I Said It Would Come to This. Those Bastards Are Planning Again!!

Our cousins across the pond, a.k.a. "the Brits", are planning for climate change. Not 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius but 4 degrees Celsius of warming and what that would mean for the UK (if there still is a united kingdom should that occur).

Not surprisingly, the Brits are focusing on flooding and inevitable retreat from the sea and, inland, the valleys. Britain is coming to grips with the likelihood that it too will have to deal with IDPs or internally displaced persons, a term once reserved for war refugees but now extended to include climate migrants.

Resilience is the catchword:

People may have to be moved away from high-risk areas as climate change makes flooding more likely and more severe in the UK, the government has said. 

Announcing the biggest review of climate change in Britain for nearly a decade, the environment secretary, Michael Gove,said flooding was one of the key ways in which changes would become manifest in the UK. 

“It will not always be possible to prevent every flood,” he told an audience of Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) stakeholders. “We cannot build defences to protect every single building or reinforce every retreating coastline. We will be looking at ways we can encourage every local area to strive for greater overall resilience that takes into account all the different levers from land-use planning to better water storage upstream, and tackles both flood prevention and response.”

The best way to build resilience is to prepare for plausible worst case scenarios. In the UK, that's 4 degrees Celsius of warming.

The Environment Agency is preparing for 4C of warming in planning the UK’s flood defences, though the Paris agreement aims to limit warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.

...Next year, Defra will publish a long-term policy statement on flooding and coastal erosion and the Environment Agency will issue a new 50-year flood strategy, which Gove said should “explore new philosophies”, going beyond traditional flood defences such as sea and river walls and other “hard” barriers.

Real petro-states, it seems, don't dwell on inconvenient possibilities such as 4C of warming or the mega-floods and severe droughts that would spawn. Petro-states don't focus on what 4C would mean to already rapidly decaying infrastructure or habitability of cities, towns and villages, most of which are located on rivers, lakes or other waterways. The last thing petro-states want to talk about is internally displaced populations and faltering resilience, urban or rural.