Cold Times — How to Prepare for the Mini Ice Age
COLD TIMES
How to Prepare
for
the Mini Ice Age
by
Anita Bailey, PhD
AUCTORITAS PUBLISHING LLC
2215 N Main Avenue, Springfield, MO 65803
2017
Copyright © 2017 Anita Bailey
All rights reserved.
Paper Edition: ISBN: 0-09859017-8-6 and ISBN-13: 978-0-9858017-8-6
This work is offered for informational purposes. The insights are the product of the author’s experience and standard reference materials. Always utilize more than one source when making important decisions. Neither the author nor publisher will be responsible in any way for utilizing this information nor for the consequences of your actions.
DEDICATION
For Rick
Contents
A Consideration
1 THE NEW REALITY
2 THE TRANSITION TO COLD
3 PLACE
4 FOOD: IMMEDIATE BASICS
5 WATER: PURIFYING, COLLECTING. STORING
6 FOOD: PRODUCING YOUR OWN
7 FOOD: SMALL SCALE LIVESTOCK
8 KEEPING WARM
9 POWER AND LIGHT
10 HEALTH AND HYGIENE
11 SAFETY AND SECURITY
12 WHAT IF….? THE BIG PICTURE
RECIPES
RESOURCES
INFORMATION RESOURCES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A Consideration
We’re not discussing the end of the world, of course;
we’re talking events like those that can be found repeated many times
in the histories of other failing civilizations.
That said, my guess is that some of those discontinuities
are going to be harsh ones. Those who brace themselves
for serious trouble and reduce their vulnerabilities
to a brittle and dysfunctional system
will be more likely to come through in one piece.
---John Michael Greer, December 28, 2016
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make.
- Jean Bodin
1 THE NEW REALITY
I wrote this during the final months of 2016 through the autumn of 2017. As it went to publication, there was early snow in the upper Midwest, frozen unharvested grain crops in Russia, and foot-deep hail in Spain. Earlier in the spring, Kansas farmers lost 40% of their wheat crop to flooding and frost – California’s tomato crops are dropping by millions of tons, and Florida’s citrus crops were decimated by hurricanes. America’s crippled and dying “legacy” media rarely report it.
This is the time you knew was coming.
You knew, and I knew, because we are the children of the long-ago survivors of similar planetary phenomena. Our ancestors survived every past Mini Ice Age cold time – Dalton, Maunder, Wolf, Middle Ages, Sporer, Roman – and every actual 10,000-year glaciated full-on Ice Age, as well. The subconscious awareness of this coming time is written in our genes, stored in a dusty section near the ‘thrifty genes’ that make gaining weight easy and ‘anxiety genes’ that trigger the tendency to store up things.
Just as birds flock together and start heading south when the seasons are about to change, and caterpillars build cocoons when their development reaches a specific stage, we too are biologically programmed for survival through Cold Times. Many of the social changes happening around the entire world are part of the genetic responses triggered by whispered advance warning of the coming Cold. Humankind’s historical behaviors will be our behaviors and our descendant’s behaviors, as well, because what our ancestors did is the root of persistence and written in our survivor’s genetic program.
This is significant in a way we only sense – biology, as they say, is destiny. But it is critically important to remember that biology’s subtle signals are not the same as determinism, the inability to alter biological programming, and nowhere near the same as knowledge. The common-sense know-how to deal with aberrant weather comes from cultural learning and personal experience, often passed along as word-of-mouth and inexplicable ‘family traditions’. Those strange family traditions arose in response to some previous hard time, lingering on in passed-along actions. Thanks to sociopathic social controllers and several generations of great weather with good times, that knowledge has been all-but erased from modern awareness. Even the librarians who should have known to store our collective wisdom on paper and in safe places, didn’t.
Historically, Cold Times start with erratic and unusual weather. Ancient documents record frosts in midsummer that destroyed warm-weather crops, for example. Over time, weather becomes more difficult to predict. Flooding destroys farmland, crops, and towns. Winters get colder and snow lasts longer; spring comes late, summers are unusually wet, winter hits before the summer’s crops are harvested. Lakes and rivers freeze, and thaw late. Glaciers grow down valleys at 150 feet a day.
As harvests fail, people starve and clamor to their neighbors for supplies. Desperation triggers crime and wars break out. Distress and hunger wear down immunity, and epidemics rage. One out of every three children born dies before the age of 5; one of the remaining two dies before reproducing. Cities shrink and coalesce around strong men, while far rural areas become increasingly isolated. Gangs and robbers, unable to provide for their own, prey on unwary travelers and out-of-the-way dwellings. Some areas depopulate and become wilderness, just as Rome’s once-great structures fell and became rough pasture to nomadic shepherds and their flocks. Over centuries, weather improves and stabilizes, bumper crops again are harvested, more infants survive to adulthood, populations increase, cities rebuild, and the cycle of forgetting starts over.
