RE:
They look very interesting. I think you should try and convince the Texas novelist to make the date more realistic though: 2250 say. Don’t you think it’s more likely that people will still be slowly stupefying in the heat in 2080, rather than building polar cities that soon?

ANSWER: Susan, you are right, realistically, humans won’t need polar cities until around 2300 or so, but he has decided to set his story in 2080 in order to make the story more immediate for people reading it here and now. He felt that 2300 would make the story merely sci fi and people would not pay attention to real emergency we are in now, or will be soon, certainly by 2080.
MY FEELING as director of the Polar Cities Project is that we need to start talking about them now online and in the MSM in order to get used to the idea of polar cities. We need to start siting them and even pre-building them NOW, by 2300 there will be no fuel for planes or trucks to transport building material. People still do not understand the dire straits we are almost in. my wor here is meant as a dire wake up all.

I don’t think many people grasp that global heating is something that we can’t just turn off by (eventually) dropping fossil fuels. They don’t understand that we are starting something that we can’t stop.

(BTW, I think Susan went overboard with the ‘great’ stuff. But I tend to not complain about praise received. ;o)

There’s no one sitting in the driver’s seat steering or ready to hit the brakes.

We thought the road was level because we weren’t paying attention to the amount of heat we were storing up in the oceans. But things started to change and we started paying attention.

Now we’ve significantly melted Arctic sea ice, decreased albedo, and made the slope steeper.

We’ve increased forest/vegetation fires. We’ve even seen Arctic peat dry out enough for large peat fires to occur. We’ve put more CO2 into the atmosphere along with more black carbon. (Black carbon is another climate change driver.) Again, by increasing CO2 we kicked forces into play that make the slope steeper.

Car is speeding up a bit more.

We could possibly hit the slope of no return in the next couple of decades. If we force large amounts of carbon and methane out of the Arctic region it is all over.

Our skeletal remains will be that of the ‘left behind’ who perished due to
thirst, hunger and conflict over food and water. Any people living around
the pole will be the 1% and their private armies and servants. Not the
other 98.5% of us.

I just don’t get the big bucks like you, Zack, Andrew, etc. ;o)

I don’t enjoy being a lead-off hitter. More of a cleanup guy….

It’s like pushing a car along a road. While the road is level, no problem. But we’ve now reached a point at which the road begins to slope downwards. At this point gravity starts helping us move the car. If we let the car go much further then the road becomes even steeper and the car will gain enough speed so that we have no ability to stop it.

On the way to a runaway heating climate we might see a disrupted ocean current system but it’s not likely to throw us into an ice age. There has to be less heat inside the stratosphere for an ice age to occur and we are in the process of trapping more and more heat.

Probability of a human-induced ice age = extremely low.

Probability of a human-induced cooked planted = very high and increasing.