Surviving Climate Change, Global Warming and Killer Heat Waves TPS-0026

The topic that is on my mind is inescapable for many people around the world right now.

This intensified state of heat waves all over the place. The visceral validation that global warming is happening, climate change is happening.

In some places, record breaking temperature highs are being hit, people are dying.

I don't know if they're dying in record numbers, but the deaths are climbing and, and I'm trying not to be one of them.

I'm also very much a skeptic of high tech expensive and futuristic approaches to these conditions.

The easiest way to be a peacemaker among those who would argue...anyone who is really trying to be a climate change or global warming denier…

They tend, in my estimation to be incentivized by having some stake in some an industry that would be set back if regulatory restrictions were put on.

Sometimes that's very transparent, sometimes it's not. Then there's this other sort of second level removed from those who are direct stakeholders in industries.

The anti-green left, from a right wing or libertarian position where it's just an issue that stereotypically people on the left care about therefore we're just gonna make fun of it.

It's unfortunate because of all the things that you could do to spite yourself undermining the ecology that allows life to flourish under the right circumstances. Under well cared for circumstances. Undermining ecology in the name of whatever ideology or whatever profit motive...

I'm trying not be too too insulting, but it's obviously problematic and troubling.

I don't like to spend too much of my time getting in shouting matches with people who I disagree with.

I would rather just be the change I wanna see in the world, make a difference how and where I can without burning out and without undermining my own survival, my own stability.

That was what I did with all of my activism in my teens and twenties and even into my thirties. I over-leveraged myself into causes that didn't really have a way to sustain me, or to reciprocate my efforts in a way that would sustain my life.

It just ends up being, unless you are a professional activist or a moneyed philanthropist or operating from some serious grant funding, to be a street activist and a guerrilla activist.

To be on the lower end of the economic spectrum, you can only go so far before you gotta start licking your wounds and try to just survive and I'm in that mode now.

So the best I can do for anybody at this point is make art that I can sustainably make, and speak these words that come from the heart.

Unless I come up in a major way. There's not much I can finance. There's not much I can invent.

To be perfectly honest, my philosophy, my ideology, it's been primitivism, which is about not accumulating material things and not working a 40 hour week, and not thinking about really high tech, futuristic ways to solve problems that really just require a lifestyle change, a change in the system of values of consumerism.

To actually really lower the demand for a lot of the toxic chemical derived products and harmful technologies that are just making the planet unlivable for every organism.

For me, it kind of makes sense, this elegant arc of my journey and my daily struggle to survive these 120+ degree Fahrenheit peak temperatures where I'm at, I'm leaning into the climate refugees of the world.

It's just a fact of life, adapting to this season.

I didn't have a thermometer last year, I should have, but I didn't, and now I do.

I'm like, damn, I'm already at the top of this thermometer. It's already at the top of the numbers.

I'm assuming that if it goes above that 120F, then I'm just gonna have to extrapolate what those lines are gonna mean.

It says a lot to me, because if that was the upper limit that they expected to make these things, well, I guess what are they gonna do?

Start making new ones that go higher, because that's the state of the world?

That’s telling, it’s pretty dire. We don't have a lot of wiggle room now.

I'm in a situation where it's a desert biome, and it's relentless heat during this arc of a few months.

It does feel harsher and hotter than last year but again.

This will be my first year of starting to really make note of how I'm adjusting to these temperatures, noting the temperatures.

I'm not gonna tap out to go try to find air conditioning.

I'm in a remote, off grid, off road homesteading desert project.

This is very much part of what's on my road map personally, for wanting to do permaculture in every biome, and wanting to explore the strategies and techniques that are provided in the designers manual. And understand that every time I go out to an extreme edge of a biome to start this from scratch, to be well rounded, well trained, I'm okay with hardship. I’m okay with living through this and having it make me stronger.

I'm happy to say that this year I am adapting with the temperatures.

I'm adapting what I'm doing with keeping the fish and the trees and the plants alive, and triaging which ones need to be harvested and sacrificed. I’m gauging that also with macro economic and crypto economic forces.

