A friend of mine went to Ireland one summer about 20ish years ago. Never once did it get above 20 degrees and it rained most days. Someone I know in Mexico grew up in a town where the architecture is designed around rain. The buildings downtown all have roofs overhanging the sidewalks because it used to rain most days, so they designed things to shelter pedestrians. The place also had an airport, but it was unusable most of the time because it was too foggy / rainy. These days it only rains occasionally and can be mid-30s for several months of the year.
There are a lot of places where people used to need heating in the winter, but the summers were brief but pleasant. Now, in a lot of places the winters are still brutal, but now summer days get so hot that air conditioning is also a necessity.
But, what worries me most is farming. Farmers need predictable seasons. If they know the summer will be warmer and dryer they can sometimes switch to different crops. That doesn’t work if there’s unpredictable weeks-long rain when it’s time to harvest.
Humanity is resilient, and humans will survive. But, being a living human in 2226 might be awful. Enjoying the outdoors might just not be something people can’t do anymore. All the natural ecosystems of the world might have collapsed, and people just eat nacho-flavoured protein paste and dream about what it was like to eat a raspberry.
A friend of mine went to Ireland one summer about 20ish years ago. Never once did it get above 20 degrees and it rained most days. Someone I know in Mexico grew up in a town where the architecture is designed around rain. The buildings downtown all have roofs overhanging the sidewalks because it used to rain most days, so they designed things to shelter pedestrians. The place also had an airport, but it was unusable most of the time because it was too foggy / rainy. These days it only rains occasionally and can be mid-30s for several months of the year.
There are a lot of places where people used to need heating in the winter, but the summers were brief but pleasant. Now, in a lot of places the winters are still brutal, but now summer days get so hot that air conditioning is also a necessity.
But, what worries me most is farming. Farmers need predictable seasons. If they know the summer will be warmer and dryer they can sometimes switch to different crops. That doesn’t work if there’s unpredictable weeks-long rain when it’s time to harvest.
Humanity is resilient, and humans will survive. But, being a living human in 2226 might be awful. Enjoying the outdoors might just not be something people can’t do anymore. All the natural ecosystems of the world might have collapsed, and people just eat nacho-flavoured protein paste and dream about what it was like to eat a raspberry.