The Great Plague
A short story of a dystopic view of the future.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
TS Eliot
In the year of 2120 a great plague struck the world reducing the world population to 1.75 billion from 9.50 billion people after environmental disasters devastated the world in the latter half of the twenty-first century.
As the ocean waters warmed during the beginning of the twenty-first century from global warming it started to change the currents in the oceans and that in turn changed the atmospheric currents. Droughts became common all around the world and with the droughts came raging forest fires that burnt the dried trees and grasslands. So much of the globe was covered in smoke that the global temperature actually dropped because of the sunlight reflecting off of the white smoke clouds.
The jet steam moved farther north causing a drought in the Great Plaines which in turn caused the famers to pump even more water out of the Ogallala aquifer as a result the water levels dropping in the aquifer and the Great Plaines returned to the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Where there was enough water for crops, the crops were destroyed by fast moving thunderstorms and derechos though out the Midwest and the Great Plaines. The Great Lakes swelled with all the runoff from the rains in northern Canada.
It wasn’t just the Great Plaines that was devastated but all of North America, the Gulf of California now went all the way to the US boarder and the heat and drought went all the way up to Idaho and Montana and scorched the land between the Rocky and the Sierra Nevada Mountain ranges turning it into a desert. Florida just about disappeared from the rising oceans and along the East Coast the coastlines shrank back hundreds of miles inland. New York City held off the slow creeping up of the ocean, then a hurricane overwhelmed the protections and the city gave up the battle. The Statue of Liberty was standing in waist deep water and the City became a series of islands with huge monoliths jutting out of the water as the buildings crumbled in the rising water.
Scientists had warned that the as the oceans warmed the oceans the currents would disappear; but they got that wrong because there still was a temperature difference between the equator and the poles, the currents didn’t disappear they just got hotter. And that warm current just off the East Coast created havoc on the weather!
Hurricanes and typhoons were year round and during the summer months massive cyclonic storms moved heat and water vapor to the poles. The hurricanes were like massive tornados but a hundred miles across with winds of two hundred miles an hour were common. The rains were of Biblical proportions each storm brought feet of rain not inches. The currents carried the warm water to England and the Scandinavian countries it changed England in to the new Florida. Meanwhile Greenland finally lived up to its name.
Massive wars were fought around the world for water and arable land.
The population of the world migrated towards the poles or toward fresh water. Canada fought to keep the United States out of Canada, after seven years of fighting they called a truce and merged the nations. The tundra became the bread basket of North America. Mexico… they weren’t lucky. Mexico City became a ghost city in the middle of a desert.
After the wars a peace settled over the world and the people formed a compact; fossil fuels were banned and the world turned to solar, wind, and hydro power and in some places tidal and other unconventional forms of power. After much heated debate nuclear power was allowed but under strict guidelines where renewable wasn’t feasible such as the making of aluminum and desalination of sea water.
The lush rain forests of Central and northern South America vanished! The Amazon one of the greatest rain forests in the world was reduced to a waste land. It was stripped of it rich soils by erosion from the farmers who burned down the forest to plant crops that depleted the soils. The Amazon River was reduced to a fraction of its former self.
The Middle East already a sweltering desert became a blast furnace, temperatures in Qatar were in the mid-hundreds daily, and it was deadly to anyone venturing outside. The country built massive nuclear desalination plants for fresh water and the energy need for air conditioning.
Bangladesh was completely flooded and no longer exists, the people fled north to Nepal who fought to keep their country from being overrun by refugees. Refugees from Bangladesh and western China fled to the Himalayas; there was some water in the mountain valleys.
It was the tundra and the mountain ranges that saved us.
The Arctic and Antarctic circles became the breadbasket to the world and the mountain ranges became the islands of humanity. Antarctica climate became like Iceland before the global warming and produced grain along with beef, lamb, and mutton. Antarctica also got known for its whiskeys and fine wool products.
The tall mountain ranges were like fingers in the clouds scraping the rain out of them. The tall mountains forced at the air up and over them cooling what little moisture there was into rain or snow. Rivers ran in the mountain valleys until they met the deserts where they evaporated and turn their river basins into salt flats. Meanwhile small independent farming villages grew in the lush valleys where water was abundant and farming was possible. They also harnessed water to run mills and small factories; it was like we went back to the 1800s with our dependency on water power. Transportation was by animals and sailing ships, in a few enclaves electric vehicles could be found along with high tech manufacturing and institutes of knowledges. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and UAE using nuclear plants created an oasis once again in the desert. They used the nuclear plants for desalination of the seawater and with the leftover electrical power they ran factories. They traded the manufacturing goods with the Polar Regions for food.
Some of the mountain villages became fiefdoms ruled by petty rulers and usually they were swallowed by other petty rulers. The oligarchies tried to hold on to power in the deserts communities and on islands but the islands disappeared under the rising oceans. Currency disappeared and barter took, I need this and you need that so why don’t we trade? Trading was again done by clipper ships and by pack caravans.
It was in one of the mountains valleys towns that it is believed that a rat scratch a worker and the plague spread to humans. The early cases were traced back to Central Asia like the Silk Road that spread the black plague of old so was the new plague and was once again spread by caravans.
It was an insidious disease, all you had was a slight fever for a couple of days. Most people never even noticed it but the damage was done and until decades later did they find the virus. The RNA found a home in the Y chromosome corrupting its DNA, it wasn’t until years later when medical researchers noticed a decline in the birth rate that they found the foreign DNA from the virus. Over seventy-five percent of the men were infected and sterile by the time there was a vaccine found. It was found that like chickenpox causes shingles the plague caused cancer in the men that the virus had infected twenty, thirty years earlier.
In 2190 the world band together to share biodiversity and started a multi-generational project to reforest the world and bring back the abundance of the land and sea. The second Yogyakarta Principles conference in 2200 set down the second set of human right’s principles that everyone is entitled to: clean air, fresh water, healthy food free from contaminant, and it passed along a duty to the future generations to guaranty those rights to our generations to come. One of the goals was for every person in world to plant 5000 trees a year; they knew that it was the trees and plankton that supplies the world with oxygen and lowered the greenhouse gasses. All over the world fish hatcheries sprang up next to water ways, aviaries to replenish the bird population, and game farms to release game back into the forests.
They knew that it would take generations because it took generations to poison and it would take generations to detox the planet.
~*~*~*~*~
When I sat down to write this, two hurricanes are in the Gulf of Mexico and heading toward the gulf coast states, a tropical storm had formed off the Carolinas’ coast last week and from some reports that was the farthest north a tropical storm has formed.
The world is in the grips of a plague (If you don’t believe me that COVID-19 is a plague, go look up the definition in Merriam-Webster dictionary.) for the last six months with no end in sight.
A record number of forest fires are burning in the western states as a result of the droughts in those states
Here in New England areas are in a moderate to severe drought with no relief in sight and this has been a record breaking summer with the number of days over 90o.
August 2020