2050

A thought experiment.

The global warming path ahead of us promises global temperatures peaking around mid-century at 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. If all promises are kept, this is what we can expect.

The below scenario is one version of a best-case scenario. As I write this, we are currently on track for about 2.7 or 2.8 degrees C of warming over preindustrial levels. I’m using 2.0 degrees for these scenarios, so most of the statistics and facts that will make up the below examples come from only a 2.0-degree world. When I give specific examples of things happening below, that is based on an educated guess from the data I’ve seen. For example, right off the bat I talk about in 2050 half of the world suffering from food insecurity. That comes from a real report, and then I extrapolate out what that might mean.

This isn’t a prediction of what will happen. I don’t have a time machine with the ability to see into the future. But these are all scenarios that have the potential to happen, some are likely, and some are not. My goal is to use my imagination to paint a picture of what our world might look like if we don’t do enough to combat climate change. I encourage you to use your own imagination to do the same. Often in human history, we don’t do enough about problems because we haven’t seen them in the past and therefore, we can’t imagine them in our future.

If we assume that we reach 2.0 degrees Celsius by 2050, nations will fail and that will have a knock-on effect on the neighbors of that nation, the trading partners of that nation, the friends and enemies of that nation. Running a nation of tens of millions or hundreds of millions or billions of people is hard enough without mother nature putting her thumb on the scale against you. When that happens, you’re in a world of trouble.

So, let’s go. How bad can it get?

2050 – The state of the world

In 2050, half of the world’s population suffers from food insecurity.[1] There has been at least one famine in South America, Africa, and Asia each year for the past fifteen years. None of the famines show signs of stopping. The world has moved away from cattle as a significant source of protein, which has helped reduce GHG emissions somewhat, with the world now eating beef and drinking cow’s milk at rates similar to those in the late 1990s. Younger generations have turned more to vegetarian lifestyles, or low meat consumption, so this trend should continue moving away from cattle production in the coming years.

Climate change has devastated many nations in the decades leading up to 2050. The Maldives, which 30 years ago in 2020 was 6 feet above sea level is now in 2050 only 3 feet above sea level. With the methane tipping point reached over the last decade, residents have seen the writing on the wall and know they will have no country soon. With no future, there is no investment in the future and refugees from the Maldives continue to flow out of the country, with just 25 percent of the population from three decades ago. They will soon join other island nations such as the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tuvalu and Vanuatu which have already been abandoned to the sea.

Southeast Asia has been hit the hardest. Bangladesh has lost over 10 percent of its land to sea-level rise in the past thirty years, this has displaced about 15 percent of the population in that time. The country has lost over 20 million people. This has put a strain on its neighbors, particularly, India.

It can be argued that India has struggled the most in the past 30 years simply due to its massive population. As China’s demography caught up with it and India became the most populous country in the world decades ago, the country seemed poised to take on the mantle of leadership in Asia. It was not meant to be. Punishing monsoons grew in deadly force each year as the atmosphere heated, increasingly became a harbinger of destruction rather than a sign of a plentiful harvest. Eventually the population learned to flee the river valleys of the country during monsoon season so that the loss of life could be curtailed. The great flooding of the monsoons of 2044 saw half a million Indians die from an intensity of storms not seen in human history. Villages have moved away from rivers out of respect for the destructive path. The heat in India is no less punishing, with about a 600,000 Indians dying from extreme heat annually. This is well on the way of fulfilling the expectation that about 1.5 million Indians will die each year from the heat by 2100.[2] These extremes have sapped the economy of its vigor, and although the country is struggling to absorb the tens of thousands of Bangladeshis that come to India each year, it is nothing compared to the refugees from Pakistan.

