Crossing the Threshold of the Long 21st Century

Before We Begin…

The rough draft for the decade from 2025 to 2035 ballooned to almost 6,000 words, so I concluded I would need to scrap my initial plan to tell the story of the coming century by the decade. Instead, each Friday will cover a five-year period, starting in 2025 and ending in 2125. On top of changing the chronology of the storytelling, I realized I had a second issue on my hands. I could tell the story of the coming century solely through a dry, textbook style, outlining momentous events and tracking broad trends. But to really tell that story, we need characters to follow. People who’s lives can give the imagination something more concrete to grip on to as the wild beast of history careens from one landmark event to another. So I've decided to take a page, and four characters, from the book that Dr. Mattson and I are finishing. At the start of Inequality by Design, we meet three high school graduates of the class of 1980, and follow them for 40 years, as their lives are buffeted by the corporate-approved creative destruction of the neo-liberal economic era. By the end of the opening chapter, as the main characters enter elderhood, their kids and grandkid are entering adulthood in the year 2020. So it is these four who we will follow through the first half of the unfolding Long 21st Century.

What better metaphor for the coming century, than a gate topped with barbed wire, dwarfed by an approaching storm?

Also, Oklahoma's wild weather generated this image, not AI. More on that later...

A fine read, even if it was
as much a way to talk about
the USA in the 60s and 70s,
as a detailed examination
of the Long 14th Century.

    But before we meet our protagonists, I want to throw out a quick note about the title of this post. Calling an era a 'long century' is, like everything else under the sun, not new. Perhaps the most well-know example come from Barbara Tuchman's book A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous Fourteenth Century. Published in 1978, the book covers the events of the Great Famines of the early 14th century, the Black Plague, the Papal Schism, peasant revolts, and the general breakdown of Western European society as it transitions from the Medieval Period (roughly 800-1300 AD) to the Early Modern Period which began sometime around 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople, the flowering of the Italian Renaissance, and the start of the Age of Sail. Setting aside the academic criticisms, the concept that Tuchman spoke to was the idea that the events which defined a period of transition didn't conform to the neat limit of 100 years. Thus, the changes experienced by Western Culture which were amplified by the beginning of the Little Ice Age, fundamentally reformed what it meant to be a member of Western Christendom. And that era ran for nearly 150 years, aka a century and a half. A long century, if you will. And that period seems suspiciously similar in length to the philosophy underpinning the Iroquois Confederacy's Great Law of Peace, a philosophy that one should consider the impact of their actions on the next seven generations. Arabic thinker and historian Ibn Khaldun's Dynastic Change and Its Economic Consequences posits a similar length of time as the life cycle of any given dynasty.

    This is all to say that I believe we, the people of North America, have already crossed the threshold. While I don't know what event future historians will point to as 'the' triggering event: September 11th, the Great Recession, Calderon's War on the Cartels? Heck, they may even reach back to the first iteration of NAFTA, which went into effect in 1994 and ushered in a transformation of the North American economy from three big, separate entities, into functionally one, tightly interlinked mega-economy. Indeed, if the Long 21st Century began in 1994, and runs until some seminal event circa 2125, that would bracket the Long 21st Century quite nicely. 

For giggles, I played with AI image generation for the four main characters. This was a for-fun experiment and I will return to stock images. But let us return to the four characters of the narrative, shall we?

    The first is Marty Junior, first-born son, unsurprisingly, of Marty Senior. Growing up, Marty took his role as big brother seriously enough he had a few run-ins with the law, beating up anyone he perceived as picking on his little brother or sister. By 2025, Marty Junior is a 33 year old cyber security specialist who works for the State of Michigan. He lives in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan with a wife, Tina, and their (uncreatively-named) newborn son, Marty the third, aka Trey. 

    Little sister Jillian celebrates her 30th birthday in 2025. Her parents secretly joked that she got all the brains of the family. Those brains won her free rides to the University of Michigan and that to a Canadian medical school. A few years out of residency, she and her husband Chris run a health clinic in Ashtabula, Ohio, which operates at perpetual near-bankruptcy. Jillian is pregnant with the couple’s first child. 

