Executive Summary

• Future shock (on track, unfortunately)
• Hope for the best, plan for the worst
• What too little water means to those living without reliable rains
• Planning for too much water
• How great garden soils mitigate…well…practically every ill
• Electricity at risk.  Plan accordingly.
• Storms and rising seas.  Got any coastal real estate in low lying areas?  Get rid of it.

If you have not yet read Time For Some Climate Honesty, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Truth be told, I would prefer to live in a world that is 3 degrees warmer than 3 degrees cooler. Ice ages and cooling are associated with crop failures and famines. In New England, where I live, there was a mile or two of ice overhead as recently as 10,000 years ago.

I love my garden here in western MA and know nothing at all about how to grow veggies on top of a mile-thick sheet of ice. I suspect it’s difficult.

So I guess that’s the best spin I can put on it. Warmer is better than colder, all things being equal.

However, beyond that there are a growing number of new risks that we need to take into account. Heat waves. Too much rain. Too little rain. Punishing arctic cold making winters long and delaying spring planting. Crop failures.

These are all things that I laid out in the Crash Course back in 2008. Here’s what I said about the convergence of dangerous trends in the Crash Course (”Future Shock”):

Placed on a timeline, we see that the next asset bubble is cresting just as the first wave of boomers enters retirement. At the same time peak cheap oil is starving the world's economic engine for the growth its money systems demand of it, and someday – likely very soon — world oil production will peak and terminally decline.

But that’s not all. Resource depletion, increasing pollution levels, and a shifting climate are costing us more, and diminishing our way of life.

Sitting over all of this and limiting our options further is our national failure to save and invest, and historically-unprecedented levels of debt.