But how many times has the gut been wrong? We don't remember. The gut (call it instinct, intuition, what have you), by nature of being a soft, squishy defenseless mess protected at most by some fat, maybe a little muscle, is cowardly, and will never be comfortable with bold action.
Nevertheless, I do listen to my gut feelings, and lately my gut has been telling me to move to Mexico.
Which is weird, don't you think?
The whole thing started when I came to the realization, that all other factors being what they are, the really important thing boils down to global warming. It's coming. It's accelerating, and it's getting to the point where the acceleration will accelerate into the shock zone.
This feeling stems from my knowledge of past climate variation. Which, yes, I know, is trending, induction, inference, unscientific. The fact remains that in the past climates can change like the flip of a switch, that heating or cooling can catastrophically take place on the order of decades or years.
No, I don't think we will have anything biblical, but I do think, when it happens, it will be a rapid phase change. And you can only prepare so much, but really it's all about location, location, location.
So, why not stay where I am? Chicago has lots of water, the Great Lakes undoubtedly will be stick around for awhile. Yes, but North America traditionally is an arid place. Places like the south and the west are kind of screwed if the rain belts move north as predicted. So it will be more than cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Dallas, San Antonio, Denver that are doomed. The Great Plains will return to the Sahara they were one thousand years ago, and not just the plains cities like Topeka or Wichita, but Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis, Des Moines are doomed as well. Climate studies also suggest decade-long droughts in the southeast United States, so basically right off anyone below the Mason-Dixon line.
And where will all those people go? Where the water is, I guess. So, the Great Lakes may not be such a nice place to be.
I had originally thought, well, maybe move to Canada, or Greenland, or Scandinavia. But my feeling is, tropical diseases are going to like wildfire through the mosquito and no-see-ums and tick population and you are going to see a lot of very white northern peoples die of exotic diseases and parasites. Plus, my guess is, with the melt, it's just going to be an awful swamp. Just the form of jungle living that white people don't take to so well.
Alright, so why Mexico? Well, it's even more specific than that. My gut is telling me to go to the Sierra Madre del Sur. Why? I don't know the region. I look on a map, I can see the states Michoacan, Guerrero, Oaxaca, the city of Acapulco, but I've never been there. I don't know the peoples. I don't know Spanish. I don't know the indigenous languages there.I do know it will not suffer for rainfall. It has one of the (still) most diverse and thriving ecosystems in the world. In fact, Mexico as a whole still has a well preserved and very diverse ecology - one of the most important on the planet.
More importantly, the people there are subsistence survivors. When you compare them to their anglo neighbors up north, they are much tougher and more likely to survive through rough times. Let's face its, the anglo culture of the United States has always been an exploiter culture, and has never really had to rough it in a way that exploited peoples have. They are just more likely to survive, period, in a way that Americans or Canadians will not. So that is another factor.
I don't know. I guess it would help to visit the damn place, don't you think? But I have to wonder why my gut says go south when all signs point north?
(Oh, and by the way, after reading about the latest caper that the rich people's advisers have come up with - freeports to stash all their stuff - I have a desire to crash a fully fueled unmanned jumbo jet plane into one of these swank warehouses, or find me bunker buster. Sour Grapes? Or ahead of my time?)
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