The Invitation(40)

We leave the watery, urban ruins of New Orleans and head northward. Our panoramic view skims across the water for mile after mile after mile, until we finally reach the new shoreline. We turn westward, and when we come to the Mississippi river it looks more like one of its minor tributaries than North America’s first river. A dwindled vestige of its former magnitude, its shrunken stature presents a curious comparison to the flooded excess of coastal areas. As the field of view widens, the image slowly zooms out, and we see a broader and broader swath of the continent. As we do, one dominant feature stands out unmistakably, its color. Our view widens even further as if pulling away from the Earth until we can see hundreds of miles in every direction. The reason for the anemic appearance of the Mississippi river becomes clear, as the view widens even more, zooming out until the entire continental United States is visible, and then stopping. A quiet ominous pause takes hold as the image, needing no interpretation, speaks forcefully with a silent, portentous eloquence. The once green and verdant expanses of the nation’s farm land, abundant with fertility, and growth are parched and barren. From the Rocky Mountains eastward to the Appalachian Mountains the color of the land clearly tells the story. The light brown shades of desert sand dominate the continent. From the Gulf of Mexico northward to the northern tier states, a continental desert has now established itself. Even the voice of our Linesian guide seems somber.

“As you can see your world has changed, and more than a little. Over a century ago global weather patterns became highly unstable, and a dangerous phase of climatic blinking from one extreme to the other began. Temperature swings of eighty degrees or more in one day occur regularly throughout the world, and last for nearly three decades. When conditions finally stabilize, your planet is a much warmer place, and you are now looking at the result. Deserts now dominate all of the continental land masses on your planet. Your once fecund great plains, rich with agricultural bounty, are now arid, and parched. For over a half century, rainfall averages have not exceeded more than two inches per year, and in some years are nonexistent. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has changed your world forever. This is the price you have foisted on the future inhabitants of your planet. As water became scarce, wars broke out for something once limitless in its abundance. Uncounted millions were killed. That, combined with deserts claiming all major land masses, eventually resulted in the depopulation of humans from the interior of all continents on Earth. When trillions of gallons of warm surface water slowed, and eventually stopped the deep, slow moving global ocean currents that keep your world temperate, a point of no return had been reached. One of Earth’s primary means of endothermic regulation had completely stopped. From that point nothing could change what was to come. The comprehensive climate changes that have so drastically changed your world will be nothing less than catastrophic for man. To understand the power, and eventual impact of these changes we must move forward in human history”

A captive global audience is awestruck with general astonishment as the unfolding spectacle continues. The silent dismay of seeing North America as dry as the Sahara desert leaves most observers in hushed bewilderment. Then the image changes, seemingly moving ahead in time becoming a rapid montage of North America’s future appearance. Suddenly, a huge white area begins forming in the north, seeming to come from nowhere, spreading southward. Simultaneously, the shore line surrounding the entire continent pulls back dramatically, as it becomes apparent the white colored areas advancing in tandem with retreating ocean waters is ice, lots and lots of ice. An incipient ice age is well underway, as our Linesian guide explains.

“The year is 6280, more than four thousand years from the present moment. Your planet is in the powerful grip of an advancing ice age. Deprived of the heat spreading effects of global ocean currents, certain areas began getting colder and colder, cold enough for ice to accumulate, and in a place you call Labrador, Canada, that’s exactly what it did. Warm, wet, tropical air became snow as it encountered cold polar air masses. Air currents continually delivered enormous amounts of humid, moisture laden air from the overheated tropics to much colder regions. Snow will relentlessly fall for centuries in Northeast Canada, and a massive ice sheet two miles thick at its highest point will cover the Earth for thousands of miles in every direction. As it covers more, and more land, increasing amounts of sun light with its heat is reflected away, creating an albedo effect, hastening the ice’s unstoppable march. Anything in its path is simply crushed or entombed”