I’ve received two more answers, but none left in comments. Again, what do you think will happen by 2020, 2050, and 2100?
1) I assume it is a very bad prognosis. Even if the country decides to go full blast at solving the problem. Water everywhere on our coast way above the present coast line. Dry areas that aren’t dry.
2) Barring immediate and drastic changes to emissions, there will be continued and no doubt increasing melting of polar ice caps and other detrimental changes resulting (for example) in further droughts in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. There may well be political, cultural, social and military unrest, none of which my descendants (assuming I have any) would like to see. In fact, some of these changes may be past the ‘tipping point’: I would not like to own land in Micronesia.
When, I asked?
Some changes in the next five years. Major changes in my lifetime. My daughter (born 1998) will end her life with a very different world view than that of her grandparents if she lives as long as they have (who were born in 1917, 1926, 1926, and 1927). It is hard to predict exactly what will happen when.
I also found this Tony Blair quote in Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent Field Notes from a Catastrophe : Man, Nature, and Climate Change. It’s plain, Blair said, that
[the emission of greenhouse gases] is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming, and is simply unsustainable in the long-term. And by long-term I do not mean centuries ahead. I man within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own. And by unsustainable, I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment. I mean a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence. “
