[Solved] New York Mag Shake-up Story: The Uninhabitable Earth

The recent New York magazine cover story, The Uninhabitable Earth, has a lot of people freaked out right now. Because it was so vivid in portraying how bad the situation is, it has grabbed the collective imagination better than anything else so far. 

For me, it validates the level of the crisis I’ve been seeing for the last 10 years.  Five years ago, I wrote that we are in an emergency. 

But we've been in an addiction state, a denial state.  I had a nightmare about six years ago that woke me in the night. In it I saw our leaders and the whole population were drunk on fossil fuels. I saw our leadership, including Obama himself, looking glassy eyed and gleeful at world economic growth. I saw they were addicts. Drunks. 

They needed to be scared straight. 

Of course after the article was published, dozens of naysaying articles popped up like mushrooms in the rain. They seek to play down how dire our situation is. Scientists took issue with this point and that point.  But what about the gist of the whole situation?  It is catastrophic. 

Swamping the world’s coastal cities is only one of the effects of climate change. It’s actually the least terrible of the effects.

First, drought will drive up food prices to a point where world economies will collapse. The mid west bread basket that supplies 1/6 of the world’s grain, will cease to exist due to drought.

Ten years ago, I had a vision of a cactus appearing over a map of the Great Plains in the mid 2020’s. The message that came with the cactus was that there would be an epic, game changing drought that would change America. 

A few years later, I had a recurrent image of a $50 apple.- indication of what will happen to food prices.

Along with the drought will be the increase of super storms that become a regular occurrence in coastal cities. Storm surges that require complete evacuation, will drive people out of the cities, many for good. Real estate markets all over the world in coastal cities will collapse when potential buyers will realize their properties have no long term future.

Cities will build hurricane walls to protect against storm surges. But those will cost billions and they will quickly become insufficient as storm surges become worse and seas rise.

While economies are collapsing and cities are losing population, millions of people in parts of the world that are already compromised, will starve.

I don’t expect mass starvation in the western hemisphere as long as our governments have swung back towards left center where caring for the people is a priority. 

New York magazine spoke about an aspect of climate change that I hadn’t thought about:

That certain parts of the world, especially around the equator, will be uninhabitable. Humans have to maintain temperatures around 98.6 degrees to survive. There will be places in the tropics where, due to high humidity that makes it impossible to sweat, people won’t survive outdoors more than a few days, unless they are wearing a spacesuit.

Five years ago, Barbara Kingsolver wrote that we are perched at the top of Niagara Falls in a canoe. Today our coastal cities, a significant portion of our food supply, and billions of people will not be able to paddle back from those falls to save themselves. 

Fortunately however, we  have seen in visions that after 2020, climate change becomes the number one priority in the world. Also  in the late 2020’s, the U.S., previously a laggard, will take the lead in sustainable energy.

There is hope.