    Our third character is the younger brother, 26 year old Bobby, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Like his father, Bobby suffers from dyslexia, which has made him a perennial temp-worker. He is a bit of a black sheep of the family, as their overworked father’s deteriorating health over the course of the 2010s left Bobby without a stable father figure. Bobby showed up quite drunk at the father’s 2020 funeral, and hasn’t spoken to Marty Junior or Jillian since then. 

    Apart from these three siblings we have 16 year old Allison, the granddaughter of Jenny, another protagonist from the first chapter of Inequality by Design. In 2020, her family left the rustbelt for the warmer climate of the Gulf Coast, but their 30 year old car only got them as far as western Tennessee before breaking down for good. In 2025, Allison is slogging through what passes for an education at a chronically underfunded high school. Unlike her mother at the same age, she is not boy-crazy. Having spent her entire childhood moving from one apartment to the next, always one step ahead of eviction, she never established close friendships, and was never quite able to pin down what she wants to do with her life. 

The Big Picture: 2025 to 2030

Is that a sunrise or a sunset?

The first few of the years are deceptively calm for both the United States, and our four main characters. International headlines periodically mention a devastating drought pushing the people of the Yucatan towards starvation. A dramatic series of financial and political crises across the northern border in Canada disrupts some cross-border trade, but most people in the U.S. are just trying to get by. Making basic ‘getting by’ harder, import tariffs cost every American roughly $2,600 each year, but US-manufactured goods to replace more expensive imports often fail to materialize. At the same time, attempts at mass deportation pursued by the Reactionary Party administration in Washington pushes more and more recent immigrants and native-born relatives into a shadow economy rife with exploitation and criminal elements. While events in the eastern hemisphere make trouble over there, North America appears a serene island of stability by comparison. But pressures in all three major countries are building. 

I don't know what this chart measures, but 
it certainly looks bad for Canada...

Three horsemen of the economic apocalypse visit Canada: first comes electoral chaos, with no obvious replacement for the Trudeau government, followed by the collapse of an inflated real estate market and declining exports to the US. These factors spark a government debt crisis. The western provinces demand grater financial accountability from Ottawa, and hold referendums to refusing to send tax monies on to the federal government. Like the independence referendum in Catalonia, the government responds with arrests and laws banning provinces from holding plebiscites. This goads Quebec into outdoing the western provinces, with the provincial parliament votes to formally ‘confederate’ with the rest of the country. The province will no longer enforce laws passed by the national parliament, and will explore creating their own currency. The move is meant to force the Canadian government to backtrack on banning plebiscites, but instead provokes the national government to send in the Mounties and dissolve Quebec's National Assembly. But the move backfires, and the western provincial parliaments side with Quebec, passing laws to explicitly ban local businesses from collecting federal taxes.  By 2028, the country is divided into two hostile camps, the confederates of the periphery, and the centralizer provinces in between. 

Mexico's drought monitor readings last year.
Yes, I know, the Yucatan looks okay for now.

If Canada suffers from a deluge of problems, to the south a lack of deluges causes a different set of problems. The failure of cool-season monsoons leads to crop failures across southern Mexico and Central America. Starvation pushes some five million desperate people to crime and lawlessness, a situation local criminal gangs are only too happy to exploit. While the government in Mexico City does attempt to ship gran to the region, most of the shipments end up looted by the starving or stolen and held for ransom by gangs. The Maya-speaking peoples of the region view the fight between the Spanish-speaking gangs and government forces as just another instance of second-class citizenship and historical brutality. The Maya break into outright rebellion, and they are quickly dubbed the Zapatistas Nuevas by the Spanish-speaking population. This Pan-Maya movement even appeals to Spanish speakers sick of being held at arm’s length by the central government in Mexico City and being forced to take in people deported from the United States. 

As the year 2028 begins, the United States appears insulated from the brushfires burning to the north and south. But that appearance is deceiving, and the US is just a much a tinderbox of economic and cultural resentments. Every conflagration requires a spark, and because history has a sense of humor, an income tax cut proves to be that spark. A law passed in 2026, supported by both political parties, goes into effect. It eliminates the higher tax rate on overtime, while simultaneously ending the requirement that employers pay overtime for any work past 40 hours a week. Most work-forces without a union contract, and even some with one, quickly find their OT disappearing from their paychecks in January. 82 million Americans work hourly-wage jobs, and many salaried employees also receive some form of overtime compensation, so the consternation and fury spreads quickly. 

