and oceans, coastal waters, waterways inevitably reemerge as the default means of movement, but also as the places where the circumstances will force many people to live. This they should be able to do, provided their dwellings can float and move about without energy from fossil fuels.

* * *

Imagine life on the ocean water, and a community that is connected through its mutual dependence on the wildly dynamic coastal belt. Imagine your home being a boat; moving with the winds, the tides and the currents, rising and settling on the wash of floodwater. This is really not as outlandish as it might sound. Options for post-industrial sailboat-building are described in quite a lot of detail in Dmitry's article "Twenty-First Century Transport", which will appear in Slaying The Hydra, Gillian Fallon and Richard Douthwaite, eds., Green Books, May 2010. The design he proposes has been rather thoroughly thought out and many of its elements rigorously tested.

On board are all the systems needed to make it a self-contained mobile survival capsule. Water for drinking and washing is provided through rainwater collection with a solar still for back-up. Illumination and electricity for communications and navigational equipment and lights comes from a few solar panels and a small wind generator. For sanitation, there is a composting toilet, its proceeds used to fertilize bits of permaculture tucked away on shore. For heating and cooking and getting rid of the inevitable damp, there is a wood stove, the wood generally available in the form of driftwood. What's more, it is very hard to starve because the coastal zone tends to be very productive: Dulse seaweed, clams, oysters, mussels, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, conchs, edible periwinkles and what's left of the fish provide a year-round banquet. A sea breeze provides the air conditioning. A few ratty old sails and a couple of long sculling oars provide the propulsion when the time comes for a change of venue. The same boat that can dry out at low tide on a mud flat or nosed onto a sheltered stretch of beach can be sailed halfway across the world quite safely and comfortably. It wouldn't win any races, but then it doesn't have to be sailed by a professional crew of acrobatic sea-monkeys either.

* * *

The sea exerts a powerful pull on the imagination of the landlubber. Go to any seaside on a warm, sunny day, and you will see quite a few people spread out along the embankment, sitting or standing, staring vacantly over the water. From the water they look like ants. Go ashore and visit any newsstand, even one quite far inland, and you are sure to find some sailing magazines, full of airbrushed photographs of bikini-clad women on top of similarly well-buffed large floating toys. The sea is the ultimate escape fantasy. The landlubbers assume, and rightly so, that just out of sight of land lies a different world, one which shore-side society will never be able to fully oppress.

The shore-side landscape has been carved up into various types of boxes and rectangles. Architects never tire of putting boxes on top of, next to, or inside of other boxes; this seems to exhaust their range of motions. People inhabit these boxes, starting with the crib and ending with the coffin. In the interim, they use four-wheeled boxes to navigate the maze between house boxes, job boxes and shopping boxes. All of this fixation on rectilinear geometry is supposed to make them safe and comfortable, but it also makes them dream of escape. Escape to sea, of course, is an obvious choice, because any body of water — even a smallish one — is automatically a wilderness, while the ocean is a force of nature par excellence — unconquerable by man, guaranteed to utterly destroy and humiliate any human contrivance designed to keep it in check. The land has been carved up into rectangles and boxes, but the sea-coast (the wet side of it, that is) remains a relative wilderness precisely because it cannot be carved up quite so easily.

Strange though it may seem, the wilderness starts right at the water's edge. If our ocean-gazers turned their gaze to the boats bobbing around at anchor or at moorings, and looked carefully, they would notice that some of these stationary boats are, in fact, inhabited. Here is a dinghy tied up to the stern of one; another has towels drying on the lifelines; a third has a bit of smoke coming from a chimney above the wheelhouse — somebody is cooking lunch. Unbeknownst to most of the box-dwellers on shore, there is rather a large tribe of "live-aboards" — people who live aboard boats. Some keep their boats in posh marinas and emerge from the cabin in the morning wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Others live at anchor, setting a few crabpots or fishing off the stern to catch their dinner, and rowing themselves ashore periodically to do an odd job or gather some supplies. Some boats make semi-annual pilgrimages in search of warmer or cooler weather; others have a summer holiday, during which they visit picturesque places along the coast; still others stay put, growing a thick beard of seafood. Living on a boat is in general much more economical than living on land, and it is possible, if one is skilled, to make a living of it without very much monetary input at all. But it is certainly not for everybody. Some people try it and after a while give up, others have been living aboard for decades and are not about to stop.

