Global Mean Temperature ([Finale]: 6/25/09)

[Surlethe]

More original fiction: a series of vignettes, updated as I write. Enjoy, and (as always) criticism is appreciated.

~~~

Global Mean Temperature

1

September 25, 2076
Global mean temperature: 18.2° C

The gathering darkness obscured the home of the man known to authorities only as "Valdemar". He stood out front in the humid Florida evening, leaning on his cane. Around him, the wasteland stretched, tortured and twisted tree limbs, crumpled two-by-fours, the refuse and detritus of crushed homes and lives. The government had abandoned the city, left Orlando to its fate. The entire Florida peninsula had been evacuated in the past three weeks as Kappa approached, back behind the new dikes stretching from the panhandle to the Georgia coast. He grunted at the thought; who'd have suspected the US government could act so efficiently, even in the face of the destruction of an entire state? Certainly not he, and he'd been living here for fifty years and watching the American hegemony implode for ninety. Off in the east, he could see the first high cirrus clouds of the approaching hurricane.

Kappa. The thirty-sixth named storm of the season, and the largest to date: a furiously spinning cyclone large enough to stretch from New York City to Chicago, boasting winds of over three hundred forty five kilometers per hour -- two hundred fifteen miles per hour; even in the fade of Western civilization, the United States still had not adopted the metric system. Old pride dies hard, thought Valdemar. The ruinous wars in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey during the beginning years of the century had first cost America, once the light and hope of the Western world, her prestige, and then her treasury. Growing debt had destroyed her economic fortunes, and the oil crisis of the twenties had crushed the rest of her economy. It had taken twenty years to switch to a nuclear and electric infrastructure, and for a decade, everything had seemed golden and glorious, although the rising sea levels had been annoying.

Then agriculture in the midwest and plains collapsed, and stayed down for seven straight years as the topsoil blew off in cyclones and droughts worse than the 1920s. Valdemar smiled at the memory: brittle humanity, reaping its reward. Nature was striking back, and humans took it hard. Starvation literally decimated western civilization. Then the dikes had come, humanity fighting, struggling to keep life in its beating civilization. Its fate, however, had been sealed in the 1990s, as industrialization had sped up, pumping gas into the atmosphere with abandon, mirrors that reflected the Earth's heat back onto it. Now, western civilization was in its death throes, beset by cooling in Europe, deserts advancing from the northwest into China as that country's cities were slowly flooded, deserts marching from the great plains out across the Mississippi valley toward Appalachia, the Amazon rainforest burning in great uncontainable firestorms, Siberian and Canadian permafrost melting, turning the northlands from hard-grounded tundra into mossy peat bogs. And to top it all off, storms coming.

Valdemar snorted. He had been on this planet ninety six years; he had raised his family, seen his grandchildren, lived a good life. Short pangs of regret stabbed him, that he couldn't do more to protect them, but he suppressed the feelings; there really wasn't more he could do. And through it all, he had watched civilization destroy itself, with a sort of detached fascination.

The sky in the northeast suddenly flared yellow-orange, like a sunrise against the purple sunset in the west. Another shuttle launch, the third in a week. Apparently, they were getting full use out of Cape Canaveral before Kappa hit and the dikes broke. Valdemar watched as the light faded, then turned and hobbled back toward his home. In the west, the sun was just dipping below the horizon; in the east, distant lightning flashed noiselessly in night skies blacker than black.

2

January 3, 2149
Global mean temperature: 20.6° C

Peloma Remiraz, short of breath, stepped onto the crest of the mountain. From up here, she could see both down to the shore, sparkling under the cloudless sky, where her tribe's village clung precariously to the rock as it plunged down into the ocean, and down the other side of the Andes ridge to the remains of the grassland, where even now little eddies of dust whirled devilishly in the wind. In the distance, she could see a golden line on the horizon: dunes, creeping south toward them.

Pleased with herself, she sat down. She'd missed her period last week, and was reasonably sure she was pregnant, though she hadn't told her husband, Menual. The doctore hadn't confirmed it with a diagnosis yet, but there was no reason not to trust her intuition, which also told her that the morning sickness would start any morning now. Best to get her journey to the top of the mountain done right off the bat.