This forced austerity is actually part of the plan.

I don't say that just to delude myself. I say that because I don't believe that cheap and easy and free money is gonna be around forever, and I don't think the things that it buys from other places in the world...I don't believe that supply chain is gonna last forever.

The sooner more people really hyper re-localize, meaning, just start experimenting as much as possible, leaning into a reality where they're transitioning from 0% reliance on what they can subsist on and grow and sustain themselves in their bio region...going from 0% to 100% and trying to increase that as soon as possible to where we actually are living within communities that really only trade with other communities.

Food, medicine, water, shelter, our basic survival needs would be procured from proper earthworks, rain water catchment, settlement patterns, everything being just hyper re-localized.

That takes letting go of a lot of the consumer habits, letting go a lot of the creature comforts, leaning into a little bit of suffering, a little bit of sacrifice, and finding out what your limits are.

For me, this has been an extreme reminder that the paradigm we're in of industrial working, the industrial and tertiary service sector, office jobs…

The transition from an agrarian to an industrial to a service workforce, it's all been a nasty gnarly enslavement entanglement, extraction from natural cycles, to climate changes we were intrinsically adaptive to.

We adapted to the seasons with appropriate sheltering and rest from harsh conditions of hot and cold and drought and pestilence, and with enough biodiversity in a natural, wild ecosystem that is not being paved over or flattened and leveled and made into agricultural fields of crops versus agro-forestry or food forestry...More of horticultural designs that have perennial systems and plenty of multi- layered resilience.

That's what permaculture brings back, all of those missing layers in those ecosystems so they can be very resilient and very productive.

But that doesn't lend itself to machine harvesting and the chemical, agricultural, petrochemical paradigm of mass scale farms to feed mass scale armies, mass industrial factory work forces, and urban dwellers that don't farm anymore and don't garden anymore.

Cheating the natural flow of energy from the sun by extracting toxic chemical oil from below the surface of the Earth, polluting the atmosphere.

It's gonna take a lot more refusal and rebellion, resistance and suffering and sacrifice to walk away from that monstrosity and get back to what is left of the horribly raped landscape and start to repair it quickly so that we can integrate back into ecology before it's too late.

Everybody who dies of climate change lethality is a victim of that progress, is a casualty of that war on nature.

This unlikely we’ll all live in vertical, air conditioned robot built dwellings, stacked in sky rises, with aeroponic aquaponic plants growing and it's just all gonna be beautiful. It's all gonna be managed.

To me, that’s sustaining the unsustainable, and continuing to stack dysfunction and invite more compounding collapse.

I'm against green technology. I'm a part of those industries.

I've been part of the green high tech movement and industry but always with a one foot in the primitive.

Whatever is debatable about the science of climate change, global warming and the cause of it, what is understood and what is a common, what should be axiomatic, self-evident to anyone on any side of this conversation about climate change, is in the history of life on Earth, there have been extreme, hot and cold temperatures...

Humans have survived a number of those cycles, they were brought on for different reasons, and they've had different durations.

There are some indications of patterns, some seem to be more anomalous.

I'm not a total expert and all that, but what I do know is that, this is not life’s first rodeo with high temperatures.

There are natural, low tech, primitive precedents for how life on Earth has adapted to these changes.

For most of the time that those changes have occurred, there were no billionaires to come up with schemes to mess with the functioning of any of the very complex inner workings of the biosphere...to try to get away with more raping of the Earth, even with the best intentions.

I hope that we scale back and out of industrialism.

I don't care how green it appears to be, none of it's sustainable from my researched opinion.

So it's interesting to think about how do organisms adapt to climate change?

Some of them can't. Some of them get immediately ravaged by parasites.

Some of them get immediately ravaged by toxic algae blooms.

Some predators and pests have no restraint on their location or their seasonality, so that they can perpetuate indefinitely and then just harangue and bring down their prey at numbers that can't be recovered from.

So a lot of the victims of these changes of climate, despite their best efforts, they don't stand a chance, and that goes for hot or cold.

