The Collapse of Western Civilization

A map of Bangladesh from 2300 comparing current sea levels with 2000 shows the country mostly underwater.

Scientists speaking out about the climate crisis were accused of attention-seeking. Such scientists were denounced and threatened, and some were legally prosecuted and had their work subpoenaed. Some countries—namely the US—passed laws that limited what scientists could research. In 2025, the US passed the National Stability Protection Act, under which hundreds of scientists were imprisoned for reducing public safety by emphasizing the climate crisis and potentially preventing economic development. While climate science did receive funding, it was at the expense of other branches of science and of the arts; the historian speculates that the arts were underfunded because artists grasped the consequences of the zeitgeist. The artists and scientists were proven correct, and, in 2010, it was recognized that scientists had underestimated the implications of climate change.

The historian attributes “human adaptive optimism”—or the perception of illimitable human adaptation—as a primary cause for humans’ failure to take climate action seriously, while scientists’ failure to recognize the severity of climate change is attributed to then-common discipline specialization and reductionist methods. Reductionism is traced back to René Descartes, a 17th-century philosopher, and it holds that complex problems could be understood better by breaking them down into component parts. The method was an impediment to the research of complex systems, like the climate, and to the dissemination of interdisciplinary research. The IPCC was formed to create a broader perspective, but the organization was unable to clearly communicate information to the public.

While some scientists took holistic scientific approaches, they failed to consider the social drivers of climate change. Scientists practiced a sort of self-denial rooted in religiosity:

Just as religious orders of prior centuries had demonstrated moral rigor through extreme practices of asceticism in dress, lodging, behavior, and food—in essence, practices of physical self-denial—so, too, did physical scientists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries attempt to demonstrate their intellectual rigor through practices of intellectual self-denial (16).

Scientists attempted to prove their worth through strict and limited intellectual canons, such as the reliance on statistical evidence and the idea that scientists must be 95 percent certain before publishing information; scientists feared appearing foolish. While the public began to attribute abnormal weather to climate change, scientists hesitated to publicly recognize the connection.

Carbon dioxide emissions rose after the initial warnings of climate change in the 1970s in both developing and developed nations. In 2005, shale gas production increased after the US exempted the industry from oversight to protect drinking water in the Safe Drinking Water Act. Canada, previously recognized as environmentally conscious, increased shale gas drilling as well as extracting fossil fuels from tar deposits and pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol—a multi-national climate agreement. Rather than lowering emissions by six percent, Canada increased emissions by 30 percent. An increase in natural gas supplies led to a drop in prices, with which emerging renewable industries struggled to compete.

This was followed by the US banning biodiesel fuels and numerous other bills that impeded the development of renewable energy. Melting sea ice allowed for easier access to previously inaccessible fossil fuel reserves. Rather than acting to prevent further melting, governments exploited the open seaways, such as in the agreement between ExxonMobil—an American fossil fuel company—and Russia, which allowed the company access to Russian Arctic areas in return for access to drilling technology (22). Government leaders used multiple tactics to justify continued fossil fuel industry development, including emphasizing that natural and shale gas emit less than coal emits. Their logic, however, was flawed, and fossil fuel production and greenhouse gas emissions increased, exacerbating climate change.

While the IPCC predicted up to a 3°C rise in temperature, by 2042, the temperature had risen by 3.9°C. The climate deteriorated, making heat waves and accompanying droughts common by 2040, with low-income nations experiencing the worst impacts. Governments implemented control measures and depopulated areas that were most at risk of severe weather events. Heat waves in 2041 killed crops, which caused panic, and dehydration, poor nutrition, and migration resulted in disease outbreaks. Farmland was reduced to desert lands, insects destroyed forests, and people began overthrowing governments.

The United States and Canada merged to form the United States of North America, and people migrated northward in North America and Europe. India and Switzerland started the “First International Emergency Summit on Climate Change” under the UNFCCC’s successor—the “Unified Nations for Climate Protection,” where they agreed to the “Unified Nations Convention on Climate Engineering and Protection (UNCCEP)” and created the “International Climate Cooling Engineering Project (ICCEP)” (26). The ICCEP enacted the “International Aerosol Injection Climate Engineering Project” (27)—or the IAICEP or Crutzen Project, named for the scientist who initially proposed the idea in 2006. Microscopic particles were injected into the atmosphere to reflect incoming sunlight; while temperatures decreased over the first three years, the project was shut down in 2063 after altering the Indian monsoon and causing widespread crop failures and subsequent famine in India.

Once the project stopped, the temperature drastically rose in a phenomenon termed “termination shock.” The greenhouse effect crossed a tipping point, or a point of no return, that exacerbated heating. The polar bear went extinct, Arctic summer ice disappeared, and the Artic permafrost thawed, releasing large amounts of methane (CH₄), which doubled the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. This resulted in the Sagan effect, or Venusian death, the feedback loop between warming and the release of more methane.

The Great Collapse, or the disintegration of the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheet, led to a rapid and significant rise in sea levels. The term also encompasses the social collapse caused by the rising seas. During the subsequent Mass Migration, approximately 1.5 billion people, or 20 percent of the population, were displaced. A plague—the Second Black Death—ensued, killing around half of the remaining human population and potentially causing the extinction of up to 70 percent of nonhuman species. However, this is a conservative and inaccurate estimate, as humans at the time did not keep accurate records of other species.

The historian does not enter into the details of human suffering, as the intended readers are educated on the subject from an early age. Akari Ishikawa, a genetic engineer from Japan, developed and released a “lichenized fungus”—Pannaria ishikawa—that efficiently absorbed carbon dioxide. The lichen spread throughout the world, altering ecosystems and reducing atmospheric carbon. Ishikawa was labeled a criminal by the government of Japan, but citizens felt she was a hero; however, the exact conditions under which Ishikawa developed and released the lichen are unknown.

The lichen and the “Grand Solar Minimum”—a solar cycle in which less radiation is emitted—slowed global warming, allowing humans in some areas to regroup, although others, including those in Africa and Australia, did not survive.