Hurricane Helene's message for us about our future.
We can't afford not to take responsibility for our lives in a more chaotic world.
Climate chaos is coming for us.
Some places face bigger risks than others, but no matter where we live, we're gonna struggle to adapt to events like nothing we've seen before.
I'm a climate futurist.
Let me level with you about what this means.
I teach classes on building personal climate strategies. My next six-week Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization begins Thursday, October 17th.
(Spaces are filling; click the button below to learn more and sign up now. Enrollment closes on October 15.)
This is my best take on what to watch out for, but climate science and foresight are complex, tracking fast-moving realities with many uncertainties. Smart people disagree on some key points.
There's a lot of fear out there right now. It's often justified. We've been in denial about how big this crisis has been getting, and now it's here.
A whole lot of us are not ready for what's already happening. Very few are ready for how weird and bad things could get.
(Also, while this crisis may be the end of certain ways of life in certain places, it's not the end of the world.
There are realistic steps we can take—including relocation, household ruggedization and community action—to improve our odds.
The most important point I'm making here is this:
We're used to thinking of climate chaos as a problem that's far away, in the future... and probably someone else's responsibility to worry about.
None of that's true anymore.
These impacts are here—where we live—they're happening now, and no one's coming to save you and your family from them.
"You're on your own," as adaptation Professor Jesse Keenan says.
It's your responsibility to work to understand what's coming at you.
What's coming at you?
First of all, crazy weather and local discontinuities.
Hurricanes, heatwaves, floods, megafires, droughts—but also a lot of smaller sudden shifts that mean our previous experience of what it means to live in a place no longer matches what we see.
Both big disasters and small erosions can be destructive, but even more, they increase *risks* on a historically unprecedented scale.
We're all about to get much more familiar with what that kind of growing risk does to our livelihoods, our economy and our government.
Almost all of us pay institutions whose job it is to help us manage risk.
Most of us have some forms of insurance, and most people who own houses have homeowners' coverage.
As risk grows, that's about to get more expensive, less helpful, or just no longer be available.
Suddenly many of the places we live are proving more vulnerable to disaster than we thought, and we're getting huge premium bills in the mail, or (worse) outright cancellation notices. Count on it costing more to insure homes and businesses as the crisis deepens.
This matters. We value things financially by the price we think they'll bring in a later sale.
Brittleness—things getting more likely to fail, and harder to fix—means lower prices.
Because brittleness is spreading fast, and our awareness of it is growing even faster, look out for millions of homes/businesses being quickly worth a lot less than they were a few years ago.
In the most endangered places—the places with so much risk they're becoming uninsurable—it may be hard to even take out a conventional mortgage to buy a local home.
I believe home values in these places are about to crash hard. Think along the scale of the Subprime Crisis.
The blowout will hitting local governments, too.
Cities and counties will find their tax bases shrinking at the very moment demand for local services and infrastructure skyrockets.
As disasters hit, they'll need to borrow money on increasingly bad terms and/or raise taxes.
This is a recipe for local economic decline.
Wealthy people often migrate away first. They're soon joined by locals with portable jobs or in-demand skills, and by young people looking for a better future.
This means a further hollowing out of the community's capacities.
In 1000s of communities, the very capacity to build a future is being eroded away.
Even in the best scenarios—where humanity cuts emissions rapidly and mobilizes national responses—we'll start to see more and more places that no longer have it in them to recover and rebuild.
The fact is that we can't save many of these places. Even if they could be defended from chaos, it'd simply cost too much.
If we stepped up as a nation, this decline would be met by big programs to support millions of people relocating to more stable lives.
That's a big if.
More realistic is widespread "unofficial abandonment", where people get limited help when catastrophes hit... for as long as they stay in the news. Then the decline continues, unacknowledged.
This creates its own undertow of tragedy.
People will get trapped in these declining brittle places.
The combination of precarity, concentrated poverty, dwindling responses and despair (with all the violence, addiction and abuse that brings) will make it hard for a lot of people to leave no matter how bad it gets.
This is the very definition of an intractable problem
The best advice, however insufficient, is don't be there when climate chaos drops the bottom out of these places.
Obviously, millions of people may not have much choice.
But let's assume you do.
Where do you go?
First, know this: there are no "climate havens."
Some places are relatively safe. Indeed, the risk gap between the most endangered and the best-sited places is pretty huge.
But everywhere you might go, you'll have to be ready for some mayhem.
Managing that mayhem in your life is somewhat, but not entirely, in your control.
Again, you can improve your family's odds of better outcomes, but nowhere will you find or make a world like the one we lived in before we started heating the oceans and melting the ice caps.
Moving away from danger is the best simple personal strategy any of us has.
It's harder to be confident in picking out what places are relatively safe to move to. It's not impossible, but it does involve some acceptance of uncertainty and some evidence-based guesswork. There are no guarantees in this crisis, but we can make smarter choices.
But let's say we have the means to make a move, and our loved ones have agreed on a place to go that's likely less risky, and we're ready now—we're good, right?
Well, no. Because guess what?
We're not the only one who got the climate chaos memo. A lot of folks have.
Places that offer better odds of avoiding catastrophes will become more valuable as brittleness spreads. And right now, there are many fewer homes, jobs, etc in the places that are clearly somewhat safer than there are people who will want to live in those homes and work those jobs. Limited (and, right now, only slowly growing) supply; huge demand: predictable outcome.
Those safer places are starting to feel the "climate squeeze." They’re likely see growing populations, rising prices and rents, flatlining hourly wages, secondary dislocation of local residents and institutional investors swooping in and bidding up the price of available assets.
There's still a window to relocate while the cost of building a new life is comparatively reasonable, but it's shrinking. Pace of action is definitely an advantage now.
Again, if we had bold government leadership, we could address this problem.
We could fund big investments in new climate-hardened infrastructure; approve and support large-scale homebuilding; invest now in the schools, services, hospitals and safety people will need. We could transform the flow of new arrivals from a worsening challenge into momentum for improving our cities and towns.
If..
As it stands, expect to see more and more boomtown dynamics and opportunity hoarding in the kind of places we'll want to be heading. It will only get harder.
Discontinuity will echo loudly in every part of our lives—from raising and educating kids, to living in our communities, to taking care of elders, to planning our own careers and retirements.
We'll all be living with more strain—and helping others manage their own distress.
Here's the thing, though.
While we may all be on our own, and unready for what's happening, we don't have to stay that way.
Many people are doing good work and looking to connect with others who are thinking about this new future.
Certainties and simple answers may be in short supply, but we can get ourselves up to speed on life in this crisis.
If you're serious, my Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization gives you the tools to build your own climate strategy, from the ground up.
Class Details:
A Crash Course in Personal Ruggedization
Dates: Thursdays, October 17, 24, 31; Nov 7, 14 and 21
Time: 11:00am - 1:00pm Pacific Standard Time (PST)
(Bonus Q&A follow-up call included. Date/time TBD)
Where: Zoom
Each session will include a deep-dive on that week’s topics, with time for discussion. Classes are recorded for those who cannot attend live, and recordings are sent out to participants on the Monday following each class.
There are still a few seats at the special early discount. These seats are first-come-first-served. Get 25% off when you enter coupon code CCPR25OFF at checkout.
Questions about the course? Please reach out to us at Alison@AlexSteffen.com.
PS: I originally posted this as a thread on Twitter. If you’d like to share it there, here’s the link:
Climate chaos is coming for us, on Twitter: https://x.com/AlexSteffen/status/1840899394511782366