Pakistan dissolved as a nation just seven years ago in 2043, and the world is still dealing with the ramifications. When the government of Pakistan collapsed in 2043, it left over 300 million people without a country. Pakistan has since split into different fiefdoms, some controlled by warlords, some controlled by a loose association of gangs. Extreme flooding from monsoons, heat that led to dozens of abandoned cities and villages through the years and economic collapse made the situation untenable for the government. When the country collapsed in 2043, the brain drain from Pakistan was already nearly complete – with over 10 million people leaving the country in the decade before the collapse. A hastily put together coalition of India and the United States were able to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, but after that was taken care of, they left. Trade has devolved into a barter system, with Indian rupees and American dollars accepted in some places, but with the country now divided into either 11 or 12 different warring statelets, depending on the day. Pakistan has become a no man’s land that the rest of the world generally leaves alone. Aid organizations that would normally step into such situations have generally stayed away due to the punishing heat of the summer and the dangerous conditions on the ground. After seven years, most of the people who could leave, have done so. A population that was 325 million in 2043, has now shrunk to 280 million, with a few million in population decline each year. An increased mortality rate has taken over from immigration as the biggest cause of population decline just last year.

China is still holding together, but just barely. The demographic time bomb that was set with China’s one child policy in the 20^th century exploded in the 21^st. China’s population now stands at just over 1.0 billion, down from a 2023 peak of over 1.4 billion. Letting go of Tibet and Xingjian in the 2030s was hardly a blip to the population of China, and was done mostly to get rid of those restive areas and concentrate resources on addressing problems in the Han Chinese dominated East.

Extreme weather events from flooding and sea level rise have devastated the infrastructure of areas that used to be China’s most dynamic regions. Guangzhou was famously named the most economically vulnerable city in the world in an IPCC report 30 years ago,[3] with a potential sea level rise of .34 meters under a 2 degree C scenario. Thirty years later, that 2-degree scenario has arrived, and the sea level rise has come in much higher, at .5 meters. The city has lost half its population from its peak 30 years ago, and with sea level rise expected to top 1 meter in the city by 2100, Chinese are retreating inland. Zhanjiang has also faced similar problems, but sea level rise has only been .25 meters thus far. But the trajectory is half a meter more by the end of the century. With the population collapse, flooding of coastal regions and Shanghai increasingly inundated with water from heavy storms, the writing has been on the wall for years now. Many Chinese have returned to the interior of the country that they largely left early this century in the hopes of a better life in China’s big cities. As these big cities can no longer offer the upward mobility that they once did and are more polluted and more flooded than the countryside, the Chinese people are increasingly taking their chances in a countryside with cleaner air, and less risk of devastating weather. The Chinese Communist Party is still the de facto rulers of China, though leaders at the provincial level often ignore dictates from Beijing. The capital no longer has the financial resources or the manpower to bring rebel regions to heal. People in Shanghai have been flirting with declaring themselves and independent nation, like Singapore, but with Shanghai expected to continue losing land to the Ocean every year, many left in the city wonder if there is any point in gaining independence for a city state that will likely disappear in their lifetime.

Africa has been hard hit by climate change as well. The nations that make up the horn of Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia have been devastated by a drought that has endured for decades, with some scientists now arguing that the Sahara will make its way to the Indian Ocean by the end of the century due to the increased effects of climate change. Many of the continent’s nations lacked the resources of richer countries to adapt. This has made it difficult for African nations to provide food, water, and shelter for their citizens. It is not surprise therefore that there have been at least two armed conflicts in Africa between African nation states each year since 2035. There were 54 different countries in Africa in 2020. Now there are only 48. The island nations of Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles decide to combine into one nation in order to allow the people of the smaller island nations to have a refuge when their islands disappear. Lesotho was absorbed by South Africa in 2032, when a petition by the countries citizens made clear that this was their preference due to the failing economy of Lesotho. Economic hardships exacerbated by climate change put an end to Libya, which was absorbed in the early 2030s with Tunisia claiming the biggest prize by capturing Tripoli. Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Egypt slowly took the rest.