Many others are about to start living on the water, even though they don't know it yet. The problem is, their houses don't float, don't move, and they aren't particularly habitable without the wires and pipes that hook them to various services. When the water comes, they are submerged and disintegrate. Living on a boat may have its challenges and annoyances, but living in a flooded house is close to impossible. And so, if the landscape you inhabit is in danger of becoming flooded, cut off from the mainland, or generally uninhabitable, why not build a boat instead of a house, or next to the house, and float away when the time comes. It is quite possible for an amateur with limited funds to build a craft that is roomy enough to house a family, relatively immune to wind and waves, happily sits upright on any relatively level bit of ground, rides well to anchor, and contains all the necessities and even a modicum of luxuries, for a perfectly civilized existence.

As a residence, a sailboat offers a unique combination of safety, civilization and freedom. It may be raining cats and dogs and blowing so hard that tree-branches are flying about on shore, but on a boat anchored in a sheltered spot, once you lash down a few things on deck and descend the companionway, you enter a different world. Standing in the cabin, you are up to your chest in water, but the water is outside, while inside it is warm and dry, you have your own source of electricity from the wind generator, fresh rainwater is gurgling down into the water tanks, and, what's more, you do not have to ask anyone's permission or pay anyone for the right to be there. If someone minds you being there, or if the place is uninviting, once the storm passes you hoist sails, pull up anchor, and look for another spot.

* * *

In a world where rising seas are already putting millions of people at risk of losing their homes, their lives, or both, a programme of building large numbers of inexpensive, practical, utilitarian and versatile sailing craft is a direct way to provide flood-proof, earthquake-proof and storm-proof habitation, to build communities, to create local resilience, and to provide hope for a survivable future. It is a way to create connections between different parts of the planet that can survive into the post-industrial age. It offers a way to transport people and goods in a fashion that avoids predation that will be an inevitable element of a disrupted time. It offers us an opportunity to make sure that we remain a seafaring species even as the fossil fuel era recedes into history, and gives us a way to salvage something very useful out of the wreckage of our industrial past.

Keith Farnish is author of "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis" (http://www.timesupbook.com) and also writes The Earth Blog and The Unsuitablog. He enjoys being a husband and dad, walking around and growing things.

Predictions

Around this time of year, some brave souls venture to put their reputations at risk by attempting to predict what the next year will bring. Some do so with uncanny accuracy, others — not so much. Being a serious author who hardly ever makes jokes, I generally sit out this annual bout of frivolity, but, noting that a new decade is about to burst upon us, I thought it reasonably safe to paint a picture of how I see the next decade. (In the unlikely case that my predictions turn out to be completely wrong, I would think that they will have been very thoroughly forgotten by the time 2020 rolls around.) And so, without further ado, here are my predictions for what it will be like in The United States of America during the second decade of the XXI century.

The decade will be marked by many instances of autophagy, in business, government, and in the higher echelons of society, as players at all levels find that they are unable to control their appetites or alter their behavior in any meaningful way, even in the face of radically altered circumstances, and are thus compelled to consume themselves into oblivion, as so many disemboweled yet still ravenous sharks endlessly gorging themselves on their own billowing entrails.

Governments will find that they are unable to restrain themselves from printing ever more money in an endless wave of uncontrolled emission. At the same time, rising taxes, commodity prices, and costs of all kinds, coupled with a rising overall level of uncertainty and disruption, will curtail economic activity to a point where little of that money will still circulate. Inflationists and deflationists will endlessly debate whether this should be called inflation or deflation, unconsciously emulating the big-endians and little-endians of Jonathan Swifts Gulliver's Travels, who endlessly debated the proper end from which to eat a soft-boiled egg. The citizenry, their nest egg boiled down to the size of a dried pea, will not be particularly vexed by the question of exactly how they should try to eat it, and will regard the question as academic, if not idiotic.

Distressed municipalities throughout the country will resort to charging exorbitant fees for such things as dog licenses. Many will experiment with imprisoning those unable to pay these fees in state and county jails, only to release them again as the jails continuously overflow and resources run low. The citizenry will come to regard jails as conveniently combining the features of a soup kitchen and a homeless shelter. Some towns will abandon the idea of having a fire department and decide that it is more cost-effective to just let house fires run their course, to save on demolitions. In an effort to plug up ever larger holes in their budgets, states will raise taxes, driving ever more economic activity underground. In particular, state liquor tax revenues will drop for the first time in many decades as more and more Americans find that they can no longer afford beer and switch to cheap and plentiful Afghan heroin and other illegal but very affordable drugs. Marijuana smoke will edge out car exhaust as America's most prevalent smell.

