09081 Climate Instability

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet. — Alice Walker

People debate the causes of climate change with religious fervor and this short article is not going to persuade anyone one way or another. My position is that as a matter of empirical observation, the history of the world is a story of unpredictable, changeable, and often hazardous weather. Variations in the climate can and often have been major contributing factors to the collapse of civilizations throughout history.

Protecting ourselves and those we love from hazards is one of the purposes of permaculture design. Everyone needs to carefully study and evaluate your risks and design ways to protect yourself and your household from the climate risks of the particular geography that you inhabit.

As we go forward into the future, some areas may eventually depopulate due to the severity of climate impacts. Six years after Katrina, the Gulf Coast has yet to recover all of its pre-Katrina population, with Louisiana suffering the greatest losses. Besides the ongoing effect of the hurricanes on the area, Louisiana is the epicenter of an enormous amount of industrial pollution hazard generated by oil and gas exploitation and the chemical industries.

Drought and desertification may drive population movements. The migration of the Okies from the Great Plains Dust Bowl to the West Coast is a historical example of how climate can force population shifts.

There are factors that may trump concern for extreme weather (such as family and job). If you decide to stay in an area at risk for regular devastation due to climate issues, “forewarned is forearmed” as they say. Do so with your eyes wide open and detailed plans for mitigation, protection, and recovery.

In all areas, we ignore climate change to our mortal peril. The younger you are when you start your permaculture design for your life, the more problems you will experience with due to climate during your life. Plan from the beginning how you will protect yourself from these hazards and mitigate their consequences.

Mitigation of climate and weather hazards is a beneficial connection integrated into almost all other aspects of your lifestyle design plan.

  • Your housing plans need a plan for shelter from extreme weather.
  • Your economic plans include contingency plans in case you lose income due to extreme weather.
  • Your resilience plans need evacuation plans and provisions for bug-out kits in case weather forces an evacuation. Plans for storage of emergency supplies should include protecting those supplies to keep them from being destroyed by extreme weather.

In general, most of us in the United States expect prompt help if there is a weather disaster from government and civil society organizations. While this usually works, it doesn't have a 100% response rate. The Katrina disaster shows the terrible impact of political criminality on our disaster response systems, as politically appointed bureaucrats, who were not qualified for their jobs, made a serious mess out of the federal government's disaster response.

The modern reality is that when the going gets really tough, especially if it is a disaster that encompasses a large area of extreme damage, some people may be abandoned by government and by civil society.

This is particularly a risk for those who are poor, elderly, weak, and ill. In recent disasters, care-givers abandoned some residents of nursing homes and euthanized sick people instead of evacuating them. Police shot unarmed racial minorities while attempting to evacuate through mostly white communities outside of large cities.

The government wants everyone to believe that Katrina was an aberration and that they have solved the problems so evident in the Gulf disasters. Yet, during Sandy, many of the poorest areas of New York City were left without any help from local, state, or federal governments, for a considerable amount of time after the hurricane had passed. The only help for those areas was from private relief, much of it spontaneously organized by Occupy Wall Street activists.

When it comes to climate disasters, it is best to plan as if you will be on your own with your immediate neighbors. If civil society and government do come to your rescue, that’s all to the good. But if you are among those your government leaves behind for the weather wolves to devour, you will need other plans and resources. Expect and plan for the worst. Hope and pray for the best.

Observation

The first task is observation and this is mostly a matter of research. You need climate records and weather observations going back as far as possible. The ideal records will include, on a monthly basis:

  • Minimum and monthly temperatures for the month,
  • Total monthly precipitation by type of precipitation (rain, snow, ice, sleet)
  • Number of days of extreme weather (90+ degrees high in the summer, high below 32 degrees F in the winter)
  • Heating and cooling degree days per month
  • Cloud cover (this may actually be expressed as hours of sunshine)
  • Number and intensity of extreme weather events such as tornadoes, thunderstorms, and hurricanes.

In the United States, climate and weather information at this level is available from the National Weather Service. Here is the page for information for central Oklahoma. http://www.srh.noaa.gov/oun/climate/get_f6.php?

Your area will have something similar. I think it is likely that many other developed nations will have similar databases of information available online.