Internal political instability has been exacerbated by drought, extreme flooding and famine in Chad, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo for the past two decades. Armed conflict has been a staple of each country for most of the last two decades, with only the briefest respite. Each country has lost population over that time, as the increasingly permanent climate stresses have caused many who can leave to seek a better life to do so. The real tragedy of Africa, however, has been Nigeria. Once thought to be the future leader of Africa with a booming population and economy, increased desertification coupled with unrelenting coastal flooding and poor governance has seen Nigeria struggle just to stay together. The country was projected to surpass a population of 377 million people by 2050 nearly thirty years ago.[4] But Nigerians have suffered through environmental devastation from creeping desertification of farmland, a rising sea that is slowly swallowing low lying Lagos, a civil war that officially began in 2043 and has only escalated since. The population of the country now stands at 288 million. The population peaked at just over 300 million in 2037, but poor crop yields coupled with an ever-increasing number of devastating storms and a sinking capital city of 30 million people came to a boil in the last decade.

Europe fought valiantly against climate change, with the continent at the forefront of most climate change legislation. However, the continent has paradoxically begun to cool.

In 2047, global scientists confirmed that the AMOC had shut down, sending Europe and North America into a panic of planning for a mini-ice age that was projected to last, at a minimum 150 years. Prices of all assets plummeted overnight. The stock exchanges of and land prices on both continents fell off a cliff, with most stock markets in Europe as well as Canada and the United States dropping over 50 percent in a matter of days as people did the math to see what catastrophic change that lasts two lifetimes would do to financial assets.

As Europe enters a new ice age, the agriculture of all of Europe will be devastated, with the crop yields from France to Germany expected to drop consistently in the coming decades, necessitating new crops and the importation of many foods that have historically been grown in these countries.

The immigration crisis has hit Europe the hardest, as land and ocean crossings from Asia, the Middle East and Africa are easier for migrants to travel than to North America, Asia, or Australia and New Zealand. The collapsed Russian federation, the Asian collapses, Africa suffering from historic drought and the Middle East no longer rich due to a near total shut down of the oil industry, has led to about 10 million people per year trying to get into relatively prosperous Europe. This has begun to strain the economic viability of the poorer Eastern European countries where many migrants stop.

European Union members in the West of the Union have put up legal and logistical roadblocks to keep those migrants out of their countries. Just last year in 2049, Ukraine took in 500,000 refuges. France took in 50,000. Violence against these migrants has increased each year, with the European Union having trouble tracking all the European Nationalist Groups (there are now over two dozen) that have been raiding refugee camps for the past decade, killing and kidnapping refugees. This has led to an explosions of an underground slave trade in Europe that is now estimated to generate $25 billion of revenue, some of which is rumored to flow back to some European capitals, where some well-connected bureaucrats can profit off the desperation of their fellow human beings. Off the books of course.

Some scientists are still arguing whether the Amazon rainforest has reached a tipping point and is destined to become savanna, but satellite photos don’t lie. The forest is still losing 2 percent of its canopy cover per year, as it has for the last decade. And no billion-dollar tree planting schemes funded by US banks seem to be doing any good. In 2035 when the first such scheme was launched, there was much fanfare, including American celebrities coming to film themselves putting shovels in Brazilian dirt. The continent of South America is learning that if you put American bankers in charge of an environmental effort, you will get a great deal of financial products spun out of that environmental effort, but little environmental progress. The Amazon Forest Development Fund, incorporated in Delaware, sold acres of land to environmentalists around the world, to keep it safe. Most of these buyers were in the United States and Europe.

Unfortunately, the commercials and videos on the internet touting the scheme had more money put into them than the auditing for the program. The commercials themselves were all shot on a soundstage in Los Angeles, as they purported to show philanthropic American celebrities planting trees with Brazilian villagers of the Amazon. Those “Brazilian” villagers were a tip-off, when they put the commercials on their IMDB pages and showed their residences in Los Angeles, New York, and New Miami. In the end, investors lost $18 billion dollars when the fund went bust 4 years ago. The creators and managers who thought up the scheme and ran the fund are nowhere to be found. They could be in what used to be the Panamanian jungle, or Pakistan, or the Congo. No one knows. All we know is that their fortunes were converted to crypto currencies a week before they were last seen in New York. Rumor has it that they have used the medical revolution in facial reconstructive surgery to disappear.