Several countries around the world will be forced to declare sovereign default and join the swelling ranks of defunct nations. There will be a mad shuffle to find safe havens for hot money, but none will be found. Investors around the world will finally be forced to realize that the best way to avoid losses is to not have any money to start with. Despite their best efforts to diversify their holdings, investors will find that they are all long paper, be it stocks, bonds, deeds, promissory notes, or incomprehensible derivative contracts. They will also find that, in the new business climate, none of these instruments make particularly formidable weapons: as the friendly game of rock-paper-scissors turns hostile, they will discover that rocks stave in skulls, that scissors puncture vital organs, but that the paper, even when wielded expertly, just causes paper cuts. Those formerly well-heeled persons who tend to believe that "possession is nine-tenths of the law" will find many extralegal exorcists eager to liberate their demons. In particular, organized crime rings will start using data mining software to identify lightly guarded cabins and compounds in Montana and other remote locations that are well-stocked with canned food, weapons and gold and silver bullion, and start harvesting them by softening the target with mortars, rockets and aerial bombardment, then sending in commando teams with grenades and machine guns. Once the harvest is in, they will expatriate the proceeds using the diplomatic pouches of defunct nations held in their sway.

While the bullion is expatriated, the Pentagon will attempt to repatriate troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and the numerous US military bases around the world, soon finding that they lack the wherewithal to do so, stranding the troops wherever they are, and forcing them to resupply themselves. Military families will be invited to donate food, uniforms, clean underwear and toiletries for their loved ones overseas. American weaponry will flood the black market, driving down prices. Some servicemen will decide that returning to the US is a bad idea in any case, and go native, marrying local women and adopting local religions, customs and garb. Although national leaders will continue to prattle on about national security whenever there is a microphone pointed at them, their own personal security will become their overarching concern. Officials at all levels will attempt to assemble ever larger retinues of bodyguards and security consultants. Members of Congress will become ever more reticent and will avoid encountering their constituents as much as possible, preferring to hide in Washington's hermetically sealed high-rises, walled compounds and gated communities. Meanwhile, outside the official security perimeter, a new neighborliness will take root, as squatting becomes known as "settling in," trespassing as "beating a new path," and fences, walls and locks are everywhere replaced by watchful eyes, attentive ears and helping hands.

Cracking Jokes at a Wake

As we approach the end of a year, and the end of a decade, it is a good time to draw some conclusions and think about the future... of the blog you are currently reading. I started it a few years ago, as part of an effort to promote a book I was writing. That went quite well, and in the process I built a small but enthusiastic audience of people who clamored for more.

They tended to be forward-looking, independent-thinking types who couldn't help but see that an American collapse was coming and were quite worried by this prospect. I was able to ease their minds, from several directions. Based on my first-hand observations of the Soviet collapse, I was able to add a lot of mundane detail, which is helpful in developing a realistic picture of the future and forming reasonable expectations. But perhaps more importantly, I was able to do so with a sense of humor. I find that a sense of humor is absolutely indispensable for preserving one's sanity. Furthermore, I feel that people who lack a sense of humor tend to be dreary, awful company, risky to have around, and a potential mental health hazard. (By the way, according to such people, that's not funny.)

To me, dead-serious people have always seemed much more dead than serious. Humor is not just about taking the edge off: most interesting critical thinking seems to happen at the cusp between seriousness and humorousness. Judging the serious and humorous aspects of each statement allows us to become cognizant of the expressive limitations of contemporary language and the imbecilic clichés with which it is riddled, and liberates us somewhat from conventional modes of thought. But what can be a benefit can also be a limitation: I find it hard to adequately express myself without recourse to parody, satire, absurdity, double entendres, gallows humor, irony or sarcasm. These are all arrows in my quiver, and I never go hunting without them. But humor, as it turns out, has its limits.

Over just the past year, based on the numerous blog comments and emails I have received, I could see the mood of the audience shift. First, the audience got much larger: collapse has gone mainstream. Second, the mood went from light-hearted and humorous to earnest, to serious, to concerned, to angry. This is, of course, perfectly understandable. Over the course of the past year, it has become clear that Obama is just the next political fraud-in-chief, that national bankruptcy is unavoidable, that economic recovery is a pipe dream, that Washington and Wall Street have congealed into a single kleptocratic monolyth impervious to popular influences, that Pax Americana is at an end throughout the world, and that if you aren't absolutely certain that you are high-class, then you must be low-class like the rest of us, because the middle class ain't no more. Funny, isn't it, the difference just one year makes?

