• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1129 0

traditions on the land. Their lives are not so different from today except they have become living museum displays, beset by anthropologists and a global tourist trade. In the western hemisphere, I imagine unprecedented new societies taking hold. They are a unique blend of the old and the new, choosing some parts of traditional culture to retain and others to abandon. People run their business corporations in the morning and go hunting in the afternoon (the ringed seals and polar bears are now protected but harbor seals and salmon are moving in). Pipelines and ports are spreading, natural gas is flowing south, and royalties are flowing north. In Canada, the first university above the sixtieth parallel has been founded.485 The global fleet bristles offshore but the land belongs to them. I see the original stewards of this land taking it back again.

PART THREE

ALTERNATE ENDINGS

CHAPTER 9

The Pentagon Report

Our thought experiment so far has been propelled by big drivers, the four global forces of demography, natural resource demand, globalization, and climate change. A fifth—enduring legal frameworks—cropped up in discussions of sovereignty over the Arctic seafloor and the political power of aboriginal peoples. Throughout the book we have stayed within the confines of the following ground rules as stated in the opening chapter:

No Silver Bullets (incremental and foreseeable advances in technology),

No World War III (no radical reshuffling of our geopolitics and laws),

No Hidden Genies (like a global depression, a killer pandemic, a sudden climate change),

and

The Models Are Good Enough.

These overarching drivers and ground rules have served the 2050 thought experiment well to this point. I hope it has kept the book from being shelved in the science fiction sections of bookstores and libraries. The described outcomes are deduced from big trends and tangible evidence already apparent today, rather than political ideology or my wonderful imagination. They favor the likely over the unlikely. I honestly expect, should I live long enough, to see many or all of them materialize within my lifetime.

In this chapter and the next, let’s step out of the comfort zone a bit. What are some other outcomes these trends could provoke? Are the four forces robust, our ground rules reasonable? If not, how might they surprise us? This chapter explores six less assured, but plausible, developments that could affect some of the big trends presented thus far. Five of them originate in the North, but have global or far-reaching consequences. Let’s begin with climate change, by breaking the ground rules on hidden genies and computer models.

The Evolution of Climate Models

The motivation for running climate models is nothing like the motivation for making weather forecasts on the nightly news. Those seek to identify specific events, like a storm front, and are meaningful only a few days into the future. But climate models forecast average climate variables, like mean January temperature, and are meaningful many decades into the future. They do this by taking account of certain things—like deep ocean circulation and increasing greenhouse gas concentrations—that simply don’t matter for short-term weather. It’s not possible to know what the exact temperature will be in Chicago next August 14 or January 2 at three o’clock in the afternoon, but it’s very possible to know what the average August or January temperatures will be. One is weather, the other is climate.

Climate models are also amazing tools for figuring out how our complex world actually works. Suppose that it is an observed fact that summer rainfall is declining in Georgia, but this phenomenon simply won’t show up in a climate model’s simulations no matter how many times it is run. Puzzled, its programmers realize that something is missing and wonder what it might be. Into the model goes a hypothesis—say, loss of forest (trees pump enormous volumes of water vapor back to the atmosphere), because many trees have been removed to build Atlanta suburbs. Does the model