If your start a republic by protesting taxation, why not end one protesting taxes?

Still believing the political process might solve the problem, Americans flood congressional offices with angry calls. But Congress fails to repeal of this despised reform, with some even responding to constituents to get different jobs. Since the right to strike was also eliminated early on in the reactionary administration, labor unions and non-unionized workers must turn to a more informal method of protest. They call for everyone in America to take a walk in the park on April Fool’s Day, and stay there until tax day on April 15th. Municipal parks across the USA fill with millions of people. The media sends the message that this April Fools joke will be a one-time event, but the next day, the parks fill up again. Then the next day. Then the next. A week into the General Strike, some 30% of the US labor force takes “walks in the park” rather than going to work. Many who do not call off work participate in slow downs and stoppages, vowing to do half the work expected. The strikes prove surprisingly successful, grinding the economy to a halt. 

The oligarchs hold the cards though, and tell every elected official in the country if they ever want to see a single cent in campaign contributions again, they will break the strikes. The majority of elected officials comply with their corporate task-masters. National Guard units are mobilized, and police officers called in for extra pay working on “park clearing” details. In some cases, local cops and national guardsmen refuse to comply with the orders. When this happens, private security companies fill in support roles, freeing up those who do obey orders to put on riot gear. 

It is NOT hard to find a real-life image of cops 
clearing protestors out of a park. Your challenge,
dear reader, is to guess which park clearing this
is a picture of...

At this point, our four characters re-enter the narrative, and we will follow them through the General Strike of 2028. So, let’s make this all personal…

Marty Junior

Marty Junior counts himself as one of the good guys. Working for the State of Michigan’s eponymously-named Office of Remote Surveillance, Marty monitors the online activity, especially financial transactions, of organized crime with a focus on human trafficking. Starting in 2025, the state received federal money and expanded definition of human trafficking, including labor organizers and charitable NGOs accused of harboring illegal immigrants or naturalized citizens targeted for deportation. Marty finds the expanded definition troubling, but a round of automation and job cuts puts to rest any doubts he may have. Junior even gets a promotion to shift supervisor, which largely insulates him from the job cuts. Plus, his superior assures him that ‘loyal men’ will be needed in the near future, rather than increased automation.

When the general strike begins Marty and his agency are more than willing to backstop National Guard and private security forces with communications and intelligence. They monitors both live feed cameras and cell phone traffic of the park walkers, turning the information suspected organizers of the strike over to local police agencies. Arrests take place overnight at suspects residences, before they can get to the protection of crowds at local parks. Marty goes home every day after work and loses no sleep about the possible fates of these political prisoners.

        In the years following the crackdown on the General Strike, Marty Junior boasts to his superiors about the vigor with which his office tracked down cell traffic and cash app transactions. He concludes the late-night arrests prevented the Detroit-area protests from getting out of hand. When speaking to people outside the office, Marty rarely mentions his work, and often draws on his experiences before the strike, if the other person asks anything like probing questions. Even with Tina, he rarely talks about the core of his work.

Like this, but with corporate sponsorship...

Jillian

Julie and her husband Chris thought they would be a power-couple; she would be the doctor providing care, while Chris the accountant would make sure they get paid. They even identified Ashtabula, Ohio as a community underserved by the health care system, thinking this would provide a stable customer base. But the joke was on them, as insurance payouts declined and patients found themselves unable to afford copays. To keep their clinic open, the pair find themselves having to hire additional staff to collect payments and manage paperwork, rather than provide direct patient care. 

While Jillian, Chris, and the fifteen clinic employees sympathize with the striker’s, they know they cannot take time off to join the strike, as the clinic would certainly lose too much revenue. The staff of the clinic demands some sort of solidarity, and a vote is taken to is taken to open the clinic to them anyone ‘walking the nearby park’ without up-front payment required. The Ohio governor declares a statewide curfew, and the State Police show up to close the clinic. Jillian and the staff leave, but show up the next day to operate as normal. Much like in Michigan, the state authorities in Ohio regard such actions as trouble making. Since he manages the clinic, state police arrest Julian's husband Chris while he is on his way back to a local park to spread word about the services the clinic might provide. This move infuriates both Jillian and the members of the staff who then vote to take half of their staff to the park to help treat any injured strikers. While Jillian stays to oversee clinic operations, half of the staff is present when the local park is surrounded by mounted riot police and the National Guard. 