It was a ritual now, started with her first and second children. Now that the third was on the way, she was almost in the habit by now. It was interesting, to compare the condition of the grasslands over the past eight years. They'd certainly deteriorated. Mama, before she had died -- God rest her soul -- had said that many years ago, the entire grassland had been a forest. As a child, Peloma had doubted; now, having heard the stories the elders told, of men who flew the skies, could sail on water, talk across mountains, and store a lifetime's worth of stories on a single card the size of a piece of shingle, she wondered what the truth was. No way to ever know, probably.

She turned back to the ocean. Down on the shore, as the rock shoulder of the mountain plunged into the sea, she watched her village carefully. From up here, it was simply a collection of brown dots against the shiny black obsidian. There was never really enough food, although there was the daily catch from the ocean. Fish were sparse, but they always were, and always had been, as long as she'd been alive.

The huts they lived in were old, and rotting, and there wasn't any wood to build new huts out of. Elder Migual had been speaking for some time in council about some caves that Don Cerlos' eldest son had found on a fishing trip to the south, saying that they should pack up the huts, take them south, and move into the caves. Apparently, Don Cerlos had found fish there, and a moist wind blew in from the ocean that they could set the nets up to catch for water. That, and there were some springs back in the caves.

Peloma didn't want to leave. The mountains to the south were lower, and didn't have a view like this one. She could come up here and feel perfect, looking through the crystal air off at the horizon, seeing the panorama stretch around her larger than it could ever be, feeling the wind on her and sun warming her and cold, dry rock beneath her as she stretched out on a flat stone.

She lay there for some time after she had regained her breath, then stood and began the descent back down toward the village, her children, her husband, and her mundane, daily tasks.

3

June 29, 2193
Global mean temperature: 21.0° C

Savik stalked through the Siberian bog. There was a deer grazing on a solid patch ahead of him. He hadn't seen anything like it before, but, mythical or not, it was meat, and meat was meat was meat. The family hadn't eaten anything beyond berries and long leaves for days, and the leaves didn't stay down for more than a few hours. Enough to take all the possible nutrients out of it, but it was still better than the starvation that was staring them in the face.

He let his forward hand sink into the wet, mossy soil. He was smeared with mud and streaked green, staying prone as he searched slowly for his next foothold. There -- a tuft of grass above his right knee. Slowly, he drew his right leg up, set his foot against the grass, and began to inch forward, searching for the next handhold. There was a rustle, and the deer's head shot up. Savik froze. The deer looked around, flicked its ears, then, curiosity apparently satisfied, dipped its head back down to begin grazing again.

Another inch forward, another inch closer. He was almost in range. Nothing could outrun him when surprise and the bog were on his side. It was just like inching up on a groundsquirrel, though he hadn't seen any of those for weeks. Another inch. He slowly reached back to his waist, slipped the metal knife out of his belt sheaf. His mother said it had been in the family for two hundred years, and there wasn't anything else like it in the tribe.

The deer was ten feet in front of him. Slowly, he arched his back up, feeling his feet sink into the mud, the knife dirty in his hands. Slowly, slowly, he tensed his muscles -- the deer still hadn't noticed -- and then he sprang forward. The deer jerked its head up in a heartbeat, and then took off across the bog. Right behind it, Savik blazed through the marsh, a step behind the deer, its slender hooves sinking into the soft ground. A minute and a half later, the deer was sprawled out in front of him, and Savik leapt on it, ignoring its piteous sqealing and bucking head. Savagely, he brought the knife across its throat once, then again into the same wound, sawing deeper. Warm blood fountained out across his hand.

His tribe had been wandering through the marshes of northern Siberia trying to eke out a living from the land for as long as anyone could remember. At night, they sat around the fire, telling stories. Grandfather always had the best ones; he'd learned them from his own grandfather, who, he said, had been there for the events. Apparently, there had been great mountains of metal, the same stuff his knife was made of, and people lived all together there. Then the oceans had risen up in wrath at the mountains of people, and their plants had turned to dust; nature had killed most and driven the rest away.

