It wasn't so difficult, at the time, to understand that these changes were working independently from our climate models. We saw a shift in 1998 and we thought that things were getting more serious. The droughts of 2002 and 2003 should have given us a wakeup call. The floodings, the 1,000-year Texas drought, Hurricane Sandy. . .we couldn't get definitive proof that they were caused by climate change. Then the polar icecap collapsed. . .
In September of 2012, it turns out, the Mayans were right after all. A strong and consistent negative Arctic Oscillation brought high pressure and rapid ice melt into the region. All of the multi year ice was either melted on the spot or pushed by the prevailing winds out of the Arctic Sea and out into the Atlantic.
We should have seen it coming, what with the unprecedented high pressure dome of air sitting directly over Kansas City for 2 months this summer. We knew our models projected an increase in the Hadley Cell intensity northward, shifting the desiccation of the Sonoran Desert up into Oklahoma, but our models showed that happening sometime around 2050 at the earliest.
We didn't realize our models were off, that the runaway arctic amplification of temperatures and ice melts was weakening the polar jet stream and that blocking currents and meridional overturning circulations would dominate the mid-latitudes so quickly.
We didn't realize that our global breadbasket was about to dry out. Some had wisely indicated that our complete reliance on monocrop production of corn and soy was going to cause us irreparable harm. But it was the great food shortage of 2016 when processed foods increased in price by 300% that should have proved it. We didn't realize that the shift of the Wintertime Aleutan Low would pull the North Pacific High northward and was going to shift our entire pacific precipitation regime to the northwest. This was going to regularly leave the entire western states dry as a bone through the winter of 2018 and that the agriculture base of the southwest was going to collapse.
We didn't expect the great heatwave of 2019 to produce widespread power loss and heatstroke deaths from Tempe to Dallas and up into Iowa City.
Our models expected the Atlantic Meriodonal Overturning Circulation to begin to slow around 2045, and not too significantly until after 2080, at the worst case scenario. Though we had seen as early as 2010 that the Eastern Atlantic Gyre was weakening rapidly, leading to increasingly cold European winters. . .It wasn't until the sea surface temperatures off of the Carolinas began to reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit that we realized the loss of sea ice and the subsequent albedo shift-driven snowmelt of the arctic was arresting the Gulf Stream.
Now we have been struggling to build in-place shelters in the great lakes regions for millions of displaced, homeless, starving travelers and their families. The regions that once held our greatest centers of population and culture and finance are regularly inundated by Category 5+ hurricanes and flooding has driven coastline inhabitants inland from Miami to Boston.
If only we had implemented a Marshall Plan style rebuilding when we needed it most. During our economic collapse of 2008. We could have produced wide-scale solar, and wind manufacturing and installation infrastructure throughout the country. Billions could have been spent on energy storage technology and modernizing the power grid, to allow decentralized wind and solar power to meet our electrical power needs.
A federal mandate for plug-in hybrid electric powered vehicles would have provided a boost to our economy with high paying jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers and we would have collapsed our trade imbalance within 10 years. While cutting our carbon emissions by 80% and driving the global price for renewable generation and energy storage technology through the floor, allowing for (and leading) a global renaissance in economic prosperity, sustainable agriculture, education and modernization.
Birthrates would have fallen globally due to increases in electrification and higher levels of education among women. And we would have avoided the catastrophic population collapse that is now so apparently going to happen today, only 20 years after the arctic showed us her hand in 2012.