Great podcast, I also recommend it regularly to others. The one thing that gives me comfort is that in modern times we have an unprecedented ability to manipulate our environment unlike those previous civilizations. Not enough rainfall to water the crops? Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places, synthesize it from sea water or extract it from extreme depths. I believe our civilization will have extreme challenges in the future but our current technological abilities are really quite staggering.

I too felt this way, until two weeks ago, when a little unexpected rain wrecked supply lines and transportation networks across British Columbia.

The time it took to get them barely-functioning, and the time that it's going to take to get them fully restored is concerning. I believe that we may be able to adapt to long-term, slow-moving catastrophes, that we can all see coming, and have all agreed are important to deal with.

Unfortunately, the interests of the people who will be doing the work/paying for people to do the work rarely align in that direction - or stay aligned for the years and decades that it takes to get these solutions built out.

I mean, it was a ton of unexpected rain, and as far as I know, the only danger was caused by the flooding itself rather than any sort of supply shortages. I suspect that rather than serve as a warning of our inability to solve problems, it will turn out to have been such a non-problem (relative to the amount of damage that happened) that it will be completely forgotten in 10 years.

>I mean, it was a ton of unexpected rain,

I thought that was the point of climate change, that there will lots of 'tons of unexpected' climate events happening?

I was responding to the assertion that it was a "little" rain, rather than that it was unexpected.

sorry, my mistake.

'Unexpected' is a relative term in this case. I remember the same area flooding back around 1990. The Sumas Prairie is a recent construct. Circa 1924 Sumas lake (seasonal lake to be sure) was drained for farmland and the area experiences flooding on this scale in something like a 35 year period - So, not even a 50 year or 100 yr weather conditions (or sequence of weather events). Since the 1990 flood there have been efforts to improve the ability to withstand known current weather events, but that proceeds at the bureaucratic pace you might expect when dealing with municipal/provincial/federal/indigenous governing bodies.

> the only danger was caused by the flooding itself rather than any sort of supply shortages.

There was no danger to Vancouver. It's a port city, that could always be supplied by I-5. There was a lot of danger to Chilliwack, if Highway 1 could not be saved (Which, thankfully, did not turn out to be the case).

My parents live in Chilliwack. It was a really scary week for them, between their need for prescription medication and animal feed.

I'm sorry your parents had to go through that, it sounds quite harrowing.

I feel like this is equally evidence for incredible preparedness and flexibility though? The fact that such a major event was only scary for a week seems like a good thing? Even in a perfect world, there will be extreme weather events, and if people can't survive a week in their homes without outside help, that seems like the problem rather than evidence that we can't adapt to disaster. I assume your parents will be sure to stock up on certain essentials going forward.

> The fact that such a major event was only scary for a week seems like a good thing?

It was scary for a week because they were down to a single remaining point of failure (Abbotsford pumping station). If that station failed (which was quite possible, due to rising floodwaters), the Fraser river would have flooded the valley, and Highway 1 would have been... Gone. Not 'flooded for a week', but 'flooded permanently'.

On the other side of the city, mudslides destroyed bridges on the Coquihalla highway - which will take at least 2 months to be made passable - and things won't be back to normal for another year.

Had the pumping station failed, and the highway flooded, it's entirely unclear what anyone could have done in that situation to keep Chilliwack supplied over the next two months.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Canada has helicopters, a functional military, and Allies no?

Certainly folks could be evacuated or supplied with essentials if it came to that. They did so as far away as Afghanistan.

It would require some adjustment and dealing with adversity, but your comment makes it sound like everyone would starve to death and be found having eaten each other or something if the roads were out for a week.

In that event, would the town itself not have been threatened with flooding?

Interesting.

That is exactly what scares me most.

> Not enough rainfall to water the crops? Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places, synthesize it from sea water or extract it from extreme depths.

Leading to greater collapses with worse consequences

You know what scares me? The rise of learned helplessness and its pseudo-enlightened relative, "we should do nothing because anything we do could go wrong."

