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Climate Change: Crossing the Rubicon — the Die Is Cast

We can mitigate a little bit, but we must adapt to survive.

Check out this Hidden Brain podcast: “We Broke the Planet. Now What?”

Earlier today I texted the link above to my grandson Cameron, who is now 21 and studying electrical engineering. Perhaps it was my liberal arts education, an interest in military history, or all that Latin that I took in high school and college. Either way, I had to explain to him what it means to say that “we have crossed the Rubicon” when it comes to climate change.

The podcast is just terrific at explaining where we are as a planet in regards to climate change. There is no reversing the natural processes that have been unleashed by us humans adding carbon to the atmosphere for 300-plus years at prodigious rates.

Climate mitigation means reducing our carbon emissions, and climate adaptation (our emergency management role) is dealing with the impacts and taking measures to reduce the impact of a changing climate (our traditional mitigation role).

What is the impact to us besides rising seas impacting human development here in the United States? Here’s my guess. The record number of immigrants trying to cross our southern border is going to swell in the coming years. We are not Bangladesh, but millions more people are going to try to come to the United States due to climate impacting where they live now in North America, Central America and even South America.

The recent surge in immigrants we have seen at the border in 2021 will be a drop in the bucket for what we can expect in the decades ahead. Even those coming now are coming in part because of natural disasters like hurricanes and drought impacting their ability to survive. The numbers will only grow bigger and bigger.

As we are doing planning here in the Pacific Northwest, we are expected to have a huge surge in “American immigration” coming from other parts of the United States as heat, drought and a lack of water cause people to move.

The die has been cast!
Eric Holdeman is a nationally known emergency manager. He has worked in emergency management at the federal, state and local government levels. Today he serves as the Director, Center for Regional Disaster Resilience (CRDR), which is part of the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER). The focus for his work there is engaging the public and private sectors to work collaboratively on issues of common interest, regionally and cross jurisdictionally.