weather adjustment as a society

[burntcopper]

Achieved hat that actually covers my ears and looks halfway decent. Which makes me ponder if this weather (cold winters with snow) continues, how long the UK will take to adjust and take it in stride so everyone just goes 'oh. snow.' without it disrupting transport or work. Problem being that mass (electric) transport/motorways in the UK didn't exist the last time we had regular heavy snow in winter across the country, they only came in *after* the weather started getting warmer, so weren't built to cope with it. Hence why we don't have many snowploughs, wheel chains, or bloody great snowshovels in every garage. My parents are the only people in our street to own a proper snowshovel, and that's because they lived in Oklahoma.

It's relatively easy for individuals to adjust to cosmetic stuff. Since last winter, people are stocking up on more practical clothing and learning what kind of footwear is good for walking on ice and snow. Similar for buying blankets and getting insulation, as well as getting road salt and snowshovels. What I'm pondering is infrastructure. It's all very well to moan about the local councils not having sufficient snowploughs like in Russia, but snow ploughs are seriously expensive, and simply not worth buying if deep snow isn't a regular event. And as for rail, the rail network isn't even built to cope with wet autumns that frost over, or hot summers. Which we've been able to rely on for the last few decades.

So has anyone done any forecasts on how long it would take for society to adjust?

In related news, taking Meg up on her offer of the sofa bed tonight as have theatre expedition tomorrow to Legally Blonde and I don't really want to risk the rail network. last time they had warning, it was screwed. Course, this means I will have to buy clothing and makeup and will probably find that the rail network coped fine... I wouldn't have given a flying fuck and just stayed home if it wasn't for the theatre factor.

Comments

[mrslant]

This is the same old Malthusian argument. Attempting to criticise economics on the basis of thermodynamics is akin to arguing that we should be making preparations urgently for the day the sun runs out of fuel. The scale is out by orders of magnitude. The Earth's natural resources are vast, and there is simply no danger that we are going to use them up, particularly as technology becomes progressively more efficient, and as the world's population stabilises and then (probably) gradually declines (if the global fertility rate stabilises below 2).

The reason Greenland, Easter Island and the rest collapsed can be summed up in a word - isolation. Hence they were unable to import resources or export people. The modern, globalised world doesn't suffer from this problem - heck, in a few hundred years we could even be mining asteroids or colonising Mars - so is unlikely to suffer the same fate. No, we're not individually smarter than Mayans or Anasazis, but we do have greater accumulated knowledge and superior technology.

Anyway, we're clearly not going to agree on this so perhaps we should stop flooding burntcopper's journal!

[gmh.livejournal.com]

Fair enough; this will be my last comment, after which I will leave this subject well alone!

I would just like to conclude with a couple of short points.

Firstly: we are currently isolated on this planet. The gravity well is a harsh mistress, and any significant moves into space would require a massive investment in resource and capital - in a world where we cannot afford to feed and clothe the current inhabitants. Generally speaking, people prefer to know that they've got enough to eat before trying to engage in interplanetary exploration; theorising that technological advance will make resource use more efficient is all very well, but the gravity well remains a constant; and we're certainly nowhere near getting around that at present.

Secondly: if economics attempts to posit a theory based on the wilful misunderstanding (or ignorance) of the physical world, then it is going to get slapped down like the soft science it is.

Ye cannae break the laws of physics.