I was reading a review of the book, The World in 2050. The book is by UCLA geographer Laurence C. Smith; the review is by Gregg Easterbrook, himself an author.
Easterbrook shares Smith’s contention that “a warming world is likely to cause the high-latitude land farthest from the equator to become desirable. By an accident of the shifting of the Earth’s plates, nearly all our high-latitude land is in the Northern Hemisphere.”
The low latitudes are those less than the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere at 23°26' N latitude and the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere at 23°26' S latitude. High latitudes are considered those closest to the poles. There just isn’t as much land in the Southern Hemisphere’s high latitudes as in the Northern Hemisphere.
The most worrisome pages of Smith’s book, according to Easterbrook, come when Smith writes of freshwater.
Smith, Easterbrook reports, says because of global warming, “more of the world’s water is leaving the mountains to run into the sea” and “no amount of engineering” can change it.
Easterbrook says Smith’s book provides a “convincing argument that shortage of freshwater is the leading environmental danger, while a northward geopolitical shift may have the heaviest impact on society.”
“The north,” Easterbrook writes, “which has plenty of freshwater, doesn’t face runaway population trends. Climate change may increase water stress in areas where population is rising while adding freshwater to places that already have plenty.”
Of course, this mixed news may not be reassuring for those in the high latitudes who may enjoy their lifestyles and relative isolation.
But what of those in the mid and low regions? Will they come looking for the water of the high latitudes, and will it be moveable?
Smith seems to think so.
