My Predictions For The Effects Of Environmental Turmoil On Society: 2019 and Beyond

A lot of people do prediction op-eds around New Year’s, and I thought I’d join in the fun. These predictions of mine aren’t just for 2019, though. And they’re not all fun.

Happy New Year!

If you care about the economy (more than any other losses we’re facing, that is), congratulations, I’ve got great news for you. Those keeping up with the leaders of climate change news know global warming and subsequent issues will catch up to us “where it hurts” by the end of this century.

Changes in Europe’s water supply alone will bushwhack them completely.

“Climate change is expected to affect water availability and increase water scarcity throughout Europe…diminishing water supplies will also have a negative impact on hydroelectric power, which is the principal energy source for large areas of Europe…water quality will affect critical EU sectors such as tourism, agriculture, industry, energy, and transport.”

The Sahel is comprised of few trees, arid land, and the occasional watering hole. Photo by The Center for Climate & Security

In Africa, the Sahel (the arid strip of land between you and the desert) has already encountered years of drought, leading to an on-again, off-again humanitarian crisis, and continued global warming will lead the desert to encroach upon the Sahel, lessening the time before the people in that region —approximately from Senegal to Djibouti—will have no farmable land. The continent itself is expected to warm 1.5 times faster than the global average.

And if you care more about the United States’ economy more than the individuals inside of the U.S., or any other country’s population, I’ve got something for you, too. “Annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states,” according to the U.S.’s Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II. More natural disasters and rising temperatures will hurt all communities—from cities to rural farms.

Photo by NASA “The new NASA global data set combines historical measurements with data from climate simulations using the best available computer models to provide forecasts of how global temperature (shown here) and precipitation might change up to 2100 under different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.” Link to data set: https://cds.nccs.nasa.gov/nex-gddp/

But we didn’t come here to talk about the economy.

So far, I’ve just been reviewing facts, brought to you by other, smarter people.

Here are my predictions for the far future:

I am white, “pretty,” female, and disabled. Gender and sexual preference aside, I am in a very interesting place, in society’s hierarchy of the oppressed. I have excess power, I am a thing desired in my “ultimate” form, but within my own body, I am pitied, I make people uncomfortable, and I am sensitive to hot, cold, and bad air quality.

I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen, and I’m not proud of it. Because I will be one of the first who cannot go outside when the air and heat are intolerable, but because people will want to “keep me around,” because I am palatable, I will be sequestered away, into a mostly-white, Western-led, condensed “utopia,” shut off from all other life or nature. Air conditioning, sadness, and insanity for me, while down south, a community of people who happen to look different than me who I would consider my friends, including other disabled people, is forgotten except for by those who live within it, and given no resources or equal footing. Death, rampant. All the polarization going on between opposing factions that shouldn’t exist now will increase tenfold. This isn’t science fiction, this is nonfiction.

Those that live in the Forgotten Places, as I call them, will rise up and take over, but it will too late. They will leave their communities only to find it is just as bad elsewhere, except for the Far North and Far South, places some can never get to, possibly picking up white people who are traitors against supremacy as they travel. No matter what changes the constantly migrating, nocturnal groups make to their behavior, trying to separate themselves from the idiots of the past, it won’t do any good. No sustainable permaculture or societal change will protect from the ash, dust, heat, and floods. They won’t have access to working technology, or enough information to know how to outlast day to day. We’ll either all live out our last days as the Forgotten Places group, or stay hidden away inside the AC and malls and block-like megacities, kidding ourselves that we mostly-whites are fine, recycling every material until it dissipates.

But either way, very few of us will be left, in the end.

And the land we will traverse in this time will be drastically different from 2018’s land.

Cities like Miami, Santa Monica, and Manhattan will be underwater. The buildings will stay — steel and concrete are strong — but as shells. All the old cities will be uninhabitable, but the greatest and saddest sights will be by the (new) coasts and rivers, looking out across the water or on the shores to witness magnificent hulking forms of gleaming metal and rotted wood, resources never salvaged, shared, or used. Our plastic — bags, bottles, furniture, wrappers, straws — will still be waiting there for us, lest it floats along the current into the ocean or down the river. The sun will be a friend to no one. The heat will stick through the night like a wet sock on a reluctant foot. Our waste will find places to live.

We will not.

Have a happy 2019, everybody.

Also published, slightly different, here: zmkf.me