One of the great failures of imagination of our age is the unfailing faith in the religion of progress. This faith creates a blindness to the simple reality: there is no salvation in human works. Technology is a tool, what amounts to a hammer. Humans make technology; a hammer has no abilities greater than the one who wields it. Technological advancement will not save us.
Remember, every dead ancient culture had its technology. Romans, Egyptians, and Mayans created buildings that have lasted thousands of years -- ours are poor copies and will not stand that long. Aztecs, Peruvians, Persians, and the Algonquin cultivated the first of the great crops that are now mainstays around the world, including turkeys, potatoes, wheat, and corn – we, with all of our high tech have destroyed the genetics of the ancient crops by inserting genes that makes subsequent generations infertile or dependent on another manufactured product. The Renaissance in Europe led to the creation of beauty and art that modern humans can appreciate but not duplicate. Both China and India developed medical arts based in entirely different, and often more effective, systems than used in the West today – herbalism, energy fields, and dietary essentials will still be healing humankind long after modern antibiotics are a dusty memory.
Each great civilization rises with its own skills and focus, trusts those talents to override reality forever, and fails as it becomes blinded by its own success. We are mites riding the back of the elephant. Mites with hubris, to be sure, but mites nevertheless.
The New Reality
We are now at the leading edge of this world-wide change. Socially, mankind is turning away from the great overriding systems (banks, governments, pharma and medical conglomerate, conventional media, political powers, industry), everything that is in the hands of unseen giants. This appears as an “awakening” on a global scale. I suspect this occurs cyclically, as underscored by economist Martin Armstrong’s cycle discov
eries, and may be an effect that is genetically programmed when certain cosmic conditions come about. A percentage of people simply know that the times are changing, even as the sun’s energetic output decreases and the entire planet destabilizes and becomes cooler.
The now-visible effects of this new reality include:
the sudden appearance of tornados in places they have previously been unknown;
snow falling in the tropics and the deserts of Northern Africa where it has not been seen in recorded history;
hail storms so heavy that “rivers” of ice a foot deep run through streets and in canals;
rain “bombs”, coming down like a waterfall so forceful that a year’s worth of rain falls in an hour;
intense heat followed by a frost followed again by heat;
100-year or 1000-year floods in the same place every year;
snows falling months early or late, or multiple feet deeper than before;
strange atmospheric phenomena: mesospheric “bores” that light up the sky in waves, purple skies;
iridescent “noctilucent” clouds;
aurora visible in the tropics, and atmospheric electric “light columns” and “sprites” flitting where they have never been seen;
lightning killing herds of animals and crowds of people;
eerie sounds like groaning or trumpets coming from the sky;
jet stream wildly out of position;
arctic cold pouring down into tropical regions at the same time heat waves are melting tundra;
an increase in volcanic eruptions, affecting travel and weather and local crops;
the onset of swarms of earthquakes, bigger quakes, and quakes in regions that haven’t known them in the past.
Meanwhile, sunspots all but disappear, and earth’s magnetic field weakens. This will affect our generations in a way that is profoundly different than when this type of solar downturn happened in the past -- because today’s electronics and electric grid are unprepared for the newly incoming ionized blasts and electromagnetic surges. This doesn’t even count the fragile state of our national economies, or the widespread cultural disarray going on worldwide. And we have created a social structure that is 100% dependent on the grid functioning normally.
The key concept of this coming Cold Time is adaptability. Those things we have taken as “predictable” – that April 15th is the last frost day and it’s safe to plant tender tomatoes, for example – will seem charmingly naïve in a few decades. The weather and planetary rhythms that were routine during the development of modern agriculture and seed-strains will turn into wild oscillations, unpredictable from year to year. Farmers struggle and fail, and food “suddenly” becomes a serious issue – first in nations that import a large percentage of their grains, and then in the formerly rich nations, who then can barely feed their own.
It’s going to hurt; there is no doubt. As during every previous cycle, people will die prematurely. Cold, floods, and bizarre weather extremes will kill directly – they already are. Diseases of malnutrition will break out and uncontrollable epidemics rage. The social stressors will trigger wars and civil violence – and there will be starvation on a scale that is nearly unimaginable, some because of politics and some from sheer privation. Empires will fall, cultures will contract into tight knots, and some will disappear entirely. The historical details may vary, but the big picture remains the same with each Cold Time.
