Parts of Africa, South America, and India often averaged over 110 degrees during the summer, killing thousands of people to each year from heat-related causes.
The loss of that stable source of meltwater, coupled with huge droughts and continued population growth, meant that water resources in Asia all but collapsed.
Sea levels rose 3 feet and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. The island nations of Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands became uninhabitable.
During the 22nd century, the world's population reached 9.5 billion people. The strain on resources — food, water, and energy — sparked a new generation of conflicts.
But after a 150 years of successful Mars colonization, the most powerful solar storm ever recorded hit the Earth and Mars. Our electrical grid failed, communications went down, and — by the time we restored everything years later — the colony had gone silent.
In the 23rd century, we reached the zenith of the sixth mass extinction. Amphibians were the hardest-hit. We lost over 1,000 species of frogs, newts, salamanders, and more.
But they weren't the only ones. Thousands of species of birds, mammals, and insects were wiped from the face of the Earth.
Thomson Reuters
Sometime between 2200 and 2300, things got really bad. The Greenland Ice Sheet collapsed and melted, causing sea levels to rise 20 feet.
NASA
The Middle East, already wracked by ethnic and resource-driven conflict, became inhospitable. Canada began a massive resettlement plan, opening up the former tundra to climate refugees.
South America and Africa, the worlds most fertile regions three centuries ago, lost a fifth of the land suitable for farming. Farming moved to the US, China, and Russia, which all gained arable land.
But they weren’t interested in coming back to our crowded, resource-drained rock, anyway. They just needed a larger gene pool. Settlement missions started back up again.
At the end of the 24th century, Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier receded past the continental shelf that surrounds it, speeding up its already-rapid collapse.
And by the end of the 25th century, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet finally collapsed after years of slowly melting. Sea levels rose again, this time by another 30 feet.
It didn't have to be this way. Limiting global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit wouldn't have solved everything, but it could have avoided a tipping point that claimed millions of lives and displaced billions more.
Sarah Kramer is a science writer based in New York City. She holds a Master of Science in Journalism from Northwestern, where she was a Comer Scholar specializing in climate-change journalism. She has written about nuclear power in Utah, environmental justice on Chicago’s South Side, mysterious shipwrecks in the upper Midwest, and scammers on Amazon. Her reporting has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the J.D. Crain, Jr. Foundation.Her work can found on Business Insider, Atlas Obscura, Motherboard, and in several permanent halls at the American Museum of Natural History, including the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth and the upcoming Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals.Follow her on Twitter at @sarahbkramer.
