In the world of college football, we have learned never to underestimate the power of a rolling tide. On the political playing field, though, we’re not sure what to make of a rising tide. It has been described as both global warming and climate change, but the inconvenient truth remains that our world is experiencing some rather dramatic short- and long-term changes. Your organization needs to prepare for both.
Weather and Climate: A Difference in Data
To understand and prepare for the changes we face, scientists suggest we think of the difference between weather and climate. Weather is the short-term, the daily and seasonal changes in our physical world. A colder than usual winter, for example, leads skeptics to question the concept of global warming. But that’s just the weather. Climate is the long tail of the many changes taking place that are altering the balance we have enjoyed and the weather we have come to expect.
For example, a recent pair of independent studies published by scientists who study polar ice have concluded that Antarctica is melting. Specifically, the western shelf of the entire block of ice is expected to liquify over the next 200 to 1000 years causing, in turn, sea level rises of 13 feet around the globe. And that’s the smallest ice cube in this little cocktail of ours. Changes of this magnitude do more than create beachfront property in Orlando.
Your Organization’s Meteorologist
Looking way out over the hood is part of business planning, and the emerging changes in our physical world certainly play into that. If you think 200 years is too far away to have implications for your business, consider the investment NASA has made along Cocoa Beach. They’re Dreaming of a Jeannie who can move lots of infrastructure inland with a blink and a nod. So the long-term pursuit of alternate locations and data centers with grid and infrastructure dependence and all the bricks and mortar of business as a usual start to take on an unusual importance. And that’s way out over the hood.
Slamming against the windshield and giving the wiper blades a run for their money are the short-term effects of global climate change. Predictions are that the edges of weather will get more extreme and frequent as minor changes in ocean temperature and ozone coverage upset our very sensitive tether to this place. That means more hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy, more epic floods and intense drought, more weather that wreaks havoc and creates chaos. What sort of forecast do you see for your organization?
Bunker Up and Hunker Down
We are entering hurricane season, a period of prediction, prognostication, and dice rolling. The weather has no conscience and no political affiliation, and it strikes without emotion. Because we do have a conscience and emotional connections, we most often hear the stories of the ill-prepared. The trailer parks in tornado alley that almost evaporate, the coastal communities that disappear from the landscape, the towns swallowed by the rivers that run through them, the lives and businesses devastated.
What we don’t hear as often are the stories of businesses who developed disaster recovery plans and established alternate locations that that allowed their people and their data to continue operations in the face of natural disasters that now seem increasingly inevitable. ICS plays a role in a lot of those stories, and we’d like to help you as well.
