Cli-Fi disaster list

Over at Resource Crises (used to be the much more interestingly named Cassandra's Legacy). They have come up with a list of ten climate related crises as appropriate to fictional settings.  They refer to this climate related disaster fiction as "Cli-Fi."

Here is the list

Cli-fi: ten assorted doomsday scenarios
1. "The great sea onrush"
2."Super-Calving."
3. "The great ring of ice disaster". 
4. "The Big Freeze" (or: "the Younger Dryas reloaded").
5. "Tickling the tail of the dragon" (or: "Shooting yourself with the calthrate gun").
6.  "The Great Coal Flame" (or "Saddam squared").
7. "Goldilock's disasters" or "The great climate rebound".
8. "Superstorms!"
9. "The world as a gas chamber".
10 "Venus, the ultimate disaster."

Note that I am only listing the types, the full details are at the post. Note that I do think they are missing a few of them.  Obviously they wanted to stop the list at ten.  The obvious, big one, is ozone related issues.

Knowing when to let go

So your all set up in your safe location.  Or maybe it is just your regular home.  When do you let go?

A real life example:

Flooding, Mudlsides Loom As Threats After Wildfire
Erica E. Phillips, Wall Street Journal, 2 September 2014 (from p. A2 of physical copy)

Glendora, Calif. - David Fredendall owns a single-family home here, on a quarter-mile long residential street that goes straight up into the San Gabriel Mountains, with sweeping views.

"We've been in town for about 27 year," said the 59-year old Mr. Fredendall, who lives here with his wife and son, "and we don't aspire to leave."

That is despite the real possibility that the hillside above..., which burned hot and heavy in a February fire, could become an unstable wall of mud and debris during the coming rainy season.  Their street, Rainbow Drive, was the site of a notoriously destructive mudslide in 1969, and it is at a better than 80% risk for debris flows in the event of a heavy rainstorms...

Well, I know people will pay a lot for a view, but usually they are talking about money.

This reminds me of the situation in the prepper-preachy novel, Event Horizon, that I reviewed recently.  In this case, the plot is set up to where a small grouping of four families are sitting in a house, and know that a militia is coming after them for blood-revenge.  In a novel, with all sorts of bug-out bag advise, and military hardware discussions, et cetera.  The family of course decides to stick it out!  And since it is a novel, they are able to devastate the militia with very light casualties.  In gaming terms, it's like the rolled boxcars (1 in 36 chance) for the win.

 

I hope the Fredenall's wind up o.k., they don't appear to need boxcars for the win, but even on much easier odds, if you roll often enough, a fail is inevitable.  Over attachment to your stuff is not a good survival strategy.

Why they can't find skilled employees

It is a common theme you hear from employers; they can't find suitably skilled workers.

Of course, even in our "improving" economy, it doesn't take long to look at the classified adds within the skilled trades to see the problem.
Blame Employers, Not Workers, for Any Skills Gap, Economist Says
Josh Zembrum, Wall Street Journal, 18 August 2014 (hat tip: NC)

Much of the evidence in support of a skills gap could be explained by employers who are no longer willing to train their employees or raise salaries, and instead want to be able to hire people with exactly the right skills–and on the cheap. Mr. Cappelli points to data showing apprenticeship programs are being abandoned. The number of apprentice programs registered with the Department of Labor declined to 21,000 in 2012 from 33,000 in 2002, and the number of apprentices has plunged from 280,000 from 500,000 a decade ago. If employers really faced a damaging shortage of workers, this would be an odd time to abandon programs to train employees.

And you have the Wall Street Journal, of all folks, pointing it out.

The abandonment of the  is probably in part due to a more amorphous course-by-course approach that you see a lot these days.  But that is not a particularly good approach to use when you are trying to get folks onto a career path.

I have been looking at the more electronic-tcp/ip side of the electrical business.  The skill set seems very thin on the ground with tradesman, but you don't see anyone hiring much of anything outside of fully skilled folks, and then at wages that are way under the comparable for the rather similar IT folks.

Event Horizon: A Review

Steven Konkoly's Event Horizon is the second book in the apocalyptic series, The Perseid Collapse. Set in New England, mostly in the back woods of  Maine in this one, it details the near term consequences of a combination of "meteor" strikes and EMP-bursts.