The Amazon is now 60 percent the size it was at its peak and is expected to dip below the 50 percent threshold in the next decade. The feedback loop of a dryer Amazon failing to cause the rains needed to help the Amazon grow back is expected to continue, until the forest is expected to stabilize at about 25 percent of its original size over the next century.

An inland sea has begun to open in southern Australia that is projected to bring the ocean to the outback in the coming years. Ocean-front property in the middle of Australia will have to wait, as the country has suffered through the worst wildfires of any nation in the past 30 years. The only remnants of the great barrier reef are now being kept alive in marine research facilities around the world, with the hope that they can be reintroduced into the ocean sometime later in this millennia when the oceans start to cool again.

New Zealand stopped selling real estate to non-residents in 2030, when the country realized that the rich and powerful from around the world were planning to escape to moderately temperate and beautiful New Zealand, which seems to be the most insulated from the world’s troubles. The price of citizenship has now risen to $3 million per person to become a citizen of New Zealand. This cost does not include the price of a residence. Luxury hotels catering to the world’s wealthy still waiting to buy a home have sprung up in the Nation’s Capital of Wellington. “Citizenship conversions” as this practice is now known, are now listed at over 17 percent of the country’s GDP.

The United Nations issued an emergency declaration in 2048 warning countries not to settle Antarctica, or to take over the continent at the bottom of the world in an effort to mine the large deposits of cobalt and lithium that were discovered when the Thwaits Glacier completely separated from the continent in 2046. All nations signed the agreement except North Korea, the island of Bezos, and the United States.

In the world's oceans, all mammal species are in free-fall due to ocean acidification. If the sea becomes too acidic, life in the ocean may fall off a cliff.

Many ocean organisms have shells or skeletal structures made of calcium carbonate, which will begin to dissolve if the ocean becomes too acidic. These organisms make up a key part of the ocean food web. Those organisms are largely gone, estimated to be at just 15% of their population from 100 years ago. The animals that eat them are starving, and the animals that eat those animals are starving…

Most ocean animals live in a relatively well-defined temperature niche that hasn’t changed much over thousands or tens of thousands of years. These animals and fish can’t adapt quickly if a temperature niche or food source changes drastically in a short time period. But things are changing too fast.

Commercial fishing in most nations has been banned for at least a decade in the hopes that the fish and the mammals will come back. But most are gone for good. Seafood restaurants on Earth are nearly impossible to find. The ones that do offer lab grown tuna, sea bass, or salmon are seen as expensive luxuries. Humanity is learning to eat jellyfish, which have thrived in the warming oceans.

2050 in the United States

Although the United States is somewhat insulated from the collapse of Pakistan, and other climate related catastrophes over the past decade simply due to its distance from these places, the U.S. economy can’t escape the impacts of global catastrophes. The collapse of Pakistan, the dissolution of Russia over two decades ago, the slowdown of China, and a worldwide depression brought about by the effects of climate change has still put a drag on the U.S. economy. The North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico has helped cushion the blow somewhat for the U.S. The independence of Quebec, formalized in 2042, came as a surprise to no one, but Quebec was quickly folded into the free trade agreement. Having such large and established partners in the integrated economy of North America, along with the vast moats of the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean do shield America somewhat from some of the world’s problems. But not completely.

America is largely energy independent, can produce most of the food it needs and still has the strongest military in the world. But it still needs markets to sell to, and increasingly those markets are failing. Asian markets and societies are struggling to tread water, with Pakistan still having a draining effect on the countries in its immediate neighborhood. With Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Philippines, and large parts of China all heavily impacted by the loss of land from the encroaching sea, Asian imports from the United States now stand at levels last seen in the 1990s. Climate refugees don’t buy many goods and services, and at present nearly half of these refugees come from Asia.

