I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how we’ll have to redesign society for the increasingly chaotic, climate-change-driven weather of the future.
The drought and apocalyptic wildfires in Los Angeles, coming just two years after a series of devastating floods, are a dramatic example of “weather whiplash” – weather that swings wildly back and forth between extremes of heat and cold, wet and dry. As climate change accelerates, disrupting formerly stable weather patterns, this phenomenon will spread to more areas and will get worse.
It’s possible to design communities that will survive the extremes of future weather, but it won’t be easy or cheap. We’ll have to build houses armored against wildfire, with metal roofs that won’t burn and landscaping without flammable greenery. But we’ll also have to engineer communities to divert and protect against flood: rivers that have room to rise, parks and gardens that soak up water, and even underground reservoirs to capture and safely store storm-driven overflow. Communities that make these choices now will have a greatly improved chance to prosper in the future, while those that don’t will be swept away.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
Since we’re well past the point of preventing climate change, our only choice is to adapt. Until now, human beings have acted as if nature was beneath our notice. We’ve heedlessly built houses on floodplains, at the edge of crumbling coasts, or at urban-rural interfaces among ecosystems like chaparral that are evolved for fire. We’ve built them from cheap materials, like untreated wood that burns and plastic that melts, with no thought for insulation or energy efficiency. We’ve tried to entomb rivers in concrete, as if we knew best where and how much they should flow.
Climate change is exposing all of this for the folly it is. The more we try to ignore nature, the worse it will be for us. The communities that will survive the upheavals to come are the ones that are designed to be resilient.
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