Weather of 2096

by | Culture

Culture

What the Future Might Feel Like

The sky of 2096 is not alien. It is not the purple-tinged, chemically ruined sky of science fiction’s worst-case imaginations. It is blue on the days it is blue, grey on the days it is grey, and on the days it is neither — the days that have multiplied across the decades until they have become their own category of weather, the days the old meteorological vocabularies do not quite name — it is something else. Something the characters in Shards of a Shattered Sky have words for that we do not yet.

The climate of 2096 is the consequence of seven decades of compounding atmospheric change applied to a physical geography that was already, by 2025, showing the early symptoms of what would become its defining conditions. NOAA’s 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report projected 3.3 to 6.6 feet of sea level rise by 2100. The IPCC’s intermediate-to-high emissions scenarios projected a global average temperature increase of 2.5 to 4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. NOAA recorded $180 billion in weather and climate disaster damages in 2024 alone.

That $180 billion was the floor. That was the baseline from which 2096 is measured.

Here is the weather, region by region, in the world of the trilogy.

The Southwest: The Country After the River

The Southwest of 2096 is the most dramatic climate story on the continent, and the most legible one, because it is the story of a physical system — the Colorado River and the aquifers that supplemented it — that arrived at its limits on a timeline the research had been describing for decades.

Colorado River streamflow is down 36 to 80 percent from historical volumes, depending on the measurement point and the year. The snowpack that historically recharged it has fallen below a third of its historical volume. Phoenix and Tucson have reached temperatures that the Center for American Progress compared to present-day Dubai — cities that were not designed for those temperatures, whose infrastructure predates the heat, whose populations have been sorting into those who can afford the cooling and those who cannot since the 2030s.

The megadrought — 85 percent probability through 2100, per University of Texas research — is not experienced in 2096 as a disaster. Disasters are acute. This is chronic. It is the weather the region has, the condition of the sky and the soil and the water table, the baseline from which all other weather in the Southwest is measured.

The Southwest of 2096 does not experience the megadrought as a crisis. It experiences it as Tuesday. Crises resolve. This is the weather — chronic, permanent, the physical signature of decisions accumulated over a century.

The Southeast: The Violent Season

The Southeast of 2096 lives with Category 4 and 5 hurricanes as routine seasonal events rather than exceptional disasters. The IPCC projections and NOAA’s sea-level data confirm the physical logic: warmer ocean water, more atmospheric energy, storms of greater intensity arriving with greater frequency against a coastline that has 2 to 3 feet of additional sea level to absorb them.

The coastal property insurance market collapsed in stages, beginning in the 2030s, as the actuarial mathematics of storm risk in a warming ocean stopped producing viable premiums. The collapse reorganized the coastal population by economic tier: those with the resources to self-insure and rebuild stayed, those without left, and the geography of the Southeast coastline became one of the starkest class maps on the continent — the wealthy in their resilient, elevated, engineered structures and the unhoused in the perpetual aftermath of the last storm and the approach of the next.

The Southeast coastline of 2096 is one of the continent’s most legible class maps. The wealthy live in engineered resilience above the flood line. The poor live in the perpetual aftermath of the last storm and the anxious approach of the next.

The Northeast: The Hundred-Year Flood, Arriving Weekly

The Northeast’s defining weather story is sea level rise translated into the specific, local, experienced frequency of flooding events. Former hundred-year floods — events whose statistical probability was once so low that planning around them felt excessive — arrive in the Northeast of 2096 on nothing more than a high tide and a moderate storm. The infrastructure of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, much of it built for the sea levels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been in a state of managed retreat and partial remediation for three decades.

The NOAA 2022 Technical Report projection of 3.3 to 6.6 feet of sea level rise by 2100 has, by 2096, already materialized at the lower end of its range and is trending toward the middle. The cities exist. They are adapted, expensively and incompletely, and the adaptation cost has been borne, as all costs in the world of 2096 are borne, in proportion to the resources available to bear it.

The hundred-year flood in the 2096 Northeast is not a catastrophe. It is calendar management. The question is not whether the flood will arrive but whether the infrastructure it finds is adequate — and whose infrastructure that is.

The Great Lakes: The Climate Privilege

The Great Lakes corridor is the single zone of relative climate privilege in the 2096 continent, and the research confirms why: intact freshwater, moderated temperatures, arable land, and the demographic dividend of seven decades of climate migration from every other region. It is the destination of the century’s great internal migration, swollen with arrivals from the desiccated Southwest, the storm-battered Southeast, the flood-managed Northeast, and the drained Plains.

Its weather is not comfortable. The winters are deeper than they were, the springs more volatile, the summers warmer. But they are survivable without the extraordinary infrastructural expenditure that the other regions require. The water runs from the taps. The fields produce. The sky, on most days, is the sky the characters in the trilogy look up at with the specific gratitude of people who know, because the world has taught them, what it means to live somewhere the sky is not trying to kill you.

The sky of 2096 is the same sky we know, looked at through seventy more years of choices about what we were willing to do about it. The question the trilogy asks, through the medium of that sky, is not whether we knew. We knew. It is whether knowing was enough.

 

 

Sources Cited

The climate science and data underlying the weather portrait of 2096.

Climate Projections and Emissions Scenarios

The Southwest: Drought, Heat, and the Colorado River

Climate Communication and the Daily Weather Story

Climate Fiction and the Weather of the Future

 

Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts