We Start at the End
Today’s outro track, after our conversation with Gaia Vince - author of the landmark Nomad Century, is brought to you by Led Zeppelin. Because it’s aged a lot better than most of my friends from high school.
It Bad
Last week witnessed a flood in Texas as biblical as the ones studied by the young girls at Camp Mystic. Some 30 cm of rain - four months’ worth in Texas - fell on Kerr County in just a couple of hours. The beautiful area around the Guadalupe River, beloved of generations of campers, saw waters rise 8 metres (26 feet) in under an hour. Some 90 are confirmed dead, many of them girls younger than 10 attending the ‘Christian’ Camp Mystic for the summer. Searches continue for the missing.
And because everyone’s brains are broken, within hours there were competing narratives about why all those people had to die. Local officials who turned down proposals to put in place early warning systems in “Flash Flood Alley” as that valley is known, claimed there was no way to know. Trump cabinet officials, after firing 10% of the National Weather Service workforce including meteorologists, blamed the National Weather Service, which did issue warnings as the 1-in-1000-year event approached. But their warnings didn’t make the “last mile” to actually get to people in harm’s way. Some online blamed the cuts and in a mirror image of people who claim hurricanes are divine judgement, seemed to say it was karma on Texas MAGA types.
That in turned spawned conspiracy theories that a shadowy cabal was using secret (nonexistent) weather control machines to attack Republican areas. Marjorie Taylor-Greene tweeted: “We must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering”. Other Republicans joined in:
Then, because of course, some attacked weather radar stations that provided the data that led to the accurate forecast and warnings that, because local officials failed to spend money on warning systems and climate resilience, failed to make it to the people who needed it to save their lives.
The conspiracy folks have been hard at work on this narrative for a while. An extremist group has been targeting doppler radar sites for months, as CNN noted. And during Hurricanes Helene and Milton, so many conspiracy theories spread that federal workers trying to rescue flood victims had to be withdrawn when militia members threatened to shoot them, for being part of the conspiracy to…depopulate North Carolina to mine for lithium, or something. When now-Vice President JD Vance wasn’t busy demagoguing immigrants by falsely claiming they were taking relief funds that should have gone to citizens.
Rapid attribution studies have already offered evidence of what should be blindingly obvious - an event like this might have once been a 1-in-1000-year event, but now happens far more frequently due to human-caused climate change.
OK Doomer
The fact that some catastrophic climate change effects are now baked in prompted Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki to quip to a news outlet, “it’s too late”. Some people, including friends of the show, stomped on Suzuki’s head for that.
Suzuki is a veteran media source, so would have known the significance of the quote, and that it would have been taken out of context. But as I get into with Gaia Vince, the context is important - and L’Affaire Suzuki is one of the sharpest battles yet in the Climate Culture War.
I remain open to arguments and evidence, but as someone who spent more years than I care to count advising people how to peddle bullshit in PR jobs, I’ve got a pretty good sense of when people are trying to avoid saying something they believe to be true. And there’s a lot - A LOT - of that in the climate space. For the best of motives, to be sure. If you’re an actor employing tactics to try and engineer a particular outcome, you will want to police your language and the language of others.
Trying to figure out what’s actually true, on the other hand, is a different project. We’re no angels here at Wicked Problems, Lord knows, but we’re old-fashioned enough to believe that it’s worth trying to see things as they are and to say that as clearly as we can.
On the Move
Gaia Vince is a science journalist who has covered migration and climate for more than a decade. Her Nomad Century, published in paperback last year and one of our books of 2024, makes the startling but obvious claims that
a) humans (like plants and animals) have always moved around as climate changed;
b) because the surface area of the planet uninhabitable year round due to heat will go from 1% to 20%, up to 3 billion people by 2070 will seek other places to live
c) smart governments will start planning now for how to deal with this epochal migrations that are already baked in, because the climate isn’t going to change - we are already living in a completely different climate than the one humanity has experienced for 7,000 years.
In This Conversation
01:54 Climate Change's Global Reach
04:24 The Reality of Climate Migration
09:24 Political Responses to Climate Change
10:44 Economic Implications and Adaptation
21:57 Innovative Solutions and Future Outlook
26:10 Australia's Influence on Tuvalu’s Sovereignty
26:40 Citizenship and Sovereignty Challenges
27:06 UN's Role in Disappearing Territories
29:00 Climate Refugees and Their Plight
30:05 The Importance of Early Agreements
30:56 Relocation and Adaptation Efforts
34:21 Facing the Reality of Climate Change
46:55 Global Governance for Climate Solutions
Get Nomad Century
Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval has held up as one of the most honest, pragmatic, and human-centric appraisals of what is coming, what is necessary to adapt, and the solutions that will enable humanity to get through it.
Listen to the conversation and defo get the book.
All the Outros
Tips, Bribes, and Abuse
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