This is my submission to Elizabeth Warren on what the world will look like in 25 years if we don't start to fix climate change now. You can submit your own ideas here
By 2039 the collapse of the summer Arctic polar ice caps will have proven beyond any genuine doubt that catastrophic human caused global warming is our new reality. The prior debates that lasted through the middle of our current decade will be seen as a proxy fight that was funded entirely by the economically entrenched and politically powerful fossil fuel industrialists who had placed their own corporate profits beyond the welfare of their country's citizenry and even the lives of their own children.
This reality was proven, without doubt, after the extreme climate shifts of the mid 2020's when the west and southwest "mega-drought" collapsed the Colorado River watershed and led to the first complete loss of power production from the Hoover Dam in 2028. The resulting shocks in domestic food prices due to the 40% reduction in California’s agricultural output, combined with systemic energy shortages caused by southeast energy demands push the United States toward a permanent state of economic deflation and a massive reduction in public social welfare.
Meanwhile, global unrest produced by the additional .8C of globally averaged temperature increases over the course of the previous 25 years has created a complete dismantling of the tenuous cease fire that is currently being maintained in the Middle East and Kashmir. The warming of the Arctic tundra has begun to release massive volumes of methane as once frozen permafrost continues to thaw at higher and higher latitudes. The precursor of a potentially massive methane eruption from the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf has been recently detected by underwater acoustic monitoring stations.
Extreme summer heat waves and the lack of drinking water have forced the government to provide relocation assistance to the southwestern cities of Tempe and Phoenix. These heat waves have now become the norm for the Midwestern grain belt where residents now reflect fondly back to the “milder" summer heat wave of 2012, where outdoor activity was still possible, if not pleasant. In 2039, summer wheat and soy outputs from Iowa to Nebraska and south to Wichita Falls, TX, will have declined by over 60% per planted acre from the 2010s.
By 2039 we will have discovered that the well-known, but less understood global carbon cycle feedbacks had already ensured that we were on the path to catastrophic climate change when we had only 400ppmv of CO2 in the atmosphere in 2013. Unfortunately, being given the opportunity to mobilize our efforts at that time, for the sake of humanity's future generations, we squandered our chance. The 2039 CO2 atmospheric abundance of 515ppmv resulted from these global carbon feedbacks that were not included in the IPCC AR5 models but are now preventing the Earth from sequestering the majority of human -caused CO2 emissions that it had once so generously removed from the atmosphere prior to the arctic ice collapse of 2033.
The increasing rate of warming in the arctic has proven that we have crossed a climate tipping point that our scientists now tell us will not cease before a final global warming of 6 degrees Centigrade above 2010 levels. This new global equilibrium is projected to happen sometime in the next 200 years, even as we work to become completely CO2 free by 2045. We are currently producing nuclear power on a massive scale with the goal of instituting a global atmospheric recovery program where CO2 is being actively removed from the earth's atmosphere and stored in deep geologic strata. This process requires a massive amount of energy, is incredibly expensive, and takes up a significant portion of our global infrastructure. We are now trying to actively remove the billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere emitted over the last 4 decades and are now fighting against the earth itself which has now become the primary source of annual increases in greenhouse gas emissions.
It is unlikely that we will be successful.
http://oi57.tinypic.com/...