The point of this book, though, is not to convince you that the climate is chilling, social structures are failing, or that you will have to adapt and prepare to meet those changes. You already know that part. This book’s purpose is:
to provide a foundation for understanding how the Cold Time will affect every aspect of your existence;
to provide a structure for survival in a physical environment that is significantly different from the one in which you were raised;
and to give you a framework of knowledge and skill on which you can create your own decisions and choices.
Framework & Assumptions
In the coming Cold Time, basic human nature and needs will still continue. A primary need is accurate information. There’s no value to ‘information’ that panders to political correctness or a false sense of security.
I will give you the best info that I have, but this won’t be a research thesis -- I’ve written hundreds of them -- with references for each assertion. I’m not trying to prove this in that way, merely give you a starting point for your own research. The internet is working and libraries are open – gather what you need so that you have it later when the internet is just a memory. Print it out, or buy paper books. Paper can last hundreds of years; your e-reader won’t.
Also, keep in mind that no one has the answers you need for your unique situation – this book is merely a set of suggestions for things that have worked for others in the past. If you want you to survive through the calamities that await us in the coming years, you must turn your brain on and take responsibility for every aspect of your life. You simply cannot place your wellbeing in the hands of strangers, even well-meaning strangers. No one cares as much about you and yours as you.
Resistance to Change
The most common resistance to making serious life changes, especially moving to a rural area, is often a practical one: money. Your job’s in City X, you’re living paycheck to paycheck already – how can you save enough to buy another place? How will you make any money to cover land payments?
Some people are not financially stuck – any resistance to change comes from their worldview, not their finances. No amount of money will protect these people from what lies ahead, if they persist in their closed minds. A big 401K will not save you, and neither will those ‘great contacts’ at the brokerage. These will be among the first things that are swept away in the early Cold Waves.
Those who are financially stuck – the good, hardworking people who see what is coming – will have to decide what is really important. Many of these live in houses that are excessively large and expensive to heat and cool, or waste money every month on a rental when the same money could have bought a little piece of land. Many drive cars with monthly payments, or worse yet with a lease, when they could have bought an older vehicle for much less and no payments. Many have useless money wasters – daily coffee bought on the way to work ($80 per month?), cable service of any kind (waste of time, money, and mind), meals eaten “out” instead of prepared at home for a fraction of the price, weekly or monthly nail or hair parlor visits, gym fees (what’s wrong with jogging around the block for free?).
Resistance comes from the dying legacy media – the people whose personal and corporate incomes depend on you and everyone else continuing to “buy” their so-called news and their advertiser’s products. There are already multiple outlets now doubling down on the global warming agenda – yes, they are actually saying that even though we “might” see something like the Maunder Minimum cold (because they can no longer deny the sun’s lack of sunspots), man-made global warming will nullify the effects.
That’s right: man-made global warming is more powerful than the sun and will “protect” us from the coming Age of Ice! If that’s the case, they should be encouraging more polluting cars, more smoke stacks, more carbon dioxide aerosols! But, of course, logic is not the media’s strong point; it is taxes that will save us from excess planetary heat. Even so, the dying media’s inability to grasp the critical nature of this Cold Time will leave their followers helpless. It’s sad.
The Spouse
One way to measure the potential outcome of any plan, is to test the willingness of both partners in a marriage to aim toward the same goals. Spouses who pull together, tend to accomplish what they want. Those who pull in opposite directions, fail. Simple as that.
What if the spouse doesn’t buy into your preparedness concerns? You have exactly three options:
Have a serious sit-down “we have to do this and this is why” meeting and get the spouse onboard. Make a P
owerPoint – really. Use YouTube websites from Adapt 2030, Grand Solar Minimum, and Lee Wheelbarger, who are easily understood.
Do all the prepping yourself and hide it from your spouse (not recommended, since dishonesty weakens the relationship).
Recognize that the spouse was not a good match for you and divorce, amicably. Or forget about prepping entirely.
Work together, work alone, or move on. Those are your choices.
Your Level of Skill
Many people who buy preparedness books are just starting out learning readiness and survival skills. More often than not, these beginners can’t differentiate between genuine knowledge from someone who has “been there done that”, and someone who is a keyboard commando who merely passes along whatever they read on the ‘net….or the outright rip-offs selling inadequate storage food or cheap gadgets.
I have “been there done that” (see my author info at the end of the book) on prepping, small farming, search and rescue, health care, growing and storing food, and et cetera. I will be speaking from hard-won experience, making a lot of mistakes, and passing along the benefit of my trials. That’s why I’m able to give it to you straight.
Throughout this book it’s assumed that you already know something about life and about doing things on your own – because I can’t tell you how to be a responsible adult. That’s beyond the scope of this book.