Escape Dream Through, 4th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): We're under a heat advisory again. "Heat index values up to 106." "Possible threat to life or property." "Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbors." Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Since I missed my walk two days ago, I took my alternating-day walk today despite the heat, out of the cool, domestic comfort of my air-conditioned house and outside under the unforgiving Georgia sun. I did keep it to a relatively short, 4.9-mile Madison in consideration of the heat, however. No relatives or neighbors checked on this Retired Old Man, although to be fair, this ROM didn't check on any of his relatives or neighbors either.

An El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern that typically develops every two to seven years, when waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific become unusually warm. That warming can alter atmospheric circulation thousands of miles away, shifting rainfall and temperature patterns everywhere. But the current El Niño is developing is waters that are already exceptionally warm. Subsurface ocean temperatures in July and early August were already more than eight degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal in some parts of the Pacific according to a UN report (sadly, the U.S. agencies are no longer considered reliable with regard to scientific data), nd El Ninos typically don't peak until the winter months. 

My concern is that a feedback loop could occur - the warmer temperatures of the current El Nino keep heating the Pacific forming additional El Ninos, and so on and so forth in an endless loop until the natural El Nino/La Nina cycle collapses and we're in continuous El Nino.

Climate skeptics say "So what? Climate changes all the time." True, on a large enough time scale, but that doesn't take into account the effect of sudden climate change on human culture, commerce, and sustainability systems built around the climate norms of the last five or six centuries. New farmland capable of providing for the bulk of humanity won't necessarily appear as our current arable land is decimated by droughts and by floods. Or that the majority of the human population lives on or near coastlines subject to sea-level rise, with most of the rest in low river valley subject to flooding. Our whole civilized infrastructure was built upon fixed assumptions of climatic stability and when those assumptions catastrophically fail, we may be looking at nothing less that civilization collapse.

The UK government is already advising citizens to keep three days worth of water and supplies on hand, although the collapse I'm envisioning goes far beyond the inconvenience of a long weekend. Keep food on hand is fine and good, but also consider how you might preserve and prepare it beyond three days when there's no electricity and the natural gas has been depleted.

For my part, I'm not going all in on prepper stashes and survival gear - guns, MREs, fuel tanks, and so on. I'm not sure I want to be a survivor in that hand-to-mouth, dog-eat-dog, Mad Max world. I've lived a long and good life for the most part, and my strategy for the coming times is getting comfortable with the concept of my inevitable death.