It's cold. That's the first thing you notice in 7010. Really cold. Then the strange, metallic smell stabs into consciousness, leftover pollution from years of unchecked industrial by products. As my head already starts to hurt, I noticed the light was odd. Like an overcast day, but off somehow.
I have traveled to San Francisco in the year 7010. There are few humans around and a dusting of snow covers the city. It seems that humans were unable to stop climate change using green technology. Efforts were too late and too little to stop the global effects on a system that had been building for hundreds of years. Instead, scientists developed a high altitude spray that was designed to increase the albedo of the planet. Essentially, it was designed to make the upper atmosphere slightly more reflective, sending a greater portion of the sun's energy back to space.
Sadly, the Earth's climate changes slowly and human patience is short. After a promising initial test, public pressure mounted to continue spraying until the temperature was fully restored. But soon private companies were offering to lower the temperature for large companies to lower their energy bills and the emissions increased rapidly. The Earth's temperature swung wildly into colder temperatures, at first losing 1°C in the first decade. The ice recovered at the poles, increasing the albedo of the planet even more. The following decades saw a rapid decline in average global temperatures until the planet was once plunged into a new ice age.
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| The last Ice Age. Source: https://www.iceagenow.info/ice-age-maps-2/ |
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