By the year 2056, the coastal US will be uninhabitable by humans. The east coast will be ravaged by hurricanes and tropical storms that rain buckets and throws the ocean against coastal towns. Most lighthouses will be destroyed multiple times over and will eventually be forgotten as populations on the east coast move inland and most to higher elevation. Flying along the coast will become dangerous and international shipments will be more expensive, which will grind commence to a relative standstill.
The west coast will become a barren desert where no food can grow and irrigation will be impossible. Scientists’ attempts to seed clouds will fail and precipitation from the Midwest to the Pacific coast will all but disappear. Sure, there are reservoirs of water in the west, but it will get so hot there in the day, pushing 130 Fahrenheit, that it will threaten infrastructure. The heat will melt wires and CPUs all over. Rampant wildfires will threaten most habitable lands in the west and the Midwest will once again become a dust bowl.
The majority of the US population will cram into the middle region of the US, from as far west as the Dakotas in the north and the middle of Texas to the south, and as far east as Upstate New York to the north and diagonally southwest through the the western tip of North Carolina (a small population will remain in the deep south but they will live like the inhabitants of the small Pacific islands prone to tsunamis that existed at the beginning of the century). By the 2050s, most countries in North America will have been forced to pull together into one nation, though it will not be without controversy and bloodshed (as conditions deteriorate in the decades leading up to the devastation we will know in the 2050s, Central America will mostly disappear and refugees will pour into the US and be alternately met with the guns of US Border Patrol and armed militias, as well as pitiful aid efforts from FEMA and the Red Cross; countless will die and some will find refuge in the new harsh reality of America).
I will be in my late sixties then, very grateful that Mary and I decided not to have another child. By the time our son, Zach, is in his teens, my family will already be well aware that the warnings about global warming were true, and we will have moved into a house in Ladoga with an underground storm shelter. By the time Zach is in his twenties, we will relocate with him to the mountains where he will attend his father’s alma mater that also doubles as a fortified structure against the weather that is relentless during hurricane season and houses many inhabitants who had owned homes in the area. Moving will be difficult, but Hurricane Drake of 2023 will devastate NC’s piedmont region and we won’t have a choice. Many government-funded institutions within the safe zone will be repurposed around that time to house the millions left homeless. The concept of ownership will be a difficult thing to hold on to and everyday will be a constant reminder of the things we will lose.
I won’t mind being in the mountains again and eventually, even Mary won’t complain about it anymore, because there will be nights when we can stare up at the stars and at least appreciate that the end of days isn’t as lawless as we all feared. We will learn that even though everyone has the capacity for cruelty and selfishness, there will be enough decent people around to stamp that down as we try to hold together as the nation that we all remember. And it’s because we are not all idiots, we are not all selfish or so shortsighted that we will be unwilling to share and help one another with full faith that kindness will be returned.
It will be a different world, no TV, no internet, no plumbing. And everything will be harder to do than we will be used to, but most everyone who survives to see it, to be witness to the end, will know hope, even if it is only a matter of time before we will all perish.
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