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lprovenPure brain-fart. No citations or anything. Merely for entertainment value.
Here is how I think the 21st century will go:
* politically etc., nothing meaningful happens for a generation or so. CO₂ levels keep rising.
* the north pole melts. Much excited squawking; nothing else. CO₂ levels keep rising.
* polar oil drilling etc. goes ahead. Several epic environmental disasters happen. More squawking, no action. CO₂ levels keep rising.
* West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapses, major melts happen in Greenland. Sea level goes up 5-6 metres, maybe twice that, quickly, inside decades. Effects not dissimilar to the 2004 Indonesia or 2011 Japanese tsunamis, but slower and world-wide.
Mahousive upheaval worldwide; cities drown, etc. Tens to hundreds of millions die as a result.
Immediate realisation worldwide that the doom-and-gloom merchants were actually correct all along. Questions asked about large-scale remediation. Answer is: it's too late; this will continue for decades to centuries, there is no longer anything we can do.
Result, massive outcry, governments fall, etc.
Trivial economic results: hyperflation as in the 1920s, and as in Zimbabwe; money is worth more as paper fuel than as currency.
Bigger impact: entire democratic systems collapse, big countries go bankrupt, etc. Credit Crunch writ large; entire West goes foom and implodes. People scavenging in the ruins, etc.
Technologically-undeveloped counties and non-democratic ones are much less impacted and thrive as a result; balance of power shifts to BRIC. Probably mainly China at first.
Water wars break out between new superpowers of Asia, Latin America, Africa etc. Quite possibly go nuclear. It gets messy. Mass-migration: colonisation of thawing Canada and Siberia, displacing vestiges of nation-states in the way.
Over the next century or two:
New sea levels gradually stabilise; planetary climate eventually stabilises towards tropical climates in the higher latitudes, deserts around the equatorial regions. Mass extinction event - 80-90% of plant and animal life dies out. Ice-free planet, sea levels around 100 metres higher than today. All the rainforests, coral reefs, tundra etc is gone. Lots of deserts, lots of farmland, no fossil fuels so a much smaller, less energy-intense human society.
New inland seas in central Asia, Australia and South America substantially redraw the map of the world.
Human population drops massively, to (finger in the air) maybe a tenth or so of current levels.
New fairly stable planetary climate system but with frequent superstorms and so on. Wildy, messy, unpredictable; extinction of all long-range migratory species and so on.
Over the next few millennia, the climate stabilises properly in this state. Wildlife numbers boom as human species' influence weakens. Diversity does not return, of course, in this timescale. Equatorial Africa and South America are mostly desert, possibly including southern Eurasia and southern North America. However, Greenland and Antarctica thaw out and become covered in life, although human influences prevent regeneration of forests.
After a few dozen to hundred millennia, the biosphere resorbs and locks up all the carbon freed in the 19th/20th/21st centuries. Temperatures drop, the climate cools, the forests retreat from the poles toward the equator.
Quite possibly, this overshoots and turns into a full-fledged ice-age; maybe a new (well, restored) cycle of them.
In a few hundred centuries' time, it's hard to tell what happened, except that there are lots of plastics in the soils, in the oceans and in sediments worldwide, ambient radiation levels are a bit higher, and the species inventory is around a tenth of what it was. There are new coral reefs in the tropics, new rainforests, but they are much quieter and less colourful than pre-industrial-revolution ones were.
Possibly, our descendants are living in this, almost certainly without much technology, and with no accessible fossil fuels or metal ores, they can't readily rebuild one.
It's not so bad. It's a shame about all the species diversity that's being wasted, and it's a shame we humans probably won't get to the stage of planetary colonisation or terraforming or anything. We might just about get to the level of bootstrapping a robot civilisation but personally I have grave doubts that AI or nanotechnology is actually possible, because if they were, I think they'd have landed on the White House lawn - or in Tiananmen Square - before now. :¬)
Here is how I think the 21st century will go:
* politically etc., nothing meaningful happens for a generation or so. CO₂ levels keep rising.
* the north pole melts. Much excited squawking; nothing else. CO₂ levels keep rising.
* polar oil drilling etc. goes ahead. Several epic environmental disasters happen. More squawking, no action. CO₂ levels keep rising.
* West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapses, major melts happen in Greenland. Sea level goes up 5-6 metres, maybe twice that, quickly, inside decades. Effects not dissimilar to the 2004 Indonesia or 2011 Japanese tsunamis, but slower and world-wide.
Mahousive upheaval worldwide; cities drown, etc. Tens to hundreds of millions die as a result.
Immediate realisation worldwide that the doom-and-gloom merchants were actually correct all along. Questions asked about large-scale remediation. Answer is: it's too late; this will continue for decades to centuries, there is no longer anything we can do.
Result, massive outcry, governments fall, etc.
Trivial economic results: hyperflation as in the 1920s, and as in Zimbabwe; money is worth more as paper fuel than as currency.
Bigger impact: entire democratic systems collapse, big countries go bankrupt, etc. Credit Crunch writ large; entire West goes foom and implodes. People scavenging in the ruins, etc.
Technologically-undeveloped counties and non-democratic ones are much less impacted and thrive as a result; balance of power shifts to BRIC. Probably mainly China at first.
Water wars break out between new superpowers of Asia, Latin America, Africa etc. Quite possibly go nuclear. It gets messy. Mass-migration: colonisation of thawing Canada and Siberia, displacing vestiges of nation-states in the way.
Over the next century or two:
New sea levels gradually stabilise; planetary climate eventually stabilises towards tropical climates in the higher latitudes, deserts around the equatorial regions. Mass extinction event - 80-90% of plant and animal life dies out. Ice-free planet, sea levels around 100 metres higher than today. All the rainforests, coral reefs, tundra etc is gone. Lots of deserts, lots of farmland, no fossil fuels so a much smaller, less energy-intense human society.
New inland seas in central Asia, Australia and South America substantially redraw the map of the world.
Human population drops massively, to (finger in the air) maybe a tenth or so of current levels.
New fairly stable planetary climate system but with frequent superstorms and so on. Wildy, messy, unpredictable; extinction of all long-range migratory species and so on.
Over the next few millennia, the climate stabilises properly in this state. Wildlife numbers boom as human species' influence weakens. Diversity does not return, of course, in this timescale. Equatorial Africa and South America are mostly desert, possibly including southern Eurasia and southern North America. However, Greenland and Antarctica thaw out and become covered in life, although human influences prevent regeneration of forests.
After a few dozen to hundred millennia, the biosphere resorbs and locks up all the carbon freed in the 19th/20th/21st centuries. Temperatures drop, the climate cools, the forests retreat from the poles toward the equator.
Quite possibly, this overshoots and turns into a full-fledged ice-age; maybe a new (well, restored) cycle of them.
In a few hundred centuries' time, it's hard to tell what happened, except that there are lots of plastics in the soils, in the oceans and in sediments worldwide, ambient radiation levels are a bit higher, and the species inventory is around a tenth of what it was. There are new coral reefs in the tropics, new rainforests, but they are much quieter and less colourful than pre-industrial-revolution ones were.
Possibly, our descendants are living in this, almost certainly without much technology, and with no accessible fossil fuels or metal ores, they can't readily rebuild one.
It's not so bad. It's a shame about all the species diversity that's being wasted, and it's a shame we humans probably won't get to the stage of planetary colonisation or terraforming or anything. We might just about get to the level of bootstrapping a robot civilisation but personally I have grave doubts that AI or nanotechnology is actually possible, because if they were, I think they'd have landed on the White House lawn - or in Tiananmen Square - before now. :¬)
