Put Simply, Would You Ignore An Imminent Storm Red Warning?
Sun’s out, summer is here; the last heatwave in 1976 was fine. They have just changed the map colours.
The last heat wave was in May 2026!
Soft denial is where people who are climate-aware, and even activists, ignore the change occurring in front of them.
Rupert Read understandably hopes collapse can be avoided and that we can build a new, more equitable society in the shell of the old one, and he’s not the only person pushing this brand of hopium; meanwhile, the Far-Right are trying to ferment a race war.
Wet Bulb Risk is Climate Science & Human Physiology Combined
“Global ever-rising temperatures have inevitably caused a rapid increase in the scale, intensity, frequency and duration of extreme heat events, posing a significant threat to human health.
In hot-humid environments, increased heat production and impaired evaporative cooling significantly raise the risk of heat stroke compared with dry-heat environments [10]. The accumulated heat load initially raises core body temperature, which then increases cardiac output, dilates skin blood vessels, and stimulates sweat secretion. Meanwhile, if adequate fluid intake does not replenish these losses during exposure, sweat-related fluid loss leads to dehydration, reducing effective blood volume and cardiac output. Moreover, decreased total blood volume, combined with increased skin blood flow, further lowers central venous pressure and splanchnic blood flow. If the normal thermoregulatory mechanism is overwhelmed, core temperature will rise to an uncompensable level, accompanied by circulatory failure, endotoxin leakage, and a systemic inflammatory response. Changes in infection or inflammatory processes associated with prolonged heat exposure typically show elevated immune cell concentrations (e.g., leukocytes) or systemic inflammatory markers (e.g., interleukins), which also indicate heat stroke progression.
Wet-bulb temperature (Tw) is a thermal stress index based on the combination of temperature and humidity, widely used to assess the health effects of humid heat. Sherwood and Huber first proposed a Tw of 35 °C as the theoretical survivability limit for humans over six-hour exposure, without considering the physiological principles of thermoregulation, particularly the differences in the limitations of evaporative heat dissipation in extremely humid versus dry environments.
Recent studies show that the Tw associated with uncompensable heat stress is far below this threshold, and the livability environmental limit does not correspond to a fixed Tw across different environmental conditions and activity levels. Studies from the PSU HEAT Project [20,21] used progressive heat stress methods to examine the critical environmental limits during minimal physical activity, above which human thermoregulatory capacity was exceeded, and core temperature progressively increased. They revealed that critical Tw varied from 26–31 °C, with higher limits associated with warm-humid environments and lower values noted in hot-dry climates.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360132325002653
I have seen multiple social media posts suggesting the 35-degree upper limit. But this fails to consider age, physiology, and chronic health conditions. 26- 31 degrees is the comfort range. Testing Heat stress on athletes tells us that when athletes die from heat, people with chronic mild heart conditions, diabetes, and those on dialysis are more susceptible at lower temperatures. Someone even tried to tell me, “You need 100% humidity for a wet-bulb temperature.” Admirably, Rupert tolerates being around the idiots.
I wouldn’t have wanted to be out today, 22/06/2026; the highest Temperature was 34 degrees C with 73% humidity, which is a wet-bulb temperature of 33.8 °C (Twb).
Prof. Rupert Read & I have had many conversations about preparedness and wet-bulb temperatures on X, Bluesky, and Facebook, and I have repeatedly asked why it’s missing from Climate Majority publications. I have done keyword searches of all their previous publications and listened to their group talk posted on YouTube, but neither offers a pathway to understanding how heat and humidity kill people. He blocked me on X and Bluesky
You can download the Plan B report here, but don’t expect any information on how to survive a wet-bulb event. These reports focus on policy-level mitigation. Read rightly identifies that the Green Party is doing nothing in the realm of climate survival education, but neither is the Climate Majority, apart from identifying insulation and a major adaptability move; #solidarityprepping offers more practical solutions, including insulating your home. Insulation is a start. I would hope most homes would have 300mm of insulation in the loft. But external wall insulation is more effective, or better still, building homes to Bio Haus standards.
SolidarityPrepping.co.uk Is Plan B
The Climate Majority Project document We Need A Plan B squarely aims at business as usual.
“One reason to be bullish on the potential of preparedness as an organising frame is the existence of ‘no-regret’ measures. These strategic interventions can enhance national well-being and economic stability in ‘business-as-usual’ scenarios while providing essential shock absorbers in times of crisis. Examples include mass insulation of the UK housing stock, increased support for decentralised, community-owned renewable energy, or enhanced local food production. These are actions that make us more resilient to a colder, more volatile world, but leave us no less prosperous in a somewhat warmer, possibly relatively stable one. These measures are likely to be easier to agree on regardless of political affiliation or assessment of the future.”