Savik was skeptical, he thought, although you always had to lend some credence to your elders; Grandfather knew what he was talking about in everything else. The deer had died, and Savik looked down at the knife. It always made him think of Grandfather's stories. Wiping it off on the animal's matted fur, he let it glint in the pale light coming through the clouds. Mountains and pillars made of the stuff? Naah.

He replaced the knife into its sheath and lifted the deer across his shoulders. It was heavier than he thought it would be, and he had to keep moving so that his feet wouldn't sink too deep into the mud. Turning, he strode back across the marsh toward this week's camping ground.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

I love it. Beautiful.

[Ford Prefect]

How very interesting; I guess that's what happens when you ignore global warming, though I wouldn't know the likelihood of the fall of civillisation.

[Surlethe]

4

July 4, 2238
Global mean temperature: 21.1° C

Adraw squatted in front of the flames. They'd used up the last of their wood to build this fire, after stripping the surrounding plain clear of saplings. This place had once been called Canada, had once been a frozen wasteland covered with snow all year round, as the stories related. Once nobody had lived here. Now, there were five or six tribes, all scattered across the huge plains -- and the plains themselves were dry, dusty, with grass growing here and there. The only living things were the people, roving, eating bark, berries, and what meat they could, the birds, the bugs, and several kinds of gopher. Those were difficult to catch, and were rare.

His little sister, Ene, sat next to him. She was just six, and since their mother had died giving birth to her, she had only Adraw to look up to. In the dry warmth of the plains summer, there was very little water, and, like each of his fourteen summers, he'd had to resort to catching birds in their nests and squeezing the warm blood out of them. There were a lot of birds, but they were aware of the people, it seemed, and only in the past year or two had Adraw gotten the hang of sneaking up.

Across the fire, he could see grandma and grandpa, the only other ones allowed to sit down and wait for food. The rest of the family, all twenty members, were scattered across the surrounding plain, hoping to find food: a stray gopher, maybe, or an unprotected nest. Sometimes, it seemed like the only things around them that were surviving well were the grass, amber and taller than him at this time of year, and the ants. Ants were everywhere; their nests were sometimes taller than the grass, and it was always an unpleasant surprise to feel prickling stings, look down, and see ant fur, as he called it, covering him from his knees down.

Grandpa stirred, spoke in that croaking, kindly old voice of his. "Have I told you two youngsters about the old days?"

Ene shivered, even in the lingering heat of the summer day, and snuggled closer to Adraw. "Tell us more, Gandpa!" she said, irrepressibly enthusiastic like any six-year-old. Grandpa had always told Adraw that he'd been the same way when he was six -- "Before your father died", and then he'd get that faraway look in his eyes and wouldn't say anything more.

Not tonight. The firelight was dancing in Grandpa's eyes as he sat up a little straighter and his voice cleared just a little bit, his eyes widening a little, as he always did when he was about to tell a good story. "A long time ago, when my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather was alive, there was a great leader named ... " -- he cast around in his memory for a moment -- "Shrub. He ruled the great Kan Empire with an iron fist. I've told you about the great Kan Empire, right?"

Ene shook her head no.

"I haven't?" Mock surprise. "Well, my little dear, the great Kan Empire was the greatest of all the peoples of the world. Back then, you know, there were lots of people in the world, as many as there are ants in a nest." Adraw couldn't even visualize one hundred people, let alone as many as there ants were in an ant nest. "Back then people lived together in great pillars of metal, the same thing that my bracelet is made of --" Grandpa held up his bracelet; it was harder than rock and gleamed dull orange in the firelight -- "that were all together. They lived together kind of like ants do."

"So what about the Kan Empire?" asked Adraw.

"Ah, yes; I was just getting to that. Back then, people had magic. They could fly across the world in a day; they could point at another person and kill him; they could even destroy metal!" There was nothing that could destroy metal; everyone knew that. "But the Kan Empire discovered one thing that nobody else had. They discovered how to bring the very Sun itself down to the Earth. They used this power to destroy their enemies, so that nobody could stand against them."

"And Shrub was its leader?"

"The Kan Empire had many leaders," said Grandpa. "Shrub was its last great leader. You see, he wasn't afraid of anything." Adraw nodded; who would be afraid of anything, if you could bring the Sun itself down to Earth? "He wasn't afraid of anything," repeated Grandfather, "except for one thing."

