Stunned by Two Maps

This Washington Post article promised six maps that would make me rethink the world, but for me, it was just these two:


This is the world with 4°C of global warming. That's me in Minnesota in the spot where it looks semi-habitable along the edge of the desertified entire middle of the country, just south of the new bread basket known as Canada and Alaska.


The second map is of the Arctic shipping channels, and it's not so much those channels that make this map so overwhelming to me: it's the way it presents a vision of the world that orients around the North Pole and the Arctic, since that's where all of the people will be.

Our entire sense of the globe as oriented north-south, with the Atlantic and Pacific as spatially dominant, will shift so that we are circumpolar, with a much smaller version of the same thing around the South Pole.

You can know this stuff and not know it. What are we doing talking about Donald Trump and anything else, really? This is madness.