Eventually, the tools of empire used abroad,
end up getting used on the people of the homeland.

When the protesters refuse to disperse, the state attacks. Hundreds, including the entirety of the staff are either injured or arrested very few escape the police cordon. The crackdown results in several deaths a number of critical injuries, and sparks general outrage across the state. The next day when protesters meet at the parks, they come heavily armed. In some places this results in tents standoffs with the police but in others, including Dayton and Toledo the strikers shoot first. Dozens are killed and hundreds injured across the state. Those currently in custody are beaten and tortured on suspicion that they are somehow coordinating the spontaneous riots on the outside. The victims of this state brutality include Juliana's husband Chris, who staggers out of the prison with broken shoulders and black eyes.

Bobby

As mentioned earlier Bobby works a series of temp jobs in Louisville Kentucky. Needing every dollar he earns, he does not participate in the first day of the general strike, referring to the people by the media moniker of April fools. As the strike enters its second week, Bobby loses his temper job unloading trucks at the Louisville train station.Most of the freight trains in the country are either halted or operating way way behind schedule. While Bobby is initially frustrated with the strike, an idle railway worker encourages him to go to one of the local parks and actually meet the people he's upset with. Bobby follows the advice and ends up befriending several strikers. With temp jobs dried up and rent due on the 15th, Bobby sews what’s left of his cash into his windbreaker, grabs his sleeping bag, and heads to the park. There, he joins hundreds of others on the path to homelessness. 

As word of the riots in Ohio filters down to Kentucky guns, improvised explosive devices, and Molotov cocktails begin showing up ay discrete locations around the park. Bobby is highly suspicious that at least some of these have been placed by agents of the state, and he and a friend actually detain someone leaving a crate of national guard issued hand grenades. 

Go south, young man!

When Bobby receives a phone call from his mother begging him not to participate in the strikes he tries to do the right thing and turn the hand grenades over to a police officer. This move predictably backfires, with Bobby arrested for possessing stolen government property. Fortunately for him, he's sitting in county jail when the crackdown begins in Louisville. The park he had been at is the scene of some of the worst fighting. Over 300 people, both strikers and security forces, losing their lives. Bobby is further fortunate that the governor of Kentucky is much more soft in his support of the corporate state and very quickly offers an amnesty to everyone arrested during the rioting if it will get the bloodshed to stop. This tactic, along with the collective horror due to the Battle of Louisville, brings the general strike to a slow-motion. Finding an eviction notice on his door, Bobby grabs his sleeping bag and jumps on an empty freight train. As the train rumbles south, Bobby calls his mom and lets her know he's leaving Kentucky.

Allison

I mentioned above Alison found everything about school boring: classes, teachers, fellow students, all of it. So she dropped out and started working full-time at a fried chicken place. At the beginning of 2028 Alison is 19 years old working as a shift manager. As the strike begins the fried chicken places teeters on the verge of bankruptcy because the franchise owner keeps demanding more and more profit from the business. The owner even visits the restaurant the day after the general strike begins, and threatens to fire anyone who participates going forward. To show he’s serious, the owner fires two line cooks who called out the day before. This action completely backfires. The entire staff walks out and heads straight to the nearest park. They make impromptu meals for fellow strikers and generally serve as a nucleus to organize everything people living in the park might need from food to clothing to shelter to sanitation facilities. Well this would mark Allison out as an organizer and someone targeted for arrest, the entire operation is done with sticky notes, pencils and absolutely no electronics. 

Allison throws herself into the organization of the strike camp with enthusiasm, finding a meaning that she never found in the mindless rigidity and conformism of high school. Allison and the other strikers are fortunate that the mayor of Memphis is one of few elected politicians in the state of Tennessee to not tow the corporate line. The Mayor argues quite publicly that the police department has better things to do than kick people out of parks that are technically owned by the public which currently is filling them up. This buys the strikers an few extra weeks until the Tennessee National Guard moves in to clear out the protest camps in early May. The Tennessee state government then dissolves the city government of Memphis, turning all its functions over to the county and declares that anyone found in the parks after the middle of the month will be arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. 

