Ask HN: What's your climate change survival strategy?

This is the thing about climate change. There are no survival strategies - you can't plan for it. The biggest problem that will come with it is unpredicability.

We know the broad strokes of how climate change will impact us, but exactly how it's going to break down is impossible to predict.

We know it's going to make certain areas of the planet unlivable. We can't be sure exactly which areas.

Sea levels are already rising - but it's impossible to predict the exact rate at which they will continue to rise. There are models in which they rise relatively slowly. There are models in which they rise quickly, and there are models in which ice sheets fall off the arctic and antarctic all at once and it rises catastrophically.

The equators are already becoming unlivable (and ahead of schedule) - most models predicted we wouldn't start to see days of deadly heat until 2080, but that happened in 2020. It was literally too hot to exist outside for more than an hour or two with out supplemental cooling. We know eventually that will become the norm for much of the equatorial region.

We know climate change will destabilize rain patterns, which will destabilize crops. We know this will drive up food prices. And eventually, send us back to a place where there literally just isn't enough food to go around (right now we produce somewhere around 1.5 times the amount of food we need - there's only starvation because we aren't willing to distribute that food equitably). We don't know when or how fast.

We know all of this will drive migration. We don't know when, we don't really know from where or to where, and we don't know what the full consequences of that migration will be. The millions of people who migrated out of the Middle East as a result of the destabilization of that region post Iraq/Afghanistan and the Arab Spring contributed to cause all kinds of political destabilization in Europe - and a swing towards authoritarianism. It's impossible to predict what tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people migrating from the poorer, harder hit regions into the richer regions will do. Or what the general destabilization of the economy will do. But it's a pretty safe bet that it will fuel authoritarianism (...is fueling authoritarianism) of all kinds.

Given the uncertainty of it all, it's impossible to adequately strategize for survival - let alone a reasonably secure and comfortable life.

Our best bet would be to fight like hell right now to prevent it from getting any worse than it's already going to.

For now it's a standalone analysis (constrained to climate) looking back & forward, applying a variety of indicators, some normal stuff like mas & stddev, some shamelessly ripped from equities trading books (bollinger bands as an example building on those first items), along with some of my own which are probably dumb but which seem reliable enough for me.

I admit I'm not a huge fan of predictive or causal models unless taken in the aggregate, usually. Especially the singular-cause or singular-outcome kind. This is coming from personal interest in this topic within psychology study...for one I find that such models can become pretty breathless & kind of suck all the energy out of the room, energy that can be redirected into an executive stance. Where otherwise you end up with perfectly good mental resources stuck in a perceptive stance. It's cool to predict, but also even cooler to predict with an open mind to many possible outcomes, and then also even cooler to do that and then say "now here's the plan" iow.

Not that I'd advocate anything, but there are several orders of magnitude more normal people than moneyed interest people. There's a fix available.

As for hedging - I'm fairly certain that, for people living affluent outside the tropics or high latitudes means that the effects that'll really get them are largely systemic. There's not much hedging to be done. (Sure, some areas will have slightly milder climate extremes, but food's still gonna be scarce. Pandemic and war will still be felt. Civil war is an option almost everywhere. Migration will still heavily impact local economies.)

That's why I asked the counter-question - to highlight that this is really, if we want to or not, either a collective undertaking or certain misery. Isolation, or even anything but very basic hedging, is not really feasible for most people on this site.

Sure, but that's not really a "survival strategy".

Will people migrate over time? Yes. Does migrating now vs. later make a difference? Much less certain - because those people migrating later? They're probably going to the same places the "migrate now" people have moved to. And at that point, it's going to be wholly unpleasant for both groups.

I mean, yes. Don't buy farm real estate in Arizona, or waterfront property in Miami.

Some people believe we're actually not looking at global warming coming up but rather re-entry to a mini ice age. See "Vostok Ice Core" samples out of Russia and what people infer from that.

I'm not endorsing this viewpoint btw, just trying to very very briefly explain it to you.