Ene and Adraw both leaned forward involuntarily. "How could he be scared of something, Grandpa?" asked Ene. "He could order the Sun down to the Earth whenever he felt like it!"

Grandpa was solemn. "The one thing he was afraid of was fear itself. So, he started a war against fear. He marshaled the armies of Kan, and waged war against wherever he found fear. But you can't defeat fear with magic, not even with the magic of the Sun."

"So what happened?" asked Adraw. Grandpa was starting to get the look in his eyes.

"Shrub used the magic of the Sun to fight fear, and he lost, because at the end of the war, every person in the Kan Empire was afraid with paralyzing fear, like the kind you get when you look down and there are ants crawling up your legs. And that's when the Sun took vengeance on the Kan Empire, caused it to become deserted, its people to die. Now it is no more.

"So, the moral of the story, my dear grandchildren, is that of everything in the world, the one thing you need not fear is fear itself."

Adraw and Ene both sat back, wondering at the stories. The very power of the Sun, mused Adraw. Grandfather startled them both out of their reveries. "And do you know what time it is, children?"

"No, what time?" said Ene.

"Bedtime! We have a long walk tomorrow; Jas has found a whole city of gophers to the west."

Grumbling, Adraw and Ene were shooed over to the sleeping mats, and were both asleep in minutes. That night, though he didn't remember it, Adraw dreamed of pillars of metal and people flying between them, and all of that disappearing in a flash of light so bright he couldn't see the Sun in the sky.

[Ford Prefect]

All hail Emperor Shrub of the Kan Empire? Haha.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I'm confused about the woman in the 2nd part, and why she went to the mountains. Am I not seeing the obvious?

[Master of Cards]

Kan Empire?

[Singular Quartet]

Kan Empire?

Corruption of ameriCAN. Or perhaps the redneck pronunciation of 'mer'kan.

As to the 2nd part.. it's a ritual. She climbed it after she had her first, climbed it a little late on her 2nd, but she knows better with her 3rd. People are weird.

[Surlethe]

How very interesting; I guess that's what happens when you ignore global warming, though I wouldn't know the likelihood of the fall of civillisation.

Global warming is certainly integral, but it's not the whole focus of the story. More is to be revealed later.

All hail Emperor Shrub of the Kan Empire? Haha.

Yes, indeed. Hail Emperor Shrub and his War on Fear.

I'm confused about the woman in the 2nd part, and why she went to the mountains. Am I not seeing the obvious?

In-story, she happened to climb that particular peak (it's right next to her village) the month she was pregnant with her first child, and now it's like a tradition for her. Besides, she loves being up there.

Out-of-story, it's a vignette, so I don't really have to explicitly justify it. Also, it's a good way to get an overview of the advancing deserts and the pitiful little existence humanity's been reduced to.

Kan Empire?

Yes. The Kan Empire, richest and most powerful nation in the world, discoverer of the power of the sun, ruled by the inimitable Emperor Shrub during his War on Fear. Sound familiar?

EDIT: Singular nailed both questions right on the head.

[Surlethe]

5

February 29, 13804
Global mean temperature: 23.4° C

Tibal Onkot broke the surface of the ocean, gasped for breath, then dove again. Above, the sky was cloudy, and there was a warm breeze blowing in from the north; below, the water was crystal-clear and lukewarm. As she swam deeper, scanning for food, she noted something strange poking through the silt and growing weeds on the bottom. Curiously, she swam closer. It was hard and pitted like rock, but angular -- not like any of the basalt she'd seen in the caves where she'd grown up.

Five minutes underwater. Her lungs were starting to ache a little bit. Curiously, she tugged up a convenient rock lying nearby and set herself down in the mud, walking slowly through the gently waving seafloor cover over toward the object. She could feel the cool seawater caressing at her skin, spreading her short head-hair out and fanning her body hair. She was sleek, strong, very feminine, had three suitors already, and was only fifteen. Of course, she was the best diver and swimmer in the tribe; of all the twenty people who lived together in the caves -- discounting the other families, who fished the waters kilometers south and whom they rarely saw -- she possessed the most innate talent.

