Blog Action Day: How to Get Ready For Global Warming

What’s the greatest risk that you can think of in your current project?

Maybe the lead programmer gets sick and can’t deliver the code you were counting on. Or maybe the construction workers quit because of poor working conditions. Or maybe just before reaching the finish line, your customer tells you that your product is nothing like they expected it to be.

Now imagine a risk of a similar multitude that’s not limited to your project but concerns the whole human population: the climate crisis.

Climate change or global warming is clearly a risk that we need to manage in one way or the other. Like any other risk, it is possible that the risk never materializes, but just in case it does, we need to get ready for it.

Here’s what we can soon be facing if the risk materializes: Extinctions of species (such as polar bears), drought leading to famines, sea levels rising and covering people’s homes, bigger storms, contaminated groundwater, people dying from heat, major increase in insect-bone diseases, 150 million environmental refugees by the year 2050.

And as a natural result proven by history, this would easily lead to dramatic armed conflicts and economic challenges.

How can we prepare for it?

In risk management you can attack the risk on two fronts: try to minimize the probability of the risk materializing, or prepare for the results. In case of the climate risk, I strongly believe that we should do all we can to prevent it from happening, but it’s soon too late to act.

So, what can we do to get ready?

1. Secure your home from rising sea levels: Move to a hill, get a floating house.
2. Secure your family from drought: Start building reserves of water, limit your water usage, or relocate to a place where drought is less likely.
3. Study means for cleaning water: If you are a scientist, your help might be invaluable in this area.
4. Start a vaccination campaign against diseases like Malaria to prevent them from killing too many people.
5. Prepare shelters and relocation opportunities for the 150 million environmental refugees
6. Make a plan for more efficient food distribution: While people in Africa won’t soon be able to produce any decent amount of food for themselves, European countries are still throwing food to waste. In order to support the humankind in the even hardening situation we need to find a way to share the food between all of us.
7. Prepare shelters for people who will suffer from the long heat periods: Kids and elderly people will need water and cool places to spend their warm days in.
8. Install warning systems to notify people about approaching storms and hurricanes: Even better would be to move people away from the dangerous areas.
9. Find political ways to handle the crisis: Get to politics. Run for president. Or at least vote people who have the willpower required to handle a crisis of this magnitude.
10. Gather weapons to get ready for armed conflicts: In case the political ways fail and the world falls into chaos, it’s good to have some means for protecting your home and your family against thieves and foreign armies.
11. Practice your begging skills: Any one of us might be among the less fortunate as well. In case that happens we need to learn the ways to find food and shelter for ourselves and our families. Picking pockets might be a useful skill as well.

What do you think? How big is the risk of global warming? Can we still keep it from materializing? And what are you willing to start doing to prepare for the risk?

Today a big part of the blogging world is gathering to talk about a common cause, the environment, in a project called “Blog Action Day”. This post is my contribution.