Compared to the ultra-stupid "let's pump up global CO2 to levels not seen in 4 million years; we swear nothing bad will happen," doing nothing might be a good change of pace for global civilization.

Considering said CO2 is already out there and doesn’t seem to be magically disappearing on it’s own, that seems unlikely.

And not like those 8 billion mouths that currently need feeding are going to go quietly into that dark night if something starts to go wrong.

Conversely, in modern times we are capable of building increasingly complex and fragile systems to manipulate our environment that are subject to even more disastrous collapses when they eventually fail.

Further, increased hyper-specialization means fewer and fewer of the population is capable of engaging in productive behavior when the systems fail. (Twitch streamers cannot rapidly be recruited to help with electrical maintenance, whereas the average neolithic flood victim is approximately as useful as any other.)

Further, our social technology appears to be barely chugging along, with people more atomized and the social fabric fraying, meaning falling levels of trust and fewer connections, so coordinating responses to...anything is becoming increasingly difficult.

It's not our ability to survive as a species that concerns me, it's the imminent period of contraction as previously abundant resources become expensive, technology-dependent, and competed over.

Here in Denmark, almost none of the food that the actual people here will eat next week is in the country yet. It's on its way in from overseas or further south.

Now, about 60% of the surface area is cultivated. Most of that (80%, so half of the country all in all) is used to grow pig feed. A lot (most, I think) of that meat is exported, in exchange for money - which was always very bad sustenance for pigs and people alike, and, these days, is digital, so in the sense that it "exists" at all, does so in the imagination of sand that was tricked into thinking.

There are many adjectives one could use to describe this situation. "Resilient" isn't one of them.

Coming from Israel, where everything is looked at through a military/security/strategic lens, this seems a strategic nightmare, but also wonderful.

Danish people know that neighboring nations won't wage war in the near future and can afford to be several steps removed from survival considerations.

I don't think, however, that Denmark is irresilient. The same supply chain you are worried to be too dependent from has to be quite robust for the country to rely on that. Apart from sudden and rapid events I bet that same supply chain will handle well medium/slow changes like climate change.

> has to be quite robust

Absent frequent disruptions, markets do not optimize for robustness; they optimize for efficiency and profit. So no, I don't agree that these supply chains are robust. It's like arguing "life on Earth evolved to be dependent on oxygen, therefore oxygen must be everywhere in the universe" (not remotely true); classic overfitting.

> in modern times we have an unprecedented ability to manipulate our environment unlike those previous civilizations. Not enough rainfall to water the crops? Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places, synthesize it from sea water or extract it from extreme depths.

Two of those approaches are about as old as agriculture. In the modern day you have people saying that (1) variable rainfall in California is an emergency, but also (2) we shouldn't build aqueducts because that would be expensive.

Aquaducts? What are you driveling on about?

Romans made them look cheap, reliable, and ornate enough to last for hundreds of decades.

I think the Greenland one was fascinating as it’s not something I would read about myself. Like a relative quick raise and fall due to climatic change.

Our ability to develop and utilize energy is amazing. We now use energy consuming machines, instead of human labor, to produce abundant food.

> Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places

And then you find out that another country wants to pipe water from that exact same place.

And that these 'other places' are not just infinite fountains of reliable water, if they exist at all...

It seems modern expectations suggest that the solution always exists, we just need to be clever enough to find it (or 'technology' will just solve it somehow)

Compared to assuming they are intractible a-priori without any proof of course it is of actual use and was selected for survival over "whelp I guess we're all dead because the deer ran away and we are foraged out"!

Infinite water is never the goal anyway - it was water for the density of demand from areas which could not use it all anyway like the snow melts in the mountains - where all of it not soaked up literally rolls away. Seriously what is with this trend of Malthusian lazy nihilism? Your body may inevitably start to stink again but that is no excuse to never wash it.