I was lucky, because when I started writing about the collapse of the USA, it was still an arrogant, self-assertive, self-satisfied country that believed in its full-spectrum dominance and thought it was heading for a "new American century." In short, it was a country that could still take a joke rather than being one. What before seemed witty is now perceived as a mockery or an insult. Not only is it impossible to joke away pain, grief and despair, but attempts to do so are in rather questionable taste, and that, more than anything else, gives me pause, because if there is anything I detest more than humorlessness, it's mauvais goût.

And so, the time has come to make some changes. Henceforth, this blog will be for publishing perfectly serious articles about climate effects on the shoreline, sail-based transport, and my next book.

Happy Holidays!

Selling Climate Change

[Late yesterday I killed this post, along with the previous one, because comment moderation got to be too much of a chore. The fellow depicted here has a lot of cousins, and they all have internet access. Then quite a few people wrote to me to ask me to bring it back. As a compromise, I am bringing back just this post.]

As some of you might have guessed by now, the topic of climate change is very important to me. I believe that all sorts of people should be made aware of climate change in ways that will make it very important to them as well. By "all sorts" I mean not just the intelligent, educated people with an ability to understand what a "climate model" is, but the sort of people you can see exhibited here.

I spent a year working in advertising, and have gained some understanding of what sort of ammunition it takes to make such people absorb and respond to a message. Significantly, it does not involve making them think; for those unaccustomed to thought, it is uncomfortable, and making them uncomfortable tends to anger them.

Climate scientists and environmental activists who support them have been struggling to get their message across: that an increase in average global temperature of 6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century is likely and would be a catastrophe.

Let's deconstruct this message on behalf of the person you see seated here. Starting at the end, there is this big scary Greek word. Tune that out: "cat... here, kitty-kitty!" Let's also cross out all the words he doesn't care about: "scientists," "average," "global" and "Celsius." These are all noise words. What we are left with is "It will be 6 degrees warmer." If he were wearing a sweatshirt, he might be prompted to think about taking it off, but as he is already down to just the boxers and the wife-beater, we shouldn't wish him to disrobe any further. If he succeeds in processing "by the end of the century," he would translate it as "not any time soon." If the word "likely" makes it through his cognitive filter, it would come out as "maybe." The message, as received, thus reads: "Maybe it will get a bit warmer long after I am dead. Well, whoop-tee-doo! What else is on TV?"

You may ask yourself, What difference does it make what this individual thinks? Well, it does and it doesn't. It doesn't because he has zero political or economic power or influence. It does because those who run the country in which he resides find it convenient to pretend that his opinion matters, to dumb down public discourse so as to frustrate the smart, educated people to the point of not wanting to participate, because dumb people are easier to exploit than smart people. If we want to influence public policy and try to prevent climate catastrophe (to the extent that it is still preventable) we need to have this fellow squarely on our side. This is not impossible by any means, but it is a dead certainty that scientific mumbo-jumbo won't make a convert of him.

The word "climate" is a bit of a non-starter already. He likes "climate control," and what we are telling him is that he might have to get a bigger air conditioner... by the end of the century. That's just great. But the real howler is the persistent use of the word "average." Imagine him poking his head out of his double-wide trailer home to surmise the weather, and, turning to his Spandex-clad, morbidly obese wife, exclaiming "Sweet Jesus, what an AVERAGE day! Take out your teeth, woman! Let's celebrate!" Are you beginning to get the picture?

Here is a mapping I would like to contribute to the question of how to sell climate change to the general public.

Scientific Mumbo-Jumbo	Translation
Global	1. Washington County 2. Jefferson County 3. Franklin County 4. All the way over in Madison County 5. Fabulous places you have only heard about but might want to visit when you win the lottery, like Orlando (not funny-sounding ones like Bangladesh: "Bang what?")
Warming	Screwed-up weather
Increased precipitation	Flood! Your double-wide will get washed into the ravine!
Average temperature increase	Heat waves! You'll be running you AC flat out and still sweating like a pig!
Atmospheric CO2 concentration	Burning stuff is screwing up the weather; everybody must stop burning so much stuff before it gets any worse.
Polar ice cap melt	Beaches, bridges and docks washed away. Interstate highway under water. Can't drive anywhere!

Unlike the problem of stopping climate change, I see this communication problem as solvable. The issue, as I see it, is that nobody has really tried to solve it. The reasons for this are many and varied, but none of them is particularly good.

If combating climate change requires everyone to understand climate science, then the battle has already been lost. As our dumb luck would have it, that is not necessarily the case.