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Bill McKibben

©Jill Pelto, jillpelto.com extending beyond the text 5

needed to make some compromises, and so the heating kept triggering feedback loops that
most of America’s aging nuclear reactors were in turn accelerated the heating: ever larger
left online past their decommissioning dates: wildfires, for instance, kept pushing ever more
that lower-carbon power supplemented the carbon into the air, and their smoke blackened
surging renewable industry in the early years, ice sheets that in turn melted even faster.
even as researchers continued work to see if This hotter world produced an ongoing
fusion power, thorium reactors or some other spate of emergencies: “forest-fire season” was
advanced design could work. now essentially year-round, and the warmer
The real problem, though, was that climate 15 ocean kept hurricanes and typhoons boiling
change itself kept accelerating, even as the world months past the old norms. And sometimes
began trying to turn its energy and agriculture the damage was novel: ancient carcasses kept
systems around. The giant slug of carbon that emerging from the melting permafrost of the
the world had put into the atmosphere — more north, and with them germs from illnesses
since 1990 than in all of human history long thought extinct. But the greatest crises
before — acted like a time-delayed fuse, and were the slower, more inexorable ones: the
the temperature just kept rising. Worse, it ongoing drought and desertification was forcing
appeared that scientists had systematically huge numbers of Africans, Asians and Central
underestimated just how much damage each Americans to move; in many places, the heat
tenth of a degree would actually do, a point waves had literally become unbearable, with
underscored in 2032 when a behemoth slice nighttime temperatures staying above 100°F
of the West Antarctic ice sheet slid majestically and outdoor work all but impossible for weeks
into the southern ocean, and all of a sudden and months at a time. On low-lying ground
the rise in sea level was being measured in feet, like the Mekong Delta, the rising ocean salted
not inches. (Nothing, it turned out, could move fields essential to supplying the world with rice.
Americans to embrace the metric system.) And The U.N. had long ago estimated the century
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