Anthropocene Climatic Collapse

If environmental researchers' warnings in the late Cold War had brought climate change to public attention with the specter of rising sea levels and ozone depletion, the early 21st century was when the scale of the coming disaster grew truly apparent. Besides a general submergence of vast swaths of coastal urbanity and dozens of island nations, the future promised declining vegetable nutrition due to carbon (and thus carbohydrate) overabundance, carbon dioxide levels pushed high enough to surpass the long-term toxicity threshold of human habitation, and vast stretches of uninhabitably hot land reaching from the equator to the middle-southern United States - uninhabitable at first only in the summer, and then year-round over the course of the next three centuries, as even winter temperatures climbed above 80ºC (170º F). Sea level rise would continue in the longer run: it was projected that once the polar ice reserves were depleted completely in the 3600s, global sea levels would settle at 60m above their year-2000 norm, tall enough to submerge many coastal skyscrapers over 20 floors tall. This was already well under way by the time of the Abduction. A full return to planetary habitability, barring titanic geoengineering initatives, was expected to come only in the 17th millennium. This did not mean the end of life on Earth, or the total disruption of human society, but it was the first globally apocalyptic disaster faced in written human history, and it brought economic collapse, mass migration, warfare, and revolt on unprecedented scale.

History

Early shocks: The 21st century

By the year 2000, rising sea levels already threatened smaller island nations, who grappled for resettlement with the advanced capitalist countries responsible for the crisis. Important freshwater reserves were drying up in critically strained regions of Africa. At the same time, a series of record-breaking heat waves rocked inhabited areas worldwide and densely populated coastlines along the subtropical ocean were battered by hurricanes of unprecedented severity and frequency. Coastal cities across the world faced existential threat as the rising sea level came to meet them at first in the form of increased flooding severity, until the flood became the norm. In the core of the American Empire, the first shocks of this were felt along its storm-ravaged southern coastline, and especially in the low-lying flat lands of Florida, where catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Angeline in 2031 reached as far as 60 kilometers inland in some areas and forced a statewide evacuation. By the 2040s, early waves of mass migration had already begun in earnest, and unrest erupted in cities across the planet as surging throngs of people displaced from their homes by the effects of storms and oppressive heat were met with ambivalence and, often, police violence when they began seeking shelter further north, especially those migrating to the advanced capitalist countries, from whose border guards they faced fierce brutality. Even inside the United States and the European Union, intra-union constraints on movement were tightened as states like New York and northern countries like Germany aimed to shut out poorer citizens from the Southern belt and the Mediterranean. Many areas of the world faced widespread drought, and agriculture productivity worldwide had dropped sharply. A series of recessions and depressions rocked the global economy, starting with the Second Great Recession in 2023. During this time, the neoliberal system came under severe strain. Oil markets were collapsing, with oil reserves drying up in the face of increasing global demand. Coupled with falling ore grades at mines worldwide, this devastated the supply of petrodollars coming into American banks and the US Treasury from raw material producing nations that underpinned the supply of consumer credit that had kept workers pacified despite their declining conditions and funded America's colossal military expenditure. During this time, China increased its activities in Africa, aiming to grow its position into the power vacuum emerging in the wake of the decline of the American model. Even as the global economy fell and mass migration came underway, economic prospects in the 21st century periphery had continued to grow in many respects. Solar was a burgeoning industry, and as Chinese and Indian interests made their first forays into the asteroid minerals market and invested large amounts of manufacturing and infrastructure capital into the African market, it seemed possible that these nations might be able to break free from the World Bank and the American military apparatus, though induction into the state capitalist influence of the Chinese Communist Party brought its own complications. Leftists across the continent continued to agitate for self-determined national development, though insurgent new socialist powerswere still often forced to make some compromises. In 2048, the Asian Highway Network was completed in an expanded form from the original vision, followed by the Trans-African Highway Network in 2053. When the century came to a close in 2099, the equator was already well over the threshold of summer thermal uninhabitability, especially in the wetter tropical climates of South-Southeast Asia and South America due to higher wet-bulb temperature, while regions as far north as New York City itself were experiencing summer highs of over 50º C (120º F). Waves of immigrants defended by armed popular forces clashed with national border patrols. The global capitalist economy teetered on the brink of collapse, even more severe than the first Great Depression, while popular forces and nationalists on the right and the left, both in the periphery countries and in immigrant communities in the capitalist core, clashed as nations sought to develop their productive forces in anticipation of the worst that was still yet to come.

Apocalypse: The 2100s-2300s

If 21st century climate change had brought widespread drought, the early-middle decades of the 22nd century were when that drought began to reverse. All that polar meltwater, after all, had to go somewhere, and as it integrated into the hydrological cycle and temperatures rose, increasing amounts of it evaporated off the oceans into the global weather system and fell onto the continents as heavy rain. Though the water supply improved in imperiled regions, the rain also had immediate deleterious consequences. Deforestation caused or aggravated by the drought meant that the ground in places where it had once been stable against rainfall were now especially prone to landslides, and sharply increased rain also meant sharply increased humidity, which interferes with humans' ability to cool off via sweat - thus speeding the effective advance of uninhabitable temperatures. Soaring summer temperatures brought the economy of each hemisphere to a standstill in its respective hot months. Air conditioning became an absolute necessity, but it was expensive and often made up a significant fraction of personal expense - though expanding solar infrastructure eased the burden slightly. Large fractions of the workforce adapted to nocturnal life as the nighttime was the only time when temperatures sank low enough to make significant amounts of crucial labor viable. In some instances, governments and popular orgs constructed, bought, or leased out air-conditioned complexes to serve as community centers to which people flocked during the daytime. By 2100, petroleum availability had declined to less than 15% of year-2000 levels. Besides the market for combustion automobile fuel, industries hardest hit since the shocks of peak oil really had begun being felt in the 2050s included advanced chemicals and consumer goods production like the plastics industry. With so much of middle-late Capitalist Age domestic infrastructure dependent on petroleum-derived plastics, this had far-reaching effects.