From the blurb:

With Boston collapsing faster than Alex Fletcher predicted, his personal rescue mission deep into the heart of an increasingly unfamiliar city reaches a critical point. Pursued by a ruthless militia group, and forced to navigate a treacherous landscape, he runs a gauntlet of grim decisions and impossible odds to reach perceived safety.

Back home--in rural Maine, a series of lethal coincidences fuels a local militia leader's ghastly strategy to raise a private army, planting the Fletcher's firmly at the intersection of his power play--and the epicenter of his rage

The story is essentially that of Alex Fletcher, and his Marine friends, versus the diabolic militia folk.

 

The problem is that the story goes through all the tactical and operational details, characters tending to discuss details in depth that have already been related to the reader, and it really is just an excuse for improbable shoot 'em ups.   The Marines set up there machinegun firing points in Harvard so badly that one infiltrator can threaten the entire defensive perimeter.  Yet civilian, Alex Fletcher,  can climb into an armored truck (MTVR), in the parking lot, and from its roof mounted .30 cal. machine gun, sweep all the endangered points on the perimeter.  These defensive positions, don't appear to cover each other, and are all on the "forward" slope, and thus vulnerable to fire from beyond the perimeter. It's not realism, it's an excuse for overblown heroics.  On a side note, the author also seems to be unaware that, as with many large facilities-universities, Harvard has a series of steam tunnels (link), running through its campus, that have the potential to turn there hard edge position into a sieve.

The defense set up in the Fletcher's Maine rural bug-out home is typical prepper book stuff.  That a marine would actually think that it is a good idea to stay inside a stick-built building when fighting a militia of unknown size is bizarre.  The "defenses" are proofed only to carbine/pistol standards. In any case, you can put up all the sandbags you want, but if their .30 cal. machine gun has tracers, its hard to see how you are going to keep the whole thing from burning down over your heads. The affair would likely end with the militia shooting people trying to escape the conflagaration.  But as is typical, the bad guys aren't going to be that competent.  They will be sure to give the defenders plenty of easy shots.

The militia leader is so comically evil that he gets pissed off and shoots something like 10% of his available manpower.  Granted, he has recruited an evil bunch, but why would such an evil bunch cower in fear of him?  Why don't they just shoot him?  I had a hard time not picturing him as Boss Hogg in cameo.

 

As we alluded to above, ex-marine Fletcher had met up with the Marines in our first novel, and he becomes even more engaged with them this time around.  The novel in some ways is like a reverse of the well known militia-porn novel Patriots, in that it is the good guys are the military folks, and the bad guys are the local folks in old-style cameo.  The battle results are about as lopsided as those in Patriots, and you can pretty well guarantee that the good guys will make all their head, or through-the-corner shots, and the bad guys....  Well the bad guys will just suck: except when they are being dementedly evil, and Boss Hogg is shooting the incompetents.  For a book with preachy-prepper advise, which is in theory intended to be giving serious advise, this is a critical failing.

 

As I noted in the review of the first part, I cannot recommend the series.  It starts falling apart toward the end of the first novel, and it just gets progressively more ridiculous in the second.  The author may be an ex-Marine, and think it is cool to be fighting alongside his brothers in arms in an apocalyptic scenario. But for most of the reading audience, its not all that exciting.  There are some reasonable points about what modern arms and weaponry are capable of, but they are submerged under all the action-hero tropes.  So, if you like laundry lists of prep gear, and the silly types of combat that are typical of the militia style novels, you will probably be able to get through the repetitive dialog in okay shape.  I think most everyone else would be better off taking a pass.

 

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high. Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting. Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation. Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

 

It is set in the near future.  To the extent that the author is discussing a lot of U.S. Marine military equipment, I guess you can call it realistic.  There is lip service at times to issues of supplies, but the whole novel only ends 96 hours after "the event" so it is a little too early for that to be a huge issue for even the moderately prepared.  Call it a 6.

 

Readability is mixed.  As noted above, it bogs down in repetitive dialog, and the author goes into overly complex details of the impromptu fortifications: to the point where a more simplified description might actually convey more information.  It isn't a page turner, even the fight scenes move a little slowly as he insists on jumping us around to all the good guys, and many of the bad guys points of view.  We will go with a 4.