Climate change poses the question "Will Britain be around in 2500?" -- Short answer: most likely not. Long answer, see below:

KEY WORDS: Antartica, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Danny Bloom, Denmark, India, Israel, Japan, Maldives, New Zealand, Philippines, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United Nations, United States of America, James Lovelock, Sara Palin, Andrew C. Revkin, Marc Morano, Anthony Watts, Elizabeth Day, Mark Lynas, George Monbiot

By Danny Bloom

CORNWALL, ENGLAND -- This is James Lovelock country. The future will very likely unfold from this little patch of God's green Earth.

A new novel about global warming in the far distant future by writer Hamish MacDonald in Edinburgh, Scotland, titled "Finitude" (see www.hamishmacdonald.com), along with two recent British newspaper articles about climate change in the far distant
future, say 2500 or so, (titled, respectively, “How much more proof is needed for people to act?” and “Ignoring the future — the psychology of denial”) emphasized the importance of facing major issues that will have an impact on the future of the human species.

Climate change is indeed an issue that is on everyone’s mind, and while Israel seems to be far removed from the experts who recently made their way to Copenhagen to try to hammer out blueprints to prevent global warming from having a Doomsday impact on humankind, Britain will also be on the front lines of these issues. Why? Because Britain will not exist as a nation by the year 2500. Everyone there will have migrated north to Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, Russia and Alaska. [New Zealand and Tasmania, too, in the southern regions of the world.]

Despite most observers’ belief that solutions lie in mitigation, there are a growing number of climatologists and scientists who believe that the A-word — adaptation — must be confronted head-on, too. The fact is — despite the head-in-the-sand protestations of deniers like former Alaskan Governor Sara Palin in the US — that we cannot stop climate change or global warming. The Earth’s atmosphere has already passed the tipping point, and in the next 500 years, temperatures and sea levels will rise considerably and millions, even billions, of people from the tropical and temperate zones will be forced to migrate in search of food, fuel and shelter. This includes the people of Great Britain.

By the year 2500, Britain will be largely uninhabited, except for a few stragglers eking out a subsistence life in the hill country regions. The rest of the population will have migrated north to Norway and Russia’s northern coast or northern parts of Alaska and Canada to find safe harbor from the devastating impact of global warming.

Okay, how do I know all this, you ask? I don’t know. I am just saying that we all must be prepared for the worst-case scenario.

By the year 2500, most likely, most Brits en masse will have left the country for faraway northern regions to find shelter in UN-funded climate refuges in places such as Russia, Canada and Alaska. British climate refugees will join millions of others from France, Germany, Spain, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and the Philippines. It won’t be a pretty picture.

When I asked a science professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei if this was a possible future scenario for Britain and other nations in Europe and Africa some 500 years from now, he said it was very possible, and that these issues needed to be addressed now, if only as a thought exercise, and even if it all sounded like a science fiction movie script. When I asked acclaimed British scientist James Lovelock if such a scenario for Britain was likely, he said to me in an e-mail: “It may very well happen, yes.”

We humans cannot engineer our way out of global warming, although
scientists who believe in geo-engineering have offered theories on how
to do it. There are no easy fixes. Humankind has pumped too many
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the result of the industrial
revolution that gave us trains, planes, automobiles and much more,
enabling us to live comfortable and trendy lives — and now there is so
much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the Earth cannot recover.

Britain, like the rest of the world, is doomed to a bleak future filled with billions of climate refugees seeking shelter in the far north, and
in places like New Zealand, Tasmania and Antarctica in the far south.

Meetings in Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro and at the UN in Manhattan
will not stop global warming.

What we need to focus on now is preparing future generations for what
our world will become in the next 500 years and how best to survive
it.

For the next 100 to 200 years or so, life will go on as normal in
Britain in terms of climate change and global warming issues. There is
nothing to worry about now. For the next 100 years posh department
stores will hawk their trendy items, computer firms will launch their
latest gadgets and airline companies will continue to offer passengers
quick passage here and there, to the Maldives and to Manhattan, for
business and for pleasure.

But in the next 500 years, according to Lovelock and other scientists
who are not afraid to think outside the box and push the envelope,
things are going to get bad. Unspeakably bad.

Those of us who are alive today won’t suffer, and the next few
generations will be fine, too. The big trouble will probably start
around 2200 — and last for some 300 years or so.

By 2500, Britain will be history, and so will be all the nations of Africa,
Asia, the Americas and Europe.

We are entering uncharted waters, and as the waters rise and the
temperatures go up, future generations will have some important
choices to make: where to live, how to live, how to grow food, how to
power their climate refugee settlements, how to plan and how to pray.

Hamish MacDonald's new novel "Finitude" plows these fields in a picturesque novel that gets to the very heart of the matter: what life might be like for future survivors of global warming in the year 2323 or so. Read it and weep. And do your homework.

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Danny Bloom is an aging Yank writer with one foot in the grave already, based in Taiwan, where he blogs like a modern-day Jeremiah
about climate change and global warming at his “Northwardho” blog full of jeremiads that most people do not take seriously.