"How To Prepare For Climate Change: A Practical Guide To Surviving The Chaos" ($24 in paperback from Simon & Schuster; also for Amazon Kindle) has a Paradise connection. Pogue assembled an "expert panel," among them Steve "Woody" Culleton. The book notes that Culleton "arrived in Paradise in 1981 via Greyhound bus...."
Serving on the Town Council from 2004-2016, "Woody plans to run for town council again in November 2020 to help rebuild his community." He did, and now it can be told: he's back on the Council.
For Pogue, climate change is incontrovertible; the controversies about just how much is human caused are beside the point. Whether we as a species can mitigate or stop climate change, the real question for us as individuals, families and communities is how we can cope or adapt to the changes.
"Sometimes," he writes, "people are pushed out by extreme-weather disasters, like the wildfire that drove Bob and Linda Oslin out of Paradise.... They decided not to return."
Neither did Jen and Ryan Cashman of Paradise, driven out by the Camp Fire, who became "climate refugees." (Pogue tells their story for CBS Sunday Morning at http://bit.ly/paradisepogue.)
Where can one go that's safer? Pogue has an entire chapter with some sage advice for those seeking "climate havens": "Get away from the oceans"; "move north"; "find fresh water"; "seek infrastructure." Best bets: the Pacific Northwest and the Great Lakes states.
Comprehensive chapters cover growing food, where to invest, dealing with insurance, adjusting one's business, preparing for wildfires, floods, heatwaves, drought, hurricanes, social breakdown. Climate changes bring more mosquitos and ticks. Pogue calls it "global weirding."
Pogue gets down to the nitty-gritty, with a section on emergency notification (and the heartbreak of the Camp Fire) along with a page on lessons from that fire: "Fill the tank."
Whether we stay or go, Pogue's must-have book will fill our information tank to the brim.
