Lord Of The Rings Memes

I think about this sometimes. What happens if people of the far future decide they don't want to go back to the old climate. What if they prefer things the way they are?

Imagine we have a really catastrophic warming scenario. A few centuries from now, the human population of a few hundred million mostly huddles around the upper latitudes, land that was uninhabitable tundra in our time. Imagine if natural systems start slowly lowering the greenhouse gas level back down, or if someone wants to scrub the excess carbon from the atmosphere. How would those people react?

Will they want to restore the Earth to how it was? Sure, that would probably be better for humans and nature overall, but what about their society specifically? Are they going to want to relocate their entire population back to the lower latitudes? And consider, the process that drove humans to those high latitudes was likely a historical event on the order of the Black Death, an epochal catastrophe whose emotional damage was so great that we still feel its echos today.

And the people then are being asked to willingly sign up for a second round of forced migration? And then you have the problem of, who exactly gets to own all this newly habitable land opening up in the lower latitudes? Who gets to own the land that was once inhabited, but had been abandoned for centuries? Who gets to own what was once China, India, of the Continental United States? How do you compensate people whose homes are going to be rendered back into polar wasteland?

I can see such a society simply choosing to keep things as they are. It may simply be too practically difficult to restore the old world. Even if the net condition of humanity and nature would improve, this is the exact kind of global coordination problem that global warming was in the first place!

They might start pointlessly burning carbon just to keep the temperature up, burning just enough to cancel out what the planet naturally recycles. They might install solar mirrors, except designed warm the planet rather than cooling it.

Or maybe the powers that be simply let the changes happen anyway, and they don't even try to make the transition equitable. The new lands get handed to the rich and connected. Everyone else gets told to pound sand.

It's interesting considering a far future that has almost the exact opposite problem as we do, and yet they would be under very similar pressures and struggles as we are.