That's just a fact of life and a fact of evolution and adaptation.

I believe it's correct to say that more species have gone extinct already in the history of of life on Earth, than are currently alive today.

But essentially, there's been a lot of of iterations on the templates of life and there are a few organisms that are pretty robust.

The extremophiles, the cockroaches, certain fungi are able to survive nuclear winter and volcanic ash winters and all kinds of extreme conditions.

But when I watch nature programs and I look at how how very diverse and thriving dense populations of animals have just exploded in their range, in there they're exuberance of life, their speciation across the landscape when climate conditions are favorable. Then there’s anguish when that cycle is waning.

They have to go into more marginal areas, and their populations decline, and some of them just get brought to the brink, some of them never come back.

Some of them get brought to the brink and they have to survive in a very low population range for a while.

There are species that are so adaptive that they can just basically go almost completely dormant for however long it takes, for very long periods of time in extreme frozen conditions or extreme heat to wait until the next favorable climate cycle.

It really struck me watching footage of this whole seasonal cycle. All these animals coming back for this expected time, when the water was gonna give them everything they needed to replenish their mating season, to do all these rituals.

It makes me wanna figure out how to play fair in nature and not abuse, and step over every other form of life in order to get this sort of mechanical engineering advantage over everything, really just doing more harm than good.

We should be using our evolved gifts in a more fair play manner.

I'm not criticizing anyone who's listening to this from an air conditioned environment right now.

I'm not trying to be more eco than thou.

I'm at a point where I'm using my solar panels and my marine batteries to power my fans so at the peak of the day, I'm wrap my head in a torn sheet and spray that down. I keep it moist and then blast myself with a fan on full blast, just laying there and meditating and studying.

Just being still because if I move 10 feet outside of the shade of this sort of medical tent situation, it feels like running a mile and, and that's deadly.

I can feel it, it's scary. I don't wish this on anyone. But I do realize that, my adaptations, my modern primitive adaptations, are very low budget.

Not everybody in the world can slap together a couple solar panels, a couple of marine batteries and a couple of fans and have access to water that they don't have to continue to go and pump by hand.

I've got some water tanks that I can fill up with a truck.

I'm already in a privileged position even to have those things.

What I'm learning and what I'm trying to lean into is the point where all prosthesis can be discarded. I want to get to a point of very ancient primitive adaptation, which is living underground comfortably and enjoying what every other creature out here knows to do, which is burrow underground.

I just don't have the courage to go all the way yet and if I'm gonna do it I'm gonna do it with that mechanical and engineering advantage that won't exactly be playing fair but at least I will do it in a nontoxic way, in a very minimalistic way.

But for now that I'm on the surface.

I don’t have viable underground options to work with. I've got this Earth tube dome where I'm trying to see how far I can go without capitulating into that dome.

Because I realize now, yes, I built the thing. But there are some safety and security trade offs to get even that hundred feet out of where that earth tube goes.

The risk of stepping even a few feet away from where I've concentrated my medical resources is so high...and I don’t yet have a solar panel array big enough to power the cooling of the dome effectively, so the risk is not worth the reward to try to even use it until much more power can be affordably installed.

If I go out there, the current fan power will to some extent protect me from the extreme heat of the day, but there’s not enough battery backups to be able to run high powered fans all through the night.

I'm into this territory now where it actually feels hotter at night, and I would assume that is because there's less wind blowing around for the most part.

So you just get stuck in the baking heat of the Earth, giving back the heat that it absorbed with the sun baking it and less wind pushing it around.

I don't have the wattage to maintain the force of air going through those Earth tubes from a fan. Once the sun is gone, when the sun goes down, the inverter starts screaming.

I've got high powered fans while the sun is blazing, which is great, but I’ll have to walk back from the dome once the sun goes down and I've got a hope that I don't become instantly so punch drunk from the heat that I trip and fall and land on a scorpion or ant hill and never make it back.

I'm weighing those things out, and I'm realizing that because I'm out here alone, unless I had an eco-village of people who look out for each other, that scenario is gonna be a last resort, and I will feel safer staying put.

