I know I’ve been brainstorming it out for literal years, with many contradictory ideas, but it’s been a rough few years, and so help me future Georgia, Decca, and friends (from my stories) have been pleasant (imaginary) companions. Georgia, last we saw of her, was seemingly enjoying her life in Japan with her little son on their liveaboard sailboat. Well, I have a series of events in mind where she gets inducted into a ski monastery of sorts in Hokkaido but then is severed from it, only to discover, in truly gothic fashion, that her girlfriend she met there and who meant so much to her was already dead the whole time…she was never “really there”. It wouldn’t be the first time: her own son was conceived by a ghost during a Christmas blizzard in Virginia.
She returns to her friends in California, where climate change has strengthened the North Pacific High, winds blow more strongly parallel to the coast, upwelling is greatly enhanced (with all sorts of fun consequences for marine flora and fauna), and as a result the summers are permanently foggy, often windy, with temperatures often not even reaching 50 degrees Fahrenheit during the day on the coast, even as the interior bakes under a sun more relentless than ever. The world has become stormier under the influence of a cold anomaly in the Pacific and even Indian Oceans, near the equator, “La Niña del Diablo”, only it’s centered in the western Pacific, near New Guinea, the temperature gradient from west to east thus being more similar to El Niño than La Niña, only with the temperature knob turned way down.
Compared to my previous worldbuilding, the effects might be further-reaching than I even expected: tropical waters would cool so much that convection would largely shut down…except in the Atlantic, where the Gulf Stream slowing down drastically cools the North Atlantic and warms the tropical Atlantic waters, leading to extreme nor’easter and Atlantic extratropical storm activity, even as extreme wind shear from the bizarre La Niña and an ever-thickening Saharan dust layer shuts down hurricane formation. The engine that powers the trade winds largely dies, as mid-latitude winter storms become much more intense, the net result being a cool, dry tropics where winds often reverse their usual flow and scream out of the west. The water vapor is largely still there, it’s just transported away by atmospheric rivers to the higher latitudes, among the most prominent of which would be…California and the US southwest.
El Niño characteristically drenches the southwestern US with moisture, but the heat it injects into the global climate system limits cold air intrusions. Not so with this new ENSO state: the global climate system cools, and the moisture comes from a pool of warm humid air that’s just not as warm as it is normally. The anomaly is extreme, and so the southwestern United States has very cold and very wet winters.
Already an extreme atmospheric river is a known hazard type; the famous “ARkStorm” study envisages a parade of storms similar to the ones that pounded California in 1862, which would be more devastating today. In my science-fictional world, it wouldn’t be so devastating. In my previous story, I depicted an atmospheric river rather similar to 1862 and the “ARkStorm”: heavy rains and extreme snowfalls over a 30-day period without much let-up. Underground reservoirs and allowing the flood plains to be wild (and absorb water) ensure it wasn’t devastating. In my world disaster preparedness is robust…but I think my climate shift is exactly the scenario where even my world would be overwhelmed.
Oh, maybe planners designed the cisterns for an ARkStorm. For added safety margin, they probably based it on a doubling or tripling of intensity compared to 1862. But what happens when an ARkStorm is not some freak 30-day event, but settles in as the normal over an entire winter? Five months of relentless atmospheric rivers pointed right at California would fill up the cisterns in the valleys…and then the rainfall and snowmelt would rapidly pool out in the open landscape, escaping even the usual floodplains, turning the entire Great Valley of California into a flowing sheet of fresh water. The crop fields and grazing lands would be extinguished.
And not only for one winter: the next year, the same pattern happens again…and then the next year. Until the Central Valley is quietly marked as water area on maps. The ancient dry lakes would fill and rise…and then they’d be replenished again the following winter. Even Badwater Basin would at first be covered by a shimmering surface of shallow water, but then repeated winter downpours over months and months would cause the lake level to rise. Lake Manly would be reborn.
The same process would potentially resurrect Pleistocene lakes all over the Great Basin, most prominently Lake Lahontan in northern Nevada. The Great Salt Lake in Utah would rise and swell drastically in area, and become far less salty. Repeated intense intrusions of arctic air would limit evaporation, changing rain over to snow with a frequency that would strike 20th century observers as supernatural. Instead of a blizzard being a freak event, the coast even of southern California could see multiple snowstorms every winter. The Sierra Nevada and the like would accumulate potentially hundreds of feet of snow per winter in the most exposed slopes, rapidly converting to glacial ice which will flow downward and spread outward. Summers are still warm enough to keep it from forming an ice sheet, but the highest Sierra elevations would retain snow and ice year-round.
Snowmelt and runoff-fed lakes that pool would rapidly transform the vast majority of the Desert Southwest into a lush country of shimmering lakes and whitecapped mountains, even as temperatures aren’t even all that much colder than the chilliest years seen today: the hydrological violence would be off the charts, and in a geological setting like the Great Basin the effects would be transformative.