It would be very helpful to you if you can find something like a 100 year record of rainfall, drought, and flooding for your area. You can start with internet searches like "100 year rainfall record for (your locality)." If you are unable to find something, or have problems finding climate records in general, contact the climate and weather department of a nearby university.

Climate record averages do not provide useful information for permaculture design.

If it was 100 degrees on Day 1, and 0 degrees on Day 2, the average temperature for the two days is 50 degrees. That relatively benign number would not prepare us for the actual weather extremes possible in the area.

The purpose of these observations is to guide you in making basic decisions, the first one being —

  • Do I want to live in this geography and its associated climate and weather?

There are no hazard-free areas in the planet’s geography, but all climate problems are not created equal. Some are easier to mitigate and protect from than others. Climate and weather hazards can be rated as follows based on their potential for damage and their frequency of impact —

  • Damage Potential: High impact, low impact
  • Occurrence: Frequent, infrequent.

If you plotted this on a chart, you would have four quadrants:

  • High Impact/Frequent Occurrence
  • High Impact/Infrequent Occurrence
  • Lower Impact/Frequent Occurrence
  • Lower Impact/ Infrequent Occurrence

A third layer of analysis could be ease/difficulty of mitigation and protection from the hazard, so it will be helpful to rank the climate hazards of your area using three factors:

  • Damage Potential
  • Frequency
  • Ease or Difficulty of Mitigation

Mapped on a chart, you would have:

  • High Impact / Frequent Occurrence / Easy Mitigation
  • High Impact / Frequent Occurrence / Difficult Mitigation
  • High Impact / Infrequent Occurrence / Easy Mitigation
  • High Impact / Infrequent Occurrence / Difficult Mitigation
  • Low Impact / Frequent Occurrence / Easy Mitigation
  • Low Impact / Frequent Occurrence / Difficult Mitigation
  • Low Impact / Infrequent Occurrence / Easy Mitigation
  • Low Impact / Infrequent Occurrence / Difficult Mitigation

Once you have identified all of the climate and weather hazards, and ranked them by these criteria, you have the information you need to decide how to mitigate their severity and protect yourself from the hazards.

You should probably start with the high impact/frequent occurrence, both easy and difficult mitigation. Then you could move on to the other "easy mitigation" items. Third could be the high impact, infrequent occurrence, difficult mitigation events. Low impact, infrequent occurrence, difficult mitigation would be last.

This is based on my own subjective opinions. Each person will have their own ideas about this.

Be sure to go over this information with all the stakeholders in your design, since perceptions of impact and ease or difficulty of mitigation may vary.

Building Persistence and Resilience

When it comes to climate and weather issues, there are two aspects we have to consider:

  • Persistence (the ability of a system to resist damage), and
  • Resilience (the ability of a system to recover after damage or disruption).

In the United States, we generally are invested in resilience. We buy insurance for cars, buildings, lives, liabilities. We have police and fire departments, National Guard disaster response, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and many local and state equivalents. There is a huge civil society disaster response system, organized nationally, that rushes in to damaged areas to assist with the recovery. The system works well as long as it is not stressed. We saw during the Katrina disaster what happens when the system is stressed beyond its ability to adequately respond.

While we certainly want to maintain excellent systems for disaster recovery, given the realities of our climat5e future, we need more investment in persistence — the ability of our systems to resist damage.

For example, we continue to build ordinary stick-built houses on the Great Plains of the United States, even though that type of housing has proven its inadequacy ever since the first Caucasian settlers began to plow the prairies and build towns. They are hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and vulnerable to rain, wind, hail, severe straightline wind storms, as well as tornadoes and lightening. The only thing that makes them habitable is excessive expenditures of fossil fuel energies.

Given the realities of the present climate, and the likely climate issues of the future, the smart housing design choice on the Great Plains is underground housing. If my house were to be destroyed in a wind storm, I would likely replace it with underground housing.

In the meantime, on the Great Plains, existing housing can be adapted and evolved to meet the challenges of the future. The Shelter section discusses our own evolutions in some detail. Additional persistence renovations could include storm doors and windows and a metal roof.

The needs of people in other areas, with different climate impacts, will be different. Context is everything in permaculture design and each person must seek the best climate solutions for their particular situation.