So surviving the heat around the clock without any underground air cooling effects comes down to how frequently I reapply a dampening amount of moisture onto the linens that I'm covering myself with, and that's really all it takes. It’s not comfortable, but it keeps me alive.

Coming full circle to this point about really feeling into the people who are dying in the heat waves and realizing that I'm not sitting in some air conditioned room, having my climate change hubris and making fun of the green left.

I'm not just a bleeding heart liberal saying, I'm feel so sorry for the people who are dying of heat stroke.

I am literally struggling to survive against life threatening temperatures under life threatening conditions alone.

I'm not asking for sympathy or pity. I'm just saying I'm in a position to have a lot of compassion for the people who I know have to go to work, who have to move around, have to go be a part of the work-a-day world and the economy. The people who are living in conditions where it comes down to the public health warnings, and whether they adhere to them or not, whether they take risks with their lives for financial reasons.

I have the luxury right now to have compassion for those people who are dying and say to myself, I'm so blessed.

I'm so blessed to be able to do what is appropriate under these conditions for any organism on the planet, which is, if you can't burrow underground and enjoy those life saving scientific parameters, factors of the Earth maintaining a constant cooler temperature below a certain number of feet, depending on where you are in the soil type...

That's a guaranteed survival route. There's always a way, you can always survive underground if you can get down there and breathe and not be caved in on and not be attacked by snakes and scorpions and whatever else when you get into the security aspect of that...

I am realizing that all the people who are dying of heat stroke are dying in vain.

The people who are dying because they're out there, working in this heat, moving around.

If we cared about people, all of the billionaires and all of the engineers, would give people the financial peace of mind to be able to take these situations of extreme heat and say, here's what you gotta do...

You gotta have plenty of water within arms reach. You gotta make sure you setup a medical room within your house where you don't have to get up and move around very far, which means maybe your human waste collection containers are right next to you.

When I stand up and move even a couple of feet it's scary.

I could fall over, fall wrong and lose consciousness completely.

May pass out before you hit the ground and if you fall wrong and you hit your head or you injure your legs...

There's a lot of people who live alone. I'm sure a lot of people who are dying of heat stroke are dying alone and I’m in solidarity with them, I'm forced to adapt to those of conditions.

I'm not elderly although I feel like that. I feel like the heat makes me have limited mobility, without some kind of cooling I’ll have impaired cognitive function. If I step out of the shade into that heat for one second, I feel like I I'm 200 years old, I just wanna collapse, I feel wobbly.

A very redemptive sort of byproduct of my pushing myself to the limits here and doing the calculations and risk evaluations…what I discovered through this process is that to be able to lay still in the shade with a just box fan type of fan and a spray bottle.

If you can power a box fan, lay flat, And what I've done is just cover myself, drape a thin sheet, a piece of a sheet so it's easy to re-moisten without wasting a lot of water. I cut out a piece of sheet that could just barely cover my body, then another piece that I could wrap around my head like a bandana.

You fold it a couple of times into that triangle, and then you do a bandana tie with that. Then every few minutes spray water on the sheet and the bandana.

What the next level is for me, is just like an outdoor festival party, where they bring a generator that powers a pressurized spray nozzle string system hung above the dance floor. It’s on a timer and runs every for about 10 seconds every couple of minutes approximately.

I’ll eventually experiment with adapting that to a micro-scale.

I wanna be able to do that without using the power of a generator.

I wanna dial in that stuff so it's within a less demanding range of water pressure and electricity to power the pumps.

I'm realizing this isn't gonna make mold everywhere, because it is so hot that this water evaporates very quickly.

With the fan on me the water evaporates very quick.

But while it is evaporating I feel like I'm in a cooler and I'm not gonna die.

It just feels nice. It feels like on a hot day when you're getting a beer and you and you hang out in that beer cooler at the convenience store a little longer than you normally would, just to enjoy that feeling.

That's what it feels like. It feels that good just having a fan and a spray bottle and some thin, small pieces of cloth.