Fish had been pretty rare -- they were always rare -- but, said great-grandfather, who rarely swam anymore, there were more than there had been for a thousand generations. He said he knew this from talking with the ancestors, but, like any healthy eighteen-year-old, Tibal was skeptical. According to the stories, after humans had fallen from heaven, they'd been forced to live in caves and make nets to catch fish, but the gods had taken even nets from them, and forced them to learn to eat the weeds they found on the seafloor. Occasionally, they could stalk and catch fish (Tibal was particularly good at that; sometimes, she even managed to get a fish a week), but their diet now consisted chiefly of seaweed and crustaceans that lived on the ground, burrowing into the silt and mud.

She was at the weird object now. Squatting, she bent to examine it. Dark, rough, and sticking up at an angle from the seafloor, it gritted as she rubbed it. She winced as a small cloud of blood billowed from her long, thin finger; she'd scraped the skin from her fingertips. The object seemed to be a low ridge of some sort, sticking up at an angle from the seabed and disappearing back down into the mud maybe four or five strides hence. It was clearly buried, and had been recently uncovered; perhaps the storm yesterday had done the trick?

Ah, yes; storms. There was one brewing now; the currents picking up had as good as told her. That, and she'd been underwater for nearly ten minutes, so her lungs were aching to bursting now. Taking one last good look at the ridge, she dropped the rock and sped upward. It was a good kilometer and a half (although she didn't think in those terms) swim back to the cave, but there was plenty of time before the storm. Breaking the surface, she gulped in air, then dove back down and streaked beneath the waves, swimming with a curious sinuous motion.

In ten minutes, she was back at the cave, pulling herself dripping out of the water. That night, a bad storm hit -- the worst in a thousand generations, great-grandfather said. While the family was huddled together in the back of the caves, hugging each other for warmth, grandfather told stories, and Tibal picked her husband. Of course, for the next few days, she forgot about everything, except eating. By the time she remembered the curious ridge and swam back out to check it, it was gone; two storms had covered it up, and she couldn't even begin to find it. There were times she thought that she'd dreamed it.

[Surlethe]

6

October 23, 13926
Global mean temperature: 23.5° C

Jan (that was his only name) rolled over and stood up. Cocking his head, he checked the sun for the time, and then darted into the grass. They'd be back in less than an hour, and he had to be gone by then.

The Canadian savannah (of course, Jan knew neither the name nor the name of the plains; he had been born about 600 generations too late) around him had been awake for eight hours, and the sun was shimmering red over the western horizon. The power of the sun ... he remembered the bedtime stories his grandfather used to tell him, about Shikan and the sun magic. Closing his eyes as he dashed through the grass, he threw off a quick prayer to the sun, if it might help. Blind their eyes, let them lose my path. Curse them as Shikan did with the sun's light he brought to Earth.

Jan was a thief. For near on two years, he'd been stealing food -- a little meat here, a few seeds there -- and trinkets from the others until he'd been caught. Just last week, in fact. Of course, his father had beat him, and the scabs were still raw and itchy.

The long, tall grass, two and a half meters tall -- nearly twice his height, even though he was mature -- whipped past him as he ran, struggling for breath. The others could run further and faster, but none had his cunning, his genius, he reassured himself as he fought the itch in his side. Off in the distance, he could smell the sea. Unbidden, memories of his sister seized him, and he stopped cold.

No. No. NO! They had no right to beat me for that! There were older scars underneath the newer stripes on his back, scars he'd done his best to forget. The injustice of all of it rankled him something terrible. There was nothing wrong with it, nothing at all. Why were they so concerned with it? It had been years since she'd disappeared, and still they felt he was the culprit?

But he was smarter than them. He could make his own living, picking off the occasional gopher from the cities that stretched for miles around the savannah, and there was enough grass to sustain him forever, though he didn't particularly like the tough texture, and it gave him mild diarrhea. It wasn't difficult to avoid the wild dogs; he could smell them for miles. What his tribe could do, anything they could do, he could certainly do better alone!