The famed Dow Jones Industrial average has spent the last decade hovering around 30,000; levels it first reached nearly 30 years ago. The “great crash” of the late 1920’s saw the DOW drop below 15,000. The index didn’t top 20,000 again until 1935 and has been slowly inching up to its current levels ever since. The panic of the 2020s has been the topic of much academic research, but scholars agree that no one event precipitated the collapse. In the end it was a lack of confidence in the future growth of the markets that sent investors to the exits. The baby boomer generation had started exiting the market at the beginning of the decade, putting a headwind in the face of the market. The housing bubble that deflated in the middle of the decade exacerbated the problem, but it was likely the climate related analysis that began to come out slowly late in the decade that sapped investor confidence.

The 2027 report “The carbon emperor have no clothes” written by a former wall street analyst detailed that fully half of the S&P 500 did not have viable business models if CO2 emissions were properly accounted for.[5] The report was written in anticipation of the European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which was to begin putting tariffs on some imported goods and services from countries that did not have a carbon price. Congress in the United States, seeing the writing on the wall, decided to implement their own modest carbon tax in 2027, lest the money from such a tax find its way into the pockets of European nations instead of staying in the United States. This pragmatic move by U.S. policymakers, kept carbon tax money at home, but inadvertently exposed the shaky foundations of many U.S. companies. By 2047, the stock markets in the US had recovered to their previous highs of the early 2020’s only to lose over 60 percent of their value when global scientists announced the AMOC had shut down.

Climate change has hit the Southeast and American Southwest the hardest in the first half of the century. The increased heat that comes with climate change has made cities in the American Southwest like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and others more challenging as temperatures rose and water drawing rights on the Colorado River from the 1920s were redrafted to significantly restrict the water on which the region depended. As the limits to water rose and economic opportunities diminished due to the oppressive heat of climate change, a steady exodus from the Southwest began, and continues to this day. Housing prices in the region have slowly fallen for the past few decades and seem to have hit the floor. The region has been about 10 percent below its peak population for the last decade. As the 2020s wore on, insurers stopped insuring houses close to forests, so that over time people moved out of these areas, and no new major housing has been built in or near large forests that might catch fire for decades.

The entire Gulf Coast from Houston to Miami, and the East Coast from Miami up to Canada has lost feet and in some cases nearly a meter of beaches and ocean fronts. The housing bubble that burst in the mid-2020s proved Miami to be a house of cards, and when the market crashed, there wasn’t enough money to keep fortifying the city from the encroaching ocean. This drove a vicious cycle as high-priced homes in Miami could not be sold, as celebrities, rich foreigners, and captains of industry didn’t want to have a home in a sinking city. The southern half of Florida is prone to chronic flooding, which gets worse each year. Insurers refuse to ensure buildings in the region and investors have no interest in building new housing and infrastructure. It is telling that no new corporate or municipal construction has been permitted in the state south of Orlando since 2035.

Large coastal cities in the Southeast from Houston, New Orleans, Biloxi, Mobile, Tampa and others have all faced their share of flooding related disasters over the recent decades, with each losing population over the past 25 years as homeowners have decided that it was more prudent to relocate than face sky-high insurance costs if they stayed, and less risk if they left. Hurricane Linda in 2029 grew to a category 5 storm before it made landfall just east of New Orleans. The property damage was comparable to Katrina in 2005, but the loss of life was much less due to a more orderly evacuation. The events of 2029 eventually led to the decision by Louisiana to no longer support development beyond New Orleans and led to the decision to let nature take back most of the Mississippi River Delta. Other states have adopted similar stances, with aggressive mangrove restoration projects adopted by most states on the Gulf Coast.

Despite these efforts, coastal erosion, a drop in tourism due to lost beaches and the abandonment of some coastlines to nature has led to a small but steady exodus from the Southeast. Many of those leaving coasts and places prone to flooding stay in the same state, but plenty have not. The Southeast states that border the ocean from Virginia to Texas have lost 10 electoral college votes in the past 30 years, as the migration to the Sunbelt that started in the previous century reversed. It is expected that this trend will continue as sea levels start to rise and more and more of the region becomes unviable for running a business or buying a home.

