Back many years ago when I was a young plant manager for a large technology company, I came up with the theory of cumulative vulnerability. This is where an entity, person or society (in my case back then, a business), is juggling a bunch of balls in the air where one gets away causing a domino effect and they all fall away. Of course, in life, we all juggle lots of things on a daily basis and on an individual task level convince ourselves we can manage. Most of the time we do, but every once in awhile, we can’t and the whole house comes tumbling down. Finance is a great example where we get over extended, racing to keep up but then a job is lost, someone gets sick or there is a financial downturn and the wheels come off the bus.
Well, climate change is very much subject to cumulative vulnerability and California is a great example of an at risk situation although there are certainly many, many others. Just heard this morning that there is no rain in the forecast for the next several weeks (today is Dec 1st, 2020) and we are at about 6% of normal rainfall since July 1st rainfall year began. There is a big high pressure ridge sitting off the coast that just won’t go away, causing all the storms to go north up to Oregon and Washington. This is climate change in action. Now if this severe drought continues and it could very well do so, then those pesky forest fires (remember them? 4 million acres have burned this year!!) will be even worse in 2021. Oh yeah, and those depleting central valley aquifers, they won’t get replenished as there will be minimal snowpack which means farmers may get water rationed and food prices will escalate along with availability. And so it goes. Although we sometimes don’t think about it, we are often balanced on a knife edge.
Not trying to have you lose sleep, but way back when, as a young plant manager, my key to success was to plan for the worst and hope/work for the best. That way we managed to have the best performing operation in a multi-billion dollar corporation and the doors of opportunity continued to open. For climate change, well, we all need to do our part in conserving energy, water, food in small changes to our daily lives but also plan for how the wheels could come off the bus (can you say pandemic?) and think of how best to prepare!
Stay safe, wear a mask, wash your hands often, keep social distance and hang in there! Vaccines are coming but we all have to stay diligent.
SZ