A LIKELY DOOMSDAY SCENARIO is presented by Emily Atkin in the article “The Blood-Dimmed Tide” for the New Republic (September 16, 2019). “It’s the year 2100. Many of the world’s major powers have spent the last several decades focusing on themselves. Borders have closed. International investments in education and technology have declined. The divide between the developed and undeveloped world has widened.
America’s continued abdication of any serious leadership role in the climate crisis touched off a series of other high-profile defections from regional and international climate accords that were already insufficient in their target goals.
The global community sailed past the 1.5 degree Celsius ‘safe threshold of warming mark’ around 2038, and summers of Saharan intensity became an annual norm in Europe—often in North America, too.
These extreme bouts of heat claimed annual death tolls of thousands in many countries, while wildfires courted the specter of mass famine by burning up billions of dollars’ worth of cropland.
The ocean rose about 1.5 feet, exposing an additional 69 million people every year to regular extreme flooding. Residents of the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati, which sits an average of a little less than six feet above the pre-crisis sea level, began to flee to Australia and New Zealand en masse.
War has also broken out in the now-iceless Arctic between the United States and Russia over access to the region’s rich stores of ever-shrinking resources: fish, gas, oil, and minerals. ”
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Writer Emily Atkin presents a doomsday scenario where summers of Saharan intensity became an annual norm in Europe in ‘The Blood-Dimmed Tide’ for The New Republic. Click To Tweet
Cartoon by Joel Pett for USAToday.
