Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil Masters
This is a world with massive social disruption and probably megadeaths. I don't see it reverting to old patterns as early as 1914. Or even 2014.
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Old "patterns" might return, but the old players certainly do not. Enough climate change to push sea levels up this much has certainly destroyed every port and severely damaged every coastal city on the planet, but that's the *minor* impact. That conversion of the Sahara to grassland hints at what it really was. Traditional agriculture no longer worked anywhere on the planet and spent several decades shifting unpredictably in a time surpluses weren't that extensive in the first place and the global food trade wasn't anything like what it came to be in the next century. Hundreds of millions of people starved from the massive and unpredictable crop failures, and even if things have stabilized 50 years on (and they probably haven't yet) the distribution of places that can grow enough food to support populations big enough to be Great Powers looks nothing like it did.