Allison and her work crew stolidly return to the restaurant. Their boss agrees to rehire them, on the condition that they pay back the franchise potential profits lost during the strike. This move has the double effect both garnishing meager wages while simultaneously showing the employees just how much profit they provide the franchise owner. The workers in public agree to this, but hold a secret meeting and decide to assassinate the franchise owner. The restaurant’s bartender has military experience and improvises an IED from household items. A week later, the franchise owner’s car blows up shortly after leaving the restaurant. Everyone in the restaurant is suspected of participating, but they all keep quiet and the police can never actually pin it on anyone. From the silence surrounding the bombing of the boss's car, emerges an unspoken consensus; "We could do that again."

"I don't know what happened, we were busy at working..."

Ice Age Heat Wave

“When our rivers run dry and our crops cease to grow.

When our summers grow longer, and winters won’t snow.”

Rise Against, "Collapse (Post-America)"

We’ve slapped many labels on the impacts of industrial civilization on the global ecosystem. Climate change. Anthropogenic global warming. Human induced climate change. Climate destabilization. All accurate, all semantic. For all the snark about how Earth’s climate always changes and the human impacts won’t matter in the long run, Rise Against pointed out problem #1 with climate change when they wrote ‘our crops cease to grow’. If you don’t care one bit about rising sea levels flooding the homes of millions, or the mass extinction that very well could follow a few degreeS rise in global temperatures over the coming centuries, take a moment to think about where your next meal will come from. More on that later. 

As with the post about resource depletion last week, I'm not going to rehash the supposed controversy about the underlying science of climate change. People with PhD’s, doing decades of research in the field, have done the hard work, and we should listen to what they have to say. This isn’t to say I dogmatically accept whatever the climate scientists have to say. As I will go over in a bit, there’s a leak one area where the observed outcomes appear to be playing out differently from how the climate models said they would. That said, I don’t accept what PR firms paid millions by fossil fuel companies have to say about the underlying causes or impacts of climate change.

I'm sure those PR firms are honest actors...

    If you're interested in reading specific US projections, the National Climate Assessment is a good place to start. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. "I don't trust the government." Okay. Fine. Your tax dollars still paid for the NCA, so you might as well look at what you bought. 

    If you're not at least superficially familiar with the topic, let me bring you up to speed. Since about 1850, human beings have been burning fossil fuels at rates that have dumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the biosphere can absorb. Due to the chemical properties of one carbon bonded to two oxygens, that carbon dioxide is a potent heat trapping gas. Technically, the carbon and the oxygen are double-bonded, which means the molecule traps energy better than the other gases in our atmosphere except methane. We've known this since the late 19th century. Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius identified CO2 as the principal heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, though he did say, in 1896, that calculating how fast temperatures would rise wasn’t feasible at that time. Since then, we’ve done a lot of work documenting the rise in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and we’ve observed a 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures over pre-industrial levels. 

I am very much aware of that in the 1970s, some climate scientist thought we might be headed into another Ice Age. Since then the Earth has only gotten hotter, and the carbon dioxide levels have only gone up. So while the climates consensus was not 100% settled in the seventies, at this point there's no doubt, from a scientific point of view; human activity drives the observed rise in both CO2 levels and global temperatures.

In a less than shocking turn of events, it turns out one of these magazine covers is fake...
There was scientific debate about global cooling vs warming, so the kept records, made
observations, tested hypothesizes, and came to the conclusion that cooling wasn't the problem.
With science. Hooray. The system worked.

Importantly for the topic of the next hundred years, the question is not whether the climate is changing, but to what degree. And yes that was a intentional pun. Dad jokes aside, the observed rise in temperatures are right in line with literally dozens of different models. It's almost like the science is sound. Anyway, it begs the question: What if the impacts of climate change are not reserved for the distant future?

I feel like I need to clarify a semantic point; when I say severe impacts, I’m referring to the 1 in 1000 years floods that seem to be happening every decade now, or the 1 in 1000 year droughts, or the fact that the two biggest reservoirs on the Colorado River are at only 33% capacity (and that's not normal), or the fact that Greenland is seeing rain rainfall later every year. These last two specific instances are just a smattering of the warning lights the climate is displaying for us on the metaphorical dashboard. And for the last year, average temperatures around the globe have been 1.5 degree hotter than pre-industrial temps, with no respite. This suggests that we’ve hit a new normal.

