I may be overly pessimistic (However read "Year in Climate" if you really want to be depressed) but this is how I see things probably playing out in the next few decades:
It appears that the world-wide rise in the cost of food caused in great part by the severe weather effects of climate change that may be causing political upheaval in many countries has not yet significantly affected the US since it is a net exporter of food.
It would be truly ironic, however, if the US, the industrialized country that perhaps more than any other ushered in the climate crises that the world currently faces, by the sheer perverse genius of stumbling into the politically driven demise of its own industrial prominence and its descent into a resource exporting third-world like economy, will be the prime benefactor of the environmental havoc it strives so mightily to deny.
Nevertheless, by about 2014 to 17 I expect that the US (and many industrial areas of the world) may experience a sudden increase in social and political turmoil in the industrial cities and many of their suburbs as the realization and impact of permanent loss of industrial job growth bites into society (However see Brad deLong for a slightly more optimistic take on our near term economic future). We also can expect renewed growth of the perennial conflict between agribusiness and independent farm interests in the Middle-west (agribusiness wins).
As Climate Change causes the central land area of the US and Canada to warm, migration should surge from the Deep South and the increasingly unlivable southwest into the expanding and northward moving farm belt. Canada should begin to experience a resistance to out of work immigrants from the US and other areas seeking employment in it's suddenly flourishing agricultural/resource based economy(see,"Best places to Live"). The expanding instability of the weather should continue to push up agricultural prices. The economies of rapidly industrializing states such as India and China may stall and social unrest could follow as food prices continue to escalate. Border conflicts are inevitable.
Proliferating disruptive weather events such as mega-storms, expanded wet seasons and catastrophic snowfall in winters because of the atmosphere’s enhanced capacity to hold moisture can be expected to render much of the US East Coast, North-western Europe and eastern China less desirable places to live and work. Heat waves in Russia and floods and snow storms in the US Midwest and Canada will probably make food harvest from these agriculture exporting areas unreliable from year to year.
Political power will probably begin to drift away from the financial industry back in the direction of those controlling large agricultural and other resource based industries. As social and political turmoil grow as society restructures to deal with the expected crises, the military elites even in the US can be expected to probably step up their activities to suppress dissent reenforcing the emerging new social order (sort of like a new feudalism).
Migration across national boundaries can be expected to swell as people flee, climate, economic and social unrest. These migrations will generate even more nativist sentiment in opposition to the new immigrants (See Center for American Progress discussion of some current US nativist arguments); The real unknowns in all this is the impact of the increase in armed conflict that usually accompanies times of stress and the role and impact of control of the internet that at least has the potential to ameliorate some of the dislocation.
Modern representative governments are proving increasingly incapable of exerting effective control on the activities of the largest financial, industrial or religious corporations They appear to have won the battle for control of the resources and economy of the world. The public seems to have accepted the reality of a weakened national state, except in military or police matters. The concept of liberal democracy appears to be withering (However see Business Insider discussion of the current European protests against austerity budgets).
The liberal democracies, increasingly unable to deal with the political power of the religious and industrial corporate elites may slowly succumb to the control of these elites and in most cases be replaced with a version of the type of corporate state espoused by some in the 1920s and 30′s as a solution to the collapse of the Royal Order and the seeming inability of some of the Constitutional Democracies that replaced them to deal with the social and economic catastrophes that broke upon them following WWI.
Can anything be done to halt this seeming death march to Armageddon? Perhaps, see my previous posts, here, here, here and here. Since so much of this scenario appears to be a function of the economic myth under which we live and the resulting plunge of the world order into activities increasing the threat of accelerating disastrous climate change, a sudden upsurge in political activism (as seems to be happening in Europe) against the existing dictatorship of the creditor class, we can begin to address the climate change crisis that appears a greater threat to humanity than even the famed "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse". However even if that were to occur, would there be enough time and would we choose the right approach for dealing with the threat? (See, Crisismavin for an insightful article on why this may even be more difficult than anyone imagines. He argues that it is not the source of our energy alone that drives the looming calamity, but the growth of energy use itself no matter the source.)
(The above is a reworking of a post in Trenz Pruca's Journal.)
Today's Quote:
“A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation”. ~Howard Scott).