He jerked his head up. The grass was swishing in the distance -- not from the wind. Were they coming? They were! He took off running again, careful to bend as little grass as possible. The stitch in his side, almost gone, was back with interest, and in a few minutes, he was panting, running doubled over. He didn't notice the grass thinning around him until he was standing in a clearing, staring up at a huge, almost impossibly steep mound of dirt: the largest ant nest he'd ever seen.

His legs were tingling -- not with the familiar running-ache, but with a thousand little ants swarming over them. He let out a strangled yell, and started hopping back and forth. Too late; there was no way out, and already the tingling was running up his body, followed by a wave of excruciating pain and then numbness. He collapsed, and the last thought Jan had before darkness overwhelmed him was of his sister's head seeming to crazily grin at him as he pushed her into the makeshift grave he'd dug for her.

[PeZook]

So it's that bad, huh?

It's a little depressing, to be honest. Wouldn't some sort of civilization start rising again after 11 thousand years? There's bound to be enough stuff left over for that, even when discounting projects like the late "seed vault" the Norwegians are going to build.

[Surlethe]

So it's that bad, huh?

Yeah, pretty much.

It's a little depressing, to be honest. Wouldn't some sort of civilization start rising again after 11 thousand years? There's bound to be enough stuff left over for that, even when discounting projects like the late "seed vault" the Norwegians are going to build.

As I understand it, civilization requires two things: farming, and domestication of animals. So, first, there are no large mammals left to domesticate. All of the large mammal species are extinct. Second, at this point, nobody remembers how to farm, and nobody's figured it out yet. Furthermore, northern Canada is infrequently (every five to ten years) swept by hypercanes that travel up the former Mississippi river valley and across the central American desert. These don't entirely wipe out the population, but they do put an end to any structures that have started to go up. Also, there's not enough of a concentrated population base: humanity was hit really, really hard. There are maybe 500,000 humans alive worldwide at this point. Furthermore, nobody's figured out how to stymie the wildfires that sweep the Canadian tallgrass prairies two or three times per year.

Civilization at this point is out of the question in South America (Tibal's people); they're just barely subsisting from the ocean. In Siberia, the ground is hardening, but the diet of humans there is shifting from grass and berries to chiefly meat; it's hit by hypercanes that travel up the new China sea and across the Gobi, and there are no cereals left to cultivate. Finally, nobody's remembered that you can actually create a farm.

As for stuff being left over, remember that most human civilization is (a) along the coast, and (b) looks to lie between 60 N and 60 S latitude. Most of the land between those latitudes are covered by deserts, and is swept by hypercanes that are literally capable of spanning the globe. There are, indeed, ruins scattered all through the deserts (for example, Chicago is currently sticking out of sand dunes on the shores of Lake Michigan); however, they're neither accessible nor useful for the humans still alive.

Finally, remember that for most of human history, humans have existed in small hunter-gatherer groups; there's really no particular reason that they can't continue to exist in those groups for ten thousand years. Civilization required a particular confluence of variables, which are not present where humans currently live in the story.

[PeZook]

<snip>

Well, from what you've written, it seems humanity's biggest problem right now are the super-hurricanes. Did they make all the large mammals extinct? I'm thinking that since there are grass praires, and deer was alive at some point, populations of large or small grazing mammals could pick up nicely.

I'm also thinking that some people at least would see the coming doomsday and make adequate preparations. Food wouldn't last long, of course, but their true legacy would be education and tools. Some shelters could be built utilizing hydroponics and other such techniques, with power coming from nuclear reactors.

Of source, super-hurricanes like the ones you described pretty much make any rebuilding attempts moot until they stop coming.

[Surlethe]

Well, from what you've written, it seems humanity's biggest problem right now are the super-hurricanes.

In short, there are three problems for humanity and any aspirations to climb back up the ladder of civilization:

• Super-hurricanes that periodically destroy structure (they're not as regular as they are in the central latitudes; besides the deserts, humans couldn't exist in those latitudes anyway because of the storms)
• Small population sizes and bases
• Lack of suitable plants and animals to foster agriculture

These will keep humans in small hunter-gatherer bands until I, as author, decide that they may rise again as a civilization.