“National wellbeing and economic stability” in an ecological collapse, under a system driving that collapse. Preparedness, in my opinion, is not about ensuring business as usual is doing ok. If We Need A Plan B had the information businesses need to understand the risks individuals, families, and the wider community face from extreme heat events, they wouldn’t be asking whether it is safe to travel during a red weather warning with a potentially life-threatening chronic illness. Strategic interventions to enhance national well-being are an excellent idea. But when they are framed in terms of economic stability, in terms of business as usual, this report isn’t about how families and individuals plan for what the climate crisis throws at us. Yet the questions at the end of the videos are individuals, not businesses, asking how they survive.
Collapse or no collapse, Rupert Read repeatedly flip-flops between whether collapse is coming and whether we’ll avoid collapsing. He never acknowledges that we are in the midst of collapse; it started at least in the 1980s. Since 2015, almost every summer has been hotter than the last until 2020; then each summer we have had global summer heatwaves, and it rains on Greenland’s ice sheet. The collapse of civilisations is nothing new. We are not being invaded, replaced, or our cities sacked, and we are not being sold into slavery. These are the collapses of antiquity. We live under a climate geo-engineered by the oil industry. The discussion touched on the AMOC collapse and the ensuing agricultural crisis that it would bring. They discussed Britain’s food insecurity but failed to mention that as we move from 1.5 to 2 degrees C, we lose the Goldilocks climate niche for agriculture. 3 Degrees is described as catastrophic, though. The notion that the UK government will strategically store grain is ridiculous.
Rupert Read doesn’t accept collapse the way Jordan Perry, the late Michael Dowd, and the late Trystan Sykes understood and accepted it. The thing about us doomers is we want to be wrong, and we want to be honest. The Alternative Plan B for Families and Individuals is Solidarity Prepping. #SolidarityPrepping is survivalism without the Fascism. Climate change-aware preparedness, collapse preparedness and acceptance. In her collapsology paper, Prof. Stephanie Rost succinctly outlined what communities need to do to prepare for collapse.
“In terms of resource management during climate crises, as evidenced by the impact of collapse in the case studies, local self-sufficiency could become essential, as global supply chains break down under strain. This requires not only traditional small-scale agriculture and renewable energy sources but also an understanding of emerging technologies like hydroponics and vertical farming, which can produce food in areas with degraded soils or limited space. Communities could need to innovate with water recycling systems, desalination technologies, and rainwater capture to maintain a stable water supply in the face of increasingly erratic rainfall patterns. We currently devolve technical skills in these methods to others; we will likely need to foster and share them at the community level so we can better leverage their contribution to improving food security.
Because they originated in a stable climatic environment, skills such as farming, hunting, and foraging will need to adapt to the unpredictable challenges of the Anthropocene. Seasons will no longer be predictable, and the ability to grow crops or raise animals for food is in doubt. While past collapses suggest people moved elsewhere when food shortages occurred or crops failed repeatedly, the crisis’s global nature means no place is unaffected. Complex societies could collapse to a smaller but surviving equilibrium. The contrast is that, in the process, the ecological degradation driving collapse could push significant swathes of Earth’s inhabitants, both animal and human, to the brink of extinction. Therefore, communities could focus on survival skills for disaster response, such as first aid, search-and-rescue techniques, and emergency shelter construction, as well as psychological first aid to address trauma and stress. If traditional healthcare systems break down, community health networks focused on preventive care and identifying vulnerable individuals could save lives, given healthcare’s importance.
The ability to innovate and repurpose materials—turning discarded items into usable tools, building materials, or energy sources — will possibly become a useful skill, and is a human skill we are capable of. Knowledge sharing through digital or low-tech means, like local radio networks or printed guides, can spread crucial survival information when the internet is no longer accessible. Human mesh networks —for example, knowledge sharing through digital or low-tech means like local radio networks or printed guides—could help spread crucial information on survival techniques if the internet is no longer accessible. This is in line with the alternative wireless networks used in Syria during its civil war.”
How we could survive in a post-collapse world Prof Stephanie Rost
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44282-025-00160-1
Insulating your home makes sense
Rainwater harvesting
Water purification through knowledge and good filters, if you can afford it
Get to know your community and neighbours
Grow climate-resilient food
Learn wilderness survival skills: They are excellent for building resilience and resourcefulness, and for distraction in nature, which is good for wellbeing.
Store 3 months to a year of dry food according to what you can afford
Backup Power? What do you need to power if the grid goes down
Back-up Sanitation: What happens when the sewage system fails
Alternative water source?
Famine Gardening.
https://linktr.ee/SolidarityPrepper
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