Salt Lake City and eventually the entire urbanized area of the Wasatch Front would become submerged without heroic engineering…but, in my timeline, canal cities that rise and fall with the water are an accepted, even desirable, type of settlement. Mexico City made a point of restoring its lake and keeping its cityscape intact, by transforming the dry streets into watered canals. Utah might embrace the same ethos but on a far grander scale, Mormon civilization being reborn on rippling waves as blustery cold fronts now lead to billowing lake-effect snow squalls dominating entire winters, the snow never quite melting from the Wasatch’s peaks even in summer anymore. The deserts? What deserts? All there is is the vast lake stretching from horizon to horizon, punctuated by snowy lush green islands.
Apocalyptic in its effects, yes, but if Utah (and northern Nevada) rises to the challenge, they’d have a series of cities on the water, a marine civilization which in the fullness of time as the water rises will even connect them by boat to the Snake River basin and thence the Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. Winters? Cold and extremely snowy. The mountains? A skier’s heaven, bar none. The ice? Spectacular? The plant life? Perhaps challenged, but after a period of adjustment, the biosphere would blossom like never before. Fir, spruce, pine would support a rich ecosystem full of fish and wildlife. The summers? Warm and sunny. What was the land that no one else wanted has now been transformed, as if by divine will, into a lush alpine paradise stretching hundreds of miles in every direction, in a matter of just a few years.
When the climate shift is greatly accentuated by the shroud of meteor dust that dims the sunlight entering the atmosphere, a la volcanic winter albeit by a different physical mechanism, the summers will be so chilly as to outright fail to support any agriculture whatsoever, the winters would become extremely cold, yet the equatorial oceans would keep directing atmospheric rivers squarely their way, pummeling the southwestern US with moisture even in the face of arctic air remaining in place the entire winter. Glaciers would expand at seemingly supernatural speed downslope, waters would rise even further, perhaps at this point establishing those linkages with the Snake River basin, the new freshwater seas would freeze over quite solid every winter, and the sun would often appear a dim disk which casts no sensible warmth even in the middle of the day, while twilight is dominated by spectacular displays of noctilucent cloud.
Needless to say our transcontinental transportation corridors would be extremely disrupted, but heroic engineering could rebuild them, the geology of the Great Basin suggesting new higher, more picturesque routes, bridges of immense majesty crossing the new seas, carrying traffic along the corridor we know as Interstate 80, connecting San Francisco to the eastern United States. When fully adapted to, the environment would be nothing short of spectacular, the apocalypse seeming almost like the hand of providence having handed the local civilization a cornucopia…and then the meteoritic winter ebbs. The global climate never quite goes back to normal, but with the end of mass plant agriculture due to the violent climate change and its replacement by animal ranching on-world and plant agriculture in controlled environments off-world, technological solutions are proposed by scientists and engineers to make the global climate “back to normal”…but now, after so many years, the question, especially in Utah, becomes: do we even want the old world to come back?
Very eerie and atmospheric, and perhaps a major digression from what this all has to do with Georgia, Decca, and friends, but I have a plot in mind to get Georgia and friends into this fantastical dreamscape that is the land we used to call Utah, since in the world as I’ve constructed for them, with all the logical and inevitable scientific consequences, Utah and the Great Basin might be the most spectacular manifestation of a Gaia who’s decided to show us what she can really do.
A perfect place for her to find a ski commune of a rather different sort, the new paradise having seen the Mormon world enter a kind of golden age even as most of the rest of the planet experiences it as apocalyptic in the more colloquial meaning of the word. Not the end of civilization — humanity is technologically advanced enough to weather it all, even if it’s the sort of catastrophe that would kill billions if it happened to us — but certainly transformative enough to make a compelling setting, and with those who foresee the transformation beforehand perhaps having enough potential to make for a compelling story.
I know I write this in generalities and ramble, skipping over from one topic to the next, assuming a lot of context that you as a reader might not have on hand already, but if I were more specific and gave more background I’d pretty much have to write the whole book right now, hah! As it is, I wanted to share these generalities and specifics, bits and pieces, so that I could both share my insights from my latest brainstorm and organize and gather my thoughts. The more I do, the more I really like this line of exploration for my next piece of science fiction. So much so I might make some revisions to the world as I’ve previously depicted it in my stories; a sure sign that I must be cooking something really good, since I’m not prone to doing that without compelling reason.
Sometimes poking the scenario you’ve constructed and looking at what would happen if you went “more, more, more! more intense!” and combining it with some other concepts you had cooking leads to a really compelling result. I’ll keep thinking…even if it does take literal years to actually sit down and write anything…