Did they make all the large mammals extinct? I'm thinking that since there are grass praires, and deer was alive at some point, populations of large or small grazing mammals could pick up nicely.

Large mammals now are in general dependent on humanity for survival. With massive climate change and the collapse of human society, there's nothing propping them up. Something's got to step into the 'grazing' ecological niche, though I'm not quite sure what. I'm divided between flightless birds, insects (like the Canadian ants), and mammals coming back.

I'm also thinking that some people at least would see the coming doomsday and make adequate preparations. Food wouldn't last long, of course, but their true legacy would be education and tools. Some shelters could be built utilizing hydroponics and other such techniques, with power coming from nuclear reactors.

This is true; the legacy of tool use and communication are still with humans. The problem with education is that without written language in some form or another, you can't pass knowledge down through the generations without it being corrupted (see Shrub and the Kan Empire, e.g., or Atlantis in real life). None of the human populations have managed to retain writing, so they can't really pass on non-immediate knowledge gained beyond the previous generation.

Also, as below, the shelters are mostly buried under the sand or in remote locations, like the Norwegian seed project, and are hence unreachable by the survivors at any point in the near future.

Of source, super-hurricanes like the ones you described pretty much make any rebuilding attempts moot until they stop coming.

There's those. There's also the fact that all of humanity's legacy is buried under this equatorial Sahara that stretches pretty much from 60 N to 60 S.

In general, humanity simple doesn't have the building blocks of civilization available, and it's not like there's some imperative always pushing humans toward civilization. Our species and genus existed as hunter-gatherers -- and extraordinarily successful ones, at that -- for tens of thousands of years before civilization took hold in the Middle East, Indus Valley, and Huang He river valley. Where the building blocks of civilization didn't exist, humans still followed that ancient hunter-gathering pattern until civilization came to them.

[darthkommandant]

"Shrub used the magic of the Sun to fight fear, and he lost, because at the end of the war, every person in the Kan Empire was afraid with paralyzing fear, like the kind you get when you look down and there are ants crawling up your legs. And that's when the Sun took vengeance on the Kan Empire, caused it to become deserted, its people to die. Now it is no more.

Am I to understand here that "shrub" used Nukes based on this passage?
If so this could explain the lack of civilisation in addition to the global warming and its disasterous effects. Or am I read into it too mujch here.

[phongn]

Advanced civilization would be very hard to do with so many resources already gone.

[RedImperator]

Darwinian selection is obviously at work here; it will be interesting to see how far the various survivor populations have diverged if and when they're ever reunited. And how much "human" remains in them; the humans themselves could make up the evolutionary stock from which the next "generation" of megafauna is derived. You already have at least one subspecies which can digest grass; their descendants won't need large brains to survive, or bipedalism, or grasping digits.

And I'm very curious to see how that shuttle launch we saw in the beginning pays off.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Forgive me, but why didn't the melting of the caps shut off the global thermal conveyer and start a new ice age which would hae radically curtailed any global warming pattern?

[Surlethe]

Forgive me, but why didn't the melting of the caps shut off the global thermal conveyer and start a new ice age which would hae radically curtailed any global warming pattern?

Um, because I say so as an author? I've been loosely following the pattern of this article; is there something wrong with its predictions?

Am I to understand here that "shrub" used Nukes based on this passage?

The situation the US was in at the end of Bush's administration (in this parallel universe) was very complicated, and the myth three hundred years later has simplified things immensely.

If so this could explain the lack of civilisation in addition to the global warming and its disasterous effects. Or am I read into it too mujch here.

There was no actual nuclear war; what happened was a little suitcase nuke exploded in downtown Indianapolis, and the United States, in retaliation, nuked Iran before invading. The use of nuclear weapons began and ended with that exchange. Of course, there's really no evidence now in the story, since Iran is a huge and hot desert, and what in Iran is not desert is underwater, since the Caspian and Black Sea have linked up and expanded.

Advanced civilization would be very hard to do with so many resources already gone.

This is true, although perhaps in a few million years, the Earth's resources will have been replenished, and any civilized life that arises then will be able to learn from humanity's mistakes.