On a somewhat humorous, if not sad note; in 2043, the state of Mississippi changed its name to Smith. This came about when the world’s first trillionaire, Kyle Smith, bought the naming rights to the state, promising $98 billion to the state if it changed its name to honor him. The state formerly known as Mississippi went bankrupt in 2042 for a second time in less than ten years due to flooding from sea level rise, increased storm damage and overall mismanagement. The U.S. government bailed the state out of its first bankruptcy in 2035, but there was no appetite for another bailout just seven years later. Smith, a tech genius that earned his original fortune in software, really struck it rich by setting up the first company to profitably mine asteroids. Smith’s company found a way to analyze near earth asteroids and pick ones with the elements to produce jet fuel, water and breathable air in space, as well as helium, which is in short supply on earth – without having to drag those elements all the way up from earth. This has kickstarted the nascent “escaping earth” industry, with the first outposts for living on the moon expected to open in 2052.

In the Summer of 2029, the power grid in the Southwest finally crumbled under the strain of extreme heat. Many parts of the electric grid in the United States are over 100 years old and were not designed to last that long.[6] The grid could not keep up with the changes of adding the intermittent power of wind and solar to the grid. The instances of grid failure and blackouts had been increasing each year but culminated in the Phoenix tragedy of 2029. The city had already suffered from 12 consecutive days of temperatures over 110 degrees, when the grid went down. Nearly all of Phoenix and its 1.6 million people lost power for the better part of 4 days. Over half of the city’s population (900,000) were estimated to suffer from heat related illnesses. Over 100,000 people left the city. Hotels with air conditioning were filled within a 100-mile radius of the city. Many people simply spent the night sleeping in their cars in the northern part of the state that had cooler temperatures. Nearly 25,000 people died over those four days in Phoenix.[7] A week later, the US Congress passed a massive spending bill worth 1 trillion dollars to update the country’s electricity grid.[8] This amount was estimated to be about one quarter of the spending that was needed. A similar, but smaller event killed 8,000 in Las Vegas 3 years later.

Unlike several countries that have seen a loss of population due to demographic reasons or a loss of land to climate change, the United States has seen its population continue to grow, with the population of the U.S. now standing at approximately 390 million. The birthrate in the United States has continued to fall, as it has in much of the developed world; due to many factors, including the increasing expense of raising a child, fertility rates among men that are now nearly 80 percent lower than they were 100 years ago, and anxiety about bringing children into a world in decline. The growth in population over the preceding decades in the United States has primarily come through immigration. This moved forward the date that America became a “majority-minority” country, meaning that half of the country did not belong to the largest racial group. Early in the century, forecasts estimated that the U.S. would become a minority- majority country by about 2045, due to declining birthrates among white American families and increased immigration, this happened in 2042. Some white supremacist groups had rallied around this concept to instill a fear of “replacement” by minorities in the earlier parts of the century, but this strategy lost its power by the 2030s when there were just not enough “angry white” voters to form a national voting block of much significance. Refugee immigration to the United States is not as high as it is in Europe, which is physically closer to many of the regions of the world beset by climate challenges and famine.

This population pushing 400 million has become a challenge the ability of the United States to feed its people. The nearly 50 percent food gap between crop calories produced in 2010 and those needed in 2050[9] has devastated many nations around the world and led to famine on a massive scale. The gap is lower in the United States, but still much higher than it has been historically. The staple grains of corn, wheat, soy, and rice have each decreased in yield by 10 – 20 percent in the United States since the turn of the century. This is despite the production of drought resistant crops, better water use technology and the conversion of more former cattle pastureland to crop production. Increased heat stress, extreme weather and soil erosion have been challenges that America's farmers could not solve. This has led to an increase in American homes supplementing grocery shopping with home gardens. In 2008 approximately 36 million homes grew their own food to some extent.[10] This could range from a family that only grew one or two things in their garden to those that were totally self-sufficient. That number has exploded, with nearly half of Americans now responding to surveys stating that they grow some of their own food or participate in a community garden. This supplementation does not go nearly far enough, as just over one-third of Americans in 2050 are food insecure, up from just over 10 percent of the population in 2021.[11] Climate change has complicated the food issue in America as places that could be depended on in the past for a steady production of crops in the past, can no longer do so. South Florida is increasingly being abandoned by humanity as the ocean takes over, the breadbasket of America is moving north of the border and California does not have the rich soil it did in the past and has had to make do with much less water after the revised Colorado River compact limited the water rights of all participants. As California was the biggest user of Colorado’s water, these changes hit them the hardest.

