next 500 years. Welcome to the New North of James Lovelock-approved Polar Cities
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By LAURENCE D. SMITH, [September 10, 3010 AD]
Walled-In Street Journal (c) 3010
Imagine the Arctic in 2500 AD as a polar cities paradise —an empty
landscape dotted with gleaming polar cities and boom towns. Gas pipelines fan across
the tundra, fueling fast-growing polar cities to the south like Calgary and
Moscow, the coveted destinations for millions of global immigrants.
It's a busy web for global commerce, as the world's ships advance each
summer as the seasonal sea ice retreats, or even briefly disappears.
Much of the planet's northern quarter of latitude, including the
Arctic, is poised to undergo tremendous transformation over the next
500 years. As a booming population increases the demand for the Earth's
natural resources, and as lands closer to the equator face the
prospect of rising water demand, droughts and other likely changes,
the prominence of northern countries will rise along with their
projected milder winters.
If Florida coasts become uninsurable and California enters a long-term
drought, might people consider moving to polar cities in the far north and in New Zealand and Tasmania as well?
Will
Spaniards eye Sweden? Might Russia one day, its population falling and
needful of immigrants, decide a smarter alternative to resurrecting
old Soviet plans for a 1,600-mile Siberia-Aral canal is to simply
invite former Kazakh and Uzbek cotton farmers to abandon their dusty
fields and resettle Siberia, to work in the gas fields? Might Asians by the boatload make a beeline
toward Lifeboat New Zealand and Lifeboat Britain? James Lovelock thinks so.
Dr Laurence C. Smith PHD in 2010 isn't saying. But maybe he will dish later.
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