Twenty years of less rain and snow looks like this....

I acknowledge the caveat that ‘in recorded history’ is a very limited period of time, going reliably back only to the late 1800s. Past temperature records are difficult to compile in no small part, due to a lack of thermometers and dedicated climate scientists back then. Proxy methods used to make educated guesses about the temperature of the climate are adequate, but they are not completely precise. Unlike open heart surgery, where precision is, I’m told, very important, ‘close enough’ works for the educated guessing about past temperatures. The fact that we’ve pushed our climate to high temperatures not seen since the end of the last ice age, should not console anyone.

Speaking of the end of the last ice age, about 11,500 years ago, the fact that the planet is as hot today as it was then shouldn't be a problem, right? Right? Well, not exactly.If you're interested in a deeper read about how heating after the last Ice Age influenced the rise of agriculture, I recommend The Long Summer by Brian Fagan. As you probably know, Agriculture emerged around the same time as the end of the Ice Age with wheat and barley cultivation, between the Tigers and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East, rice cultivation in southern China, and maize (corn) cultivation began about 3,500 years after that, around 8,000 years ago. While there’s quite a bit of academic debate about the how and why of the domestication of tasty plants but people, this process took hundreds of years in the case of wheat, and likely two thousand years for corn. And all this took place during a period of relative climatic stability.  

    This will matter a great deal going forward. To pick just one example, the NIH found that as global temperatures rise by 1, 2, and 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, wheat crop yields will decrease by 8%, 18% and 28% respectively, based on a study of wheat cultivars in South Africa. So simplify the research, when the temperature rises above 30 Celsius for more than 24 hours, it puts stress on the plants, which drives down yields. At night, most agricultural cultivars need temperatures to drop below 75 to grow.

Of course this is not true for tropical cultivars, but for cereals like corn, wheat and  barley it is true. It's also worth noting that potatoes were originally cultivated high in the Andes mountain where they were more likely to encounter frost during the growth cycle then they were 90° day. Also thank you to the people of the southern Andes for cultivating tomatoes and potatoes they're both delicious. Why does this matter? It matters a great deal when you consider that the average human needs an average of about 2000 calories a day to survive, and most crops do not deliver the caloric content of cereal grains and potatoes.

As the hot weather of the tropics moves north into temperate zones, cereal and potato cultivation will have to move north. The lone exception is rice, which is calorie-dense but not particularly nutritious, unless it has been artificially enriched. On the other hand, one could theoretically live off potatoes alone for quite a while. Obviously, people don't live on a single crop. Human beings have always supplemented their diets with fruits vegetables, by products from animals, and yes, the animals themselves. For the purposes of our future scenario, we need to acknowledge that where people can maintain settled agriculture will have to change. 

        Adding to the pressure of agricultural regions moving north as the climate warms, there's a second problem with humanity’s food supply. Not only are we highly dependent on a few staples cereal crops for the majority of our calories, but amongst those crops we are highly dependent on a few strains of said crops. The risk of depending on just a few varieties seems obvious, but if it isn’t, let’s take a detour to Ireland in the middle of the 19th century.

Introduced to Ireland as early as 1590, the potato had acclimated to the Emerald Isle by 1750. As cultivation began spreading out of Munster to the rest of the Island, Irish farmers grew roughly 120 different varieties. By 1800, many farmers ate potatoes twice a day, with that number moving to three meals a day by 1840. This didn’t have to become a fatal weakness in the Irish agricultural system, but the root (heh) problem, was that Irish farmers depended on just four varieties. The 1840s were an exceptionally cool and wet decade in the northern hemisphere. The potato blight, which first struck Ireland in September 1845, is largely attributed to this temporary shift in weather. The blight attacked two of the four potato varieties, wiping out between one third and one half of the potatoes in Ireland. Without going into too much tragic detail, the crop failures of the late 1840s, combined with borderline genocidal policies set in London (wheat could've been shipped across the Irish Sea to alleviate the famine but it wasn’t) likely resulted in the deaths of 1 million people, or 15% of the population. Another 1.3 million fortunate ones, if you can call them that, boarded ships and depart Ireland, mostly bound for the United States. All this loss from a population of about 8 million. 

It is definitely NOT supposed to look like that.
Call a doctor.