The variables are how much water is used, the frequency, and what mechanism of re applying that spray water is.

For me at this state of the game, I don't have those automated pressurized spray nozzles set up. Even if I did, it’s good to know the method I’m using now would work as an emergency back up.

If your air conditioning system breaks, what is the backup plan if you're only alive because of ac and you lose power because everybody's using ac at once so then nobody gets to use AC because the grid goes down, then people start dying.

They had no plan B. So it's very interesting understand what that I’m starting with plan B.

I also think about what happens if you break down in a vehicle. That's why I don't wanna go anywhere right now. I don't wanna get in a vehicle and risk breaking down anywhere, being in this biome and have to deal with that heat.

Modern primitive and ancient cultures figured it out. Ancient cultures figured out very interesting ways to passively design water cooling air flows. Air flows that interact with water pools, create mists, that really were able to do things that we're doing with a lot of plastic and a lot of extra energy resources, extra engineering. Things that could be done with more passive designs. It takes work, effort, time, it's not convenient.

But a lot of people they're living in a world of convenience until it fails, and then they die.

So I'm interested in that modern, primitive, ancient, primitive, and I'm thrilled to understand now that it can be made simple.

It's paradoxical, because that fan is gonna blast hot air at you and feel like you're face is in front of a blow dryer.

It requires frequent re-application of the mist of water in order to have the cooling effect

But then it wears off quickly, and then you're back to getting blasted with the heat.

I can feel my cognition sort of shrinking like, but I can continue to squeeze this spray bottle and administer that and stay out of the near death experience tunnel.

When every spray of the water hits, the fan does its magical thing, and then I'm like, they're not ready to take me to the other side yet. I still have more work to do here. I'm still here.

It does feel like that. And it's just good to know, that if your AC dies, if you can apply those measures. Just the damp fabric alone, does something, but it is much less of an efficient cooling effect than a fan blowing on you, hence, internal combustion engines, the radiator and the fan.

I think about that, so I'm the engine. I better hook up a fan and get that water pump, that radiator going to just continue to cycle the heat off the surface of my body.

It's working so far and I figure I've got probably another six weeks where most of the day, that's what I'm doing.

And while I'm doing that, I'm doing my studies, and I'm taking this this E.M.T. tele-course and feeling like the patient that they're describing.

It looks very apocalyptic, honestly.

I'm lean as hell, I cannot imagine being overweight when the shade isn't enough and you break down in a vehicle, you don't have hundreds and hundreds of gallons of water that you already loaded up before this chapter of the year, what if you're out there boon docking somewhere. You don't have hundreds of gallons of water, you got ten or five, and you're overweight, and you broke down, and you don't even have solar panels on your roof.

I think about the innovations of Petra, an ancient hydrological civilization, a Desert Oasis City. That's my new favorite thing to study is the Petra Oasis City.

In the desert, they really flourished with their systems while they could, though didn't last forever.

But there's a lot to learn from it.

Now I know I were broken down right now out there... I don't think I would travel in the summer on the road without, ideally, 50 to a hundred gallons of water just in the vehicle, on in the truck, and then having that battery backup charger be able to power 12 volt fans...knowing that if I were to lay a canopy over the top of the truck bed, try to get comfortable, plug in a twelve volt fan to that battery then just continue to douse myself in water and have the fabric hold some of that water maintaining that evaporative cooling effect directly.

That will keep me alive out there.

But I don't wanna go anywhere.

I don’t have to have but buy more solar panels and batteries, but it’s more likely that I will have to and less likely I’ll able to afford a very elegant burrow underground and make like all the other smart critters out here who escape the summer heat.

What got me back into remembering how a damp surface that you come in contact with can be what saves your life from the devastating, lethal heat of the summer sun...

It was watching these Meerkat documentaries and watching what the Meerkats do, and realizing, watching them pass out and fall over from being sun drunk.

They look like miniature, opossums, no more than 12" tall, but they walk around, spending a lot of time walking upright.

