Global Warming

More from a short story I am working on now:

By the time the keys to the family kingdom had passed to me, our family had simplified things, focusing more on local sustainable efforts and had sold off many of its properties. We owned a few small businesses and residences in higher elevation regions in Cascadia. The region had become a desirable location, which kept property values high, and what property was sold had been for a premium, returning significantly more than it had originally cost us. The housing market had crashed for the last time when I was a kid, making California more affordable to live, but the rising sea level had reduced the homes available on the market, which, combined with the migration from the dust states had maintained high housing costs. 

People generally lost faith in the state and had withdrawn their support, leaving shells of the former institutions. Some held out, and a surprising return to statesmanship saw the role of government evolve into an institution of social guidance rather than one of force and coercion. 

Climate Change

From a short story I am currently writing:

My great great-grandfather purchased and managed the Brisbane Marina after the city sold it when it went bankrupt. It eventually became a huge revenue generating investment, one that gave our family a security most never know. Most slips were vacant for years before the local economy recovered from the crash, but rates were lower than when the city managed it, so more people could afford the expense and eventually it was nearly full. The marina sat in the shadow of San Bruno mountain facing east and my grandfather told me that it was a beautiful place to to play as a kid, running up and down the docks, exploring the abandoned boats. He loved the sea, but became wary of it as it encroached upon civilization.  

When I was little, he took me to Brisbane to show me where the marina once was. Getting to the area became difficult by four meters, because much of the 101 was under water. We could still get across the Golden Gate bridge, but had to go south around San Bruno.  

That part of the coast was barely above sea level by the middle of the twenty-first century, and grandfather saw the writing on the wall. He had watched the sea creep ever so slowly closer to the land over the years. We sold the marina at a good profit when construction began on the great San Francisco Seawall, parallel and just to the west of the Golden Gate bridge. By plus one, many of the low-lying beaches within the Bay area had already begun to disappear, with almost a meter lost by 2060. Despite a near cessation of emissions from combustion and public policy finally leaned toward renewables during the early twenty-first century, at massive cost to economic growth, the climate had continued to gradually warm, with the polar ice caps and glaciers melting and causing the sea to reclaim land it had surrendered millennia ago. By my 90s, the bay had expanded all the way to Sacramento. The only constant is change. 

The Problem with Exponential Growth, by Levon Spradlin

Overpopulation has been one of the greatest environmental issues in modern times. Wars were fought over natural resources. Millions died in attempted conquests. International borders were drawn and redrawn after each battle. Eventually, natural borders like oceans, mountains, and lakes served as more practical regional markers than imaginary lines.

It took all of human history to reach a global population of one billion just after the year 1800 A.D., continuing to increase exponentially as new technology and energy sources were discovered, hitting the four billion mark in 1974, then eight billion in 2042, before nearly hitting nine billion before the great Water Wars of 2035. You see, there is no such thing as infinite growth. That was a failed paradigm before we even realized the idea was a myth.

As humanity began to test the carrying capacity of our planet, it was almost as if each nation was promoting population growth as a way to reach the limit first. Each set the bar higher, not realizing that population growth could not be sustained, and that monetary wealth became irrelevant in a world that became more and more focused on physical resources that sustained life. During the 21st century, governments and corporations began making efforts to gather resource rights and use them to control populations. The dark reality was that the people tasked with defending the will of those in positions of power became impacted by the same limitations on natural resources as the population they were charged with defending against. Police and military forces around the world found themselves defending against the hungry and weak, often their friends and neighbors. It was only a matter of time before that paradigm collapsed, giving way to a rebirth of society, but still suffering overpopulation. Liberty was restored, but that was not enough to provide food and water to the ever-growing human population.

Life in Reverse, by Levon Spradlin

It's sometime after noon on a Wednesday, I think. I don't have room to carry a calendar, and I stopped wearing a watch when the Earth fell into Hell. Today, I can report that the undead have learned to climb, so ladders are no longer a viable escape option. They can follow us. Our team got lucky, this time. Hopefully we make it back so that these reports are read and our efforts are not in vain. It has been some time since our expeditions out of the sanctuary have seen loss of life, but I fear that our luck may be running out, and the dead are catching up with us. We may no longer take comfort that even the dead die eventually.

While on a scouting expedition, our reconnaissance team stumbled into a herd of walkers, just as has happened before. In the past, we have found that, in most cases, we are able to avoid without incident. Our latest excursion has proven that we had become complacent, that our preparations may have not been enough, that our comforts had been a luxury we would even now have to abandon. What we believed to be a biological anomaly has led us to believe otherwise. Our dead had not simply come back, they were attempting to supplant mankind. They were not merely decomposing matter with leftover impulses as we had long suspected, but were growing more intelligent, and stronger. The dead were being reborn, like death in reverse. Life began, life ended. But then it all started to come undone at the seams. The world was better when life was a one-way street.

Water was Life, by Levon Spradlin

My first waking glance out the window revealed a landscape of desolation. By the mid-21st century, the population had grown to a size that had overloaded the planet’s carrying capacity. The rains no longer cleansed, they burned. As did the sun, which had previously life, yet now beat down upon the Earth through an atmosphere less able to protect its inhabitants.

Water had become the greatest threat to the planet Earth, at one time its greatest resource. Water was life, and it supported our very existence. But our corruption of that which sustained us in turn brought humanity to its knees.

Despite the best intentions of activists and policymakers, pollution had become more problematic than ever, with precious little water left for drinking, and little that remained was capable of sustaining life. With ever more restrictive decrees came less adherence to the rule of law.

In some lands, water had become inadequate to support life. In others, the waters had receded with the warming of the planet. Where there remained bodies of water, no other life thrived. Water had become adverse to life upon which relied those essential gifts of nature. Pollution of the world’s waters surpassed all other environmental threats, yet the individual hazards compounded each other over the decades, like a feedback loop, ever-intensifying, and no efforts could be made to reverse the trend once that pattern had been set in motion.

For thousands of years, the snow and ice melted with the warming, for thousands more it returned with the cold. These cycles were older than Man, yet we thought ourselves greater than nature, that we could control it. It was that hubris which brought an end to that once great society. We had done this to our future selves, to our children.