Darwinian selection is obviously at work here; it will be interesting to see how far the various survivor populations have diverged if and when they're ever reunited. And how much "human" remains in them; the humans themselves could make up the evolutionary stock from which the next "generation" of megafauna is derived. You already have at least one subspecies which can digest grass; their descendants won't need large brains to survive, or bipedalism, or grasping digits.

Yes, it will be interesting to see if any of your predictions play out.

And I'm very curious to see how that shuttle launch we saw in the beginning pays off.

All I can say at this point is, "Keep reading".

[Admiral Valdemar]

I can't help but think I'm somehow to blame for this depressing outlook, what with my rantings about ARMAGEDDON after reading that Mark Lynas article. Ah well, I happen to like these kinds of stories (I own Threads, dammit), so keep up the good work.

Now, where are those royalties and pie I was promised?

[HSRTG]

Interesting. Verrrry interesting. No predictions though.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Forgive me, but why didn't the melting of the caps shut off the global thermal conveyer and start a new ice age which would hae radically curtailed any global warming pattern?

Um, because I say so as an author? I've been loosely following the pattern of this article; is there something wrong with its predictions?

Ah, yes. The article assumes that seawater chemistry is not related to climate variance. I don't doubt the planet could warm as you say, but with the conveyor shut off, there would be a greater disparity between the higher lattitudes and the equator, such that a 'Canadian Savannah' or Siberian bogs would be covered in ice sheets.

[Surlethe]

7

August 29, 14135
Global mean temperature: 23.5° C

Adrin liked to think of himself as a swift, lithe hunter. Now, though, he wasn't doing anything except sitting and wondering where his next meal was going to come from. Sitting back on the warm basalt, he clicked his sharpened fingernails (not as good as a nice, heavy obsidian knife, but better than nothing when a knife broke on you) against the stone slab. Where were the others? The mountainside offered a nice view of the surrounding landscape: the marshes with their low trees stretching off to the south; the mountains behind in the north thrusting up into the clouds. The gods lived up there, he sometimes thought, when he saw distant lightning flashing between the clouds.

Off in the distance across the mountainside, something moved. He froze, eyes flickering. What had that been? Slowly, the outline of -- was that a groundsquirrel? It was something like that, lithe and low-slung, slinking across the mountain. There would be a home somewhere nearby, and if he could track it back, he could live there for a while off them.

He stood, slowly, and started moving toward the groundsquirrel. Hunger gnawed at the pit of his stomach, and he could almost feel it scraping at his ribs, which were visible through the skin of his sides. The groundsquirrel, oblivious, poked around and nibbled a bit at the grass, picking some seeds off. In this region of land -- what Adrin's distant ancestors would have called "Siberia" -- there were two main species of mammal: the groundsquirrels and the humans who lived on them. There were other animals, of course -- birds, some colorful and loudly annoying; some who seemed to be aping the groundsquirrels' lifestyle, digging in the ground and living there; some who hunted groundsquirrels; some who haunted the human tribes, carrying off infants and small children when parents weren't looking. There were also insects everywhere, but there had always been and always would be insects everywhere, barring some supremely unlikely collision with an astral body.

Adrin stalked the groundsquirrel for three hours, watching it from a distance as it, meandering, foraged its way across the mountain. Carefully, he noted where he was going; he'd never actually been across this mountain and into the valley beyond it. All of his life had been spent to the south, in the marshes. He continued to tail the groundsquirrel another hour. The sun started to sink behind the cloud cover that had been hanging low all day, and the day imperceptibly began to slip away into twilight. The groundsquirrel picked up the pace and headed toward a row of low mounds lying in the base of the valley.

There must be ten thousand of the critters living there, thought Adrin, as he moved closer to the mounds. The place was simply crawling with the things. The mounds themselves were low, stuck out of the ground -- some sort of hardened clay, he noticed. There were blocks of the same clay scattered through the valley, when they weren't stacked into the mounds. He stalked closer, and was rewarded with the shrill cry of a lookout groundsquirrel. The area emptied just like that. Adrin sighed. He would spend the night here, and hopefully eat well in the morning.

[Coriolis]

Excellent story and interesting presentation. I look forward to more installments.