They're very anthropomorphic and lovable in that sense.

But I'm in love with all these Meerkat documentaries, that's, that's how I wanna live.

So what do they do in the winter? They cuddle to stay warm.

What do they do in the summer? They still have to forage, but they have to do it very, wisely, very carefully. They do it only in the cooler parts of the day.

As the sun comes up they've got to start finding their way back to their retreat underground, before they get sun drunk and have a hard time.

Seeing them adapt to that and get back underground before it's too late, sometimes some of them get stranded out there, and then you see them suffering and barely surviving until they get back.

What I thought was the cutest thing that really set all this in motion for me this year, because last year I wasn't doing this, I was not even thinking about it as I didn't have the tankage of water I do now.

It was a pathetic situation that I was in last year, it was self imposed, and I don't think it was cool or smart, but I did not have the tankage. I didn't have the truck to get mass quantities of water. It was extremely risky what I had done, the amounts of water that I had.

There was no way I was gonna waste a bunch of my drinking water to keep my myself moist, my clothing, laying in sheets and spraying water, forget about it.

It was the water I had to drink, sweat coming out, heat rash everywhere, and the and the orange urine, suffering kidney pains.

That was very stupid, I knew better.

I have more water now and I have a couple options.

So the Meerkats, I wish I'm could get rid of all my devices, go fully offline and just live like them.

I will live underground, I'll cuddle to stay warm in the winter, and I will retrea from the sun underground in the summer.

The thing that was interesting that stood out, that made me remember you need to always have moist fabric on your skin day and night if you don't wanna be sweating everything out and getting dehydrated and messing up everything and risking death and in these temperatures.

It was just one scene in one of those documentaries where it showed, after a rain, there was a little segment where they said what the Meerkats do to stay cool.

After a rain, they will find a still damp, not yet fully evaporated piece of land and just go and lay on it.

That was what made me remember, oh, I have water now.

Luckily, this light bulb went off in my head before the main heat started to come. So now what do I do? I spray down my bed and I keep my bed moist at nigh. It would have been made moist by me sweating profusely anyway, at least this water isn't nasty. This is nice, filtered, clean water.

And I lay down in that water, and it completely changes the temperature profile.

Some people do what they call blackout drills. I have never heard of that as a prepper, even after all these years.

I've heard of blackout drills where you make sure you have your flashlights, make sure you have your candles, or LEDs lights.

Or you're gonna do a backyard camp out.

You could do a drill before the middle of the summer, where it's only gonna slightly inconvenience you if you turn the AC off.

But maybe that's worth trying to figure out, because what I have figured out for myself is life and death.

There are a lot of people who are dead because they didn't have these even try to figure it out, it was like too late.

Even if they had everything and they could have figured it out. You start losing your capacities real quick in these temperatures, and you can't move at all.

And the more you move, the dumber you get, and the more dangerous it is to get in one of those conditions.

As much water as I can possibly keep within reach, some fabrics, the ability to blast that fan when the sun is out, the ability to re-moisten the bed...

Even if the fan dies, it’s what makes it very nice, makes it very comfortable, even. But just knowing that water is nearby…

Sadly, a lot of people who are dying of heat stroke were just going to work or working, they had no choice. A

If the government didn't shut down their job or give them some sort of a pass so they wouldn't lose their job, that breaks my heart, but I think about the people who that wasn't their their circumstance.

I think about the people who were at home during heat waves and died. What they hooked up a garden hose to their sink and just held it with the last bit of strength they had just to have a few drops on their sheets.

Even without the wind chill factor, just having moisture contained in some fabric would probably have kept them alive depending on the ambient humidity.

If I ever go back to the air conditioned world, where this is all taken for granted, and the systems fail, at least I know that what my body's gonna do.

Cheers to the Meerkats. Thank you very much. You probably save my life.

Just that one of you in that one scene, laying in that damp soil, living it up, being smarter than all of us. Until I’m a Meerkat living underground, while I’m on the surface it’s gonna be: shade, immobilize, hydrate, drape, moisten, fan...