The revised Colorado river compact, which slowly took shape over the late 2020’s allowed the river to rebound to about 80 percent of its previous flow, though cheating by the compact participants has been a problem for decades, with the high price of water as the main incentive to cheat. Still, the compact saved cities out West that could be viable with a reduced water allotment, while those that had an unrealistic perception of the water that they could use have seen population decreases or faded away entirely. The federal office of water management (FOWM) was created in the 2030s to better police the country’s water resources and has handed out hefty fines to ranchers and companies in the West. Over 10,000 individuals now sit in Federal Prisons for water related crimes. Large technology companies almost exclusively locate near the ocean these days,[12] as public outrage on high freshwater use for data centers and fines from the FOWM made ocean-based data centers the best economic decision.

That was the mild version of civilization collapse.

If we continue our current climate path, something like the world I described, or worse, will be our fate. This is not meant to be a prediction, but an educated guess using today’s data and my imagination. I encourage everyone to use their imagination in this way to help you understand what may be coming for us. Just because it hasn’t happened in your lifetime yet, doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. Recency bias afflicts us all, as we tend to believe what happened most recently is the world we will see in the future. Climate change needs to break us out of that way of thinking, to imagine the breakdowns in the world that we will see in the coming years, and to act to stop them.

We will have less water, food, housing, and financial security, we just don’t know exactly how that will manifest itself. Because of its size and wealth, the United States is likely to fare better than most other nations on earth, even if some of those societies and nations collapse. That is cold comfort. Being the best house in a dangerous and crumbling neighborhood in a dying society is not preferable to being an average house in a thriving and safe society – but currently that is the choice we are making.

The 2050 example above would not likely lead to a collapse of the United States or our civilization, but it would put us on the road to one. The world awaiting us on the business-as-usual path is one in which half of the planet is malnourished, in which we have killed most marine life, where most large rainforests are on the way to disappearing, in which humanity is retreating from the coasts with the expectation that they will have to keep retreating for another 100 years. That is a society that is on the way to collapse, not one that can turn things around. For thriving, fast forward a few hundred years, where the population decline has leveled off, all the ice caps have melted and humanity will gather on a much smaller landmass, with much fewer resources, and will start over.

What do you expect the world to be like where you live in 2050?

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[1] Modelling impacts of climate change on global food security | SpringerLink The report states that under a business as usually scenario, about 31% of people in 2050 are at risk of food insecurity. When climate change impacts are added to the equation an additional 21% of people on earth are seen as at risk of food insecurity by 2050.

[2] 1.5 Million More Indian Citizens Projected to Die Each Year from Extreme Heat due to Climate Change by 2100 | EPIC (uchicago.edu)

[3] IPCC_AR6_WGII_Chapter10.pdf

[4] Nigeria: population forecast 2025-2050 | Statista

[5] This report does not exist, yet.

[6] The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke | Goodreads

[7] How Blackouts during Heat Waves Amplify Mortality and Morbidity Risk | Environmental Science & Technology (acs.org)

[8] The Price of a Fully Renewable US Grid: $4.5 Trillion | Greentech Media

[9] How to Sustainably Feed 10 Billion People by 2050, in 21 Charts | World Resources Institute (wri.org)

[10] Gardening boom: One in 3 U.S. households is now growing food - Farm and Dairy

[11] Hunger in America | Feeding America

[12] Microsoft’s new way of cooling its data centers: Throw them in the sea | Ars Technica