2020 is the Year the World as We Know it Began to End

This is What a Collapsing Civilization Looks Like

umair haque
Eudaimonia and Co
Published in
9 min readSep 10, 2020

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Image via Zneha (@mithrilmaker) on Twitter

As if right on cue, California began to burn — all over again. Then Washington and Oregon did. It’s not even wildfire season proper yet — and already the blazes are burning out of control. America’s learning the hard way what a new and terrible kind of phenomenon — the megafire — is. Australia learned it last year, and is going to learn it again soon. How is a state supposed to survive that? How long is it until swathes of California and Australia are unlivable? And when they are — what happens then?

It was 121 degrees in LA over the weekend. How is a city supposed to exist that way? One answer — the dumb answer — is: “Crank up the AC!” But California’s power grid is already struggling to cope. No power grid known to mankind is going to be able to let 10 million people exist in a state of perpetual air conditioned bliss, while temperatures go right on soaring past the point of human habitability. And then there’s the inconvenient question of how much carbon such power demands will require.

Did you know, by the way, that atmospheric carbon has reached its highest point in human history? Last time carbon existed in the atmosphere in such amounts, sea levels were 50 to 100 feet higher than they are today. 50 to 100 feet

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