Could such a scenario happen again today? Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes. According to the UN, corn, just four agricultural crops: corn, wheat, rice and soy, provide 60% of calories consumed by people around the world. Corn alone provides about 20% of the world’s calories.  Similar to the Irish of the 1800s, the world relies on a very few specific cultivars of corn, making the crop especially susceptible to some kind of climate-driven event. Even if the crop failure alone does’t wipe out a majority of the world’s calories, most people don’t starve to death. More often, opportunistic diseases kill before the body shuts down from a lack of calories.

Leaving our food supply in a precarious position, let's move on to the second base necessity in life: shelter. How will climate change make shelter less available to people? Setting aside dramatic events like hurricanes or floods driven by a more active water cycle, according to the UN, something like half the world's population lives within 50 miles of the coast. This average is slightly lower, at 40%, here in North America. Why does this matter? 

Better estimates put the rate of ice sheet loss from Greenland 20% higher than previously thought. In the fifty years before 2022, Greenland lost about 107 gigatons of ice annually. In 2022, that number nearly doubled, to 198 Gt. Just so we are clear, this is a net loss, and came from glaciers on land. And this was in the context of a climate which was still fluctuating below the 1.5 degree threshold noted earlier. I’m going to make my first bold claim; the the Greenland ice sheet will go into terminal collapse circa 2040. This means that, no matter what mitigation efforts we make, oceans around the world are on their way to 6 m of sea level rise. While this process will take several hundred years, even a 15% loss over the next 100 years would result in a full meter of sea level rise.

1 m of sea level rise would effect about 13 million people in the USA alone, and impact between 20-30% of existing shorelines. This will happen at the same time that the energy and economic base of the country will be contracting, making adaptation and recolcration even more expensive that is would be today. And this estimate doesn’t even include low-lying costal cities in poorer countries which will have an even harder time adapting, cities like Havana and Port-au-Prince.

Notice any patterns?

The third main impact of climate change on North America will be both acidification, mostly on the southern Great Plains, and intensified desertification in the border region of the USA and Mexico. This includes the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, and the United States of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, southern Utah and Colorado, and most if not all of California. If warming trends play out as expected, along with economic decline and mass migration, in one hundred years, I doubt the region will host any large population centers. Sure, people will live on the coast, or in high desert refuges up in the mountains, but this region will not be home to the approximately 80 million people that live there today. If the Pacific monsoons hold and rain continues to fall in the higher elevations of the Rocky Mountains, it is possible that the upper Rio Grande valley and northern Utah will continue to support settled agriculture. This trend will also play out in the higher elevations of Chihuahua and Sonora, as long as the Pacific monsoon rains fall every winter, but that's an open question.

6 meters, 18 feet, sea level rise.

1 meter, 3 feet, sea level rise.

If ice sheet melt, crop failures and desertification are the three negative impacts of climate change, I suppose we should acknowledge the less bad impacts. As climate belts move north, people in the Great Lakes region, and the northern portion of the Atlantic seaboard will have to grow used to climatic norms that would belong along the gulf coast today. At some point in the medium term future, likely beyond the hundred year scope of this exercise, places like Erie, Pennsylvania or Madison, Wisconsin will grow palm trees, sugarcane and dates. It also means that western Canada will transform from a place where 90% of the population lives within 50 miles of the US-Canada border, into a vast grassland habitable by pastoralist and, eventually settled agriculturalists. Eastern Canada will probably experience a climate that looks something like the American south today. They'll have a long, hot probably humid summers, but will still experience killing frosts between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.

    I don't know how far north agriculture will be viable in the medium, term meaning between 100 to 1,000 from now. An extended growing season and heavier rainfall will lend itself to settled agriculture, The limiting factor the further north you go will be viable soils, which take a long time to build, at a minimum hundreds of years. Soils can be depleted quite rapidly by agricultural techniques unsuitable to the climate, but I would guess in a thousand years, human agriculture will extend as far north as the arctic circle, and maybe further.

So there you have it; the North American climate will be generally hotter, with some regions drying out, others getting wetter. As agriculture belts move north and up, this will trigger movements of people, as keeping one’s belly full will outweigh attachments to place and even culture. But before we can send wave of migrants in motion, next week we will look at the broader ecological impacts of human misuse of the natural world. Welcome to the empty continent.

Coming to a coastline near you...