In my life, I've seen New York City under full quarantine.
The Midwest, overrun, devastated by pests.
Plagues sweep across California.
And then what happened next was something none of us saw coming.
It became a race against time to save our future,
to even have a future.
It's the year 2100 and I survived.
To change the future, first you have to imagine it.
"Earth 2100"
starts now.
The idea that within this century, perhaps in your lifetime,
our civilization could lie in ruins seems unbelievable.
But according to some of the world's leading minds,
that's not just a worst-case scenario, it's a real possibility.
Good evening, I'm Bob Woodruff.
Over the next two hours, we'll take you on a journey into a world
that could await us and our children.
370,000 babies will be born today.
And we've taken the liberty of creating one more,
a fictional character we're calling Lucy,who will be our guide through this century.
Her life story is not a prediction about what will happen,
but what might happen.
This once glorious city,whose lights at night could be seen for miles,
empty now.
Its towering skyscrapers, once a testament to our ingenuity,
now stand as crumbling monuments to our demise.
Maybe only artists can grasp what that kind of future really holds for us.
It's perhaps in the area that we think of today as science fiction,
but that could be a very real future for the planet.
A hundred years from now, if New York is abandoned,
I can imagine some advanced creatures,
maybe humans, maybe extraterrestrials,
looking at New York and saying,
those ignorant people, how on earth could they have ever expected to survive?
I can ask myself what happened,
but where do I begin?
With the droughts,the famines,the plague?
It began long before all that.
I lived through it all.
My story is everyone's story,
the story of the last century.
I was born June 2nd, 2009.
Civilization was at a crossroads.
We were in a race for our future.
Today, I say to you that the challenges we face are real.
They are serious and they are many.
The temperature is expected to keep going up.
The stock market plunged.
Douglas County will run out of drinking water.
They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.
Sixth grader came down with suspected swine flu on Wednesday.
Energy, climate, food, population, economic pressures,
any one of these challenges might be very serious in itself.
But because they're happening all simultaneously,
it's going to be very difficult for our governments to cope.
When I look at the next century, I feel it's up for grabs.
- Raising sea levels... - Catastrophic weather.
- Ten-year drought... - It's scary.
These are things that are happening today.
The time for action is now.
The world had never known such uncertainty.
We were used to having what we wanted and doing what we wanted.
The analogy that I would draw is someone looking at their bank account
and week after week, they're withdrawing money and they're enjoying the good life.
If they would bother to read the statements,
they would see that the bank account is dropping $900, $800, $700, $600.
And at that rate you know that another six months of the good life
is not gonna be a good life anymore.
We've acted as though we were independent of the environment.
We burned fossil fuels.
We've overused our renewable resources
in the belief that we could do that forever.
People are complaining about the economic crisis we have right now.
You haven't seen nothing yet.
You know, if we continue down this suicidal pathway that we're on,
where we basically turn living stuff into dead stuff and call that economic growth,
this will look like the good old days.
Although the world I was born into was running out of so much, water, oil, land,
I remember a loving family, a big house, green lawn,
more water than we knew what to do with.
My parents must have known what was happening.
We had a compact car and recycled.
And it wasn't just us.
Smart, imaginative people everywhere were working furiously on solutions.
Our government was pouring money into alternative energy.
It seemed like everyone was growing their own vegetable garden.
Windmills were sprouting up all over.
People were beginning to understand.
But the clock was running out, and nature was always one step ahead.
Flowers are blooming earlier
and trees are leafing earlier.
Birds are coming back from migration much earlier.
If you were to pull back from the Earth, what you would see is
sort of a refugee movement, if you will.
And species are moving their ranges farther north to get to cool,
from south to north,and from the valleys up to the mountain tops.
Of course, as a child, I didn't notice these things,
having nothing to compare it to.
I was a little girl enchanted by my small world.
Until one summer, thousands, maybe millions, of dragonflies showed up out of nowhere.
They were delicate and beautiful and I put one in a jar.
My mother was puzzled and looked them up.
They were supposed to be in Cuba, not Miami.
It was not until much later that I realized they were a sign of what was to come.
It's 2015, six short years from now,
and the best-laid plans are getting underway.
A wave farm off Scotland is harnessing the ocean's energy.
Vatican City has gone totally solar.
And here in America, cars are running cleaner and more efficiently.
Still, we cling to that old habit, oil,
and it's getting harder and more expensive to find.
From coast to coast,
motorists are searching for relief from soaring gas prices in California...
We could see a doubling or tripling of real oil prices, that's after inflation.
We're running out of oil and we've created a society,
the American way of life is what we call it,
based on the assumption that oil will be plentiful forever.
The large spread out suburbs that we've grown accustomed to,
the strip malls,
the big box stores with their enormous parking lots around them,
all of those have been made possible because we've had cheap gasoline,
and as energy becomes much more expensive, you'll see that those areas become
less desirable places to live.
The first time I moved, I was six.
A lot of people were leaving the suburbs for the city.
There were new jobs, and you didn't need a car for everything.
My dad was going to work on the new streetcar system in Miami.
And my mother told me we were going to live on the top floor of an apartment building.
She said we'd see the palm trees below us.
I was excited, but also a little sad to leave.
As the price of oil goes up,
it will ripple through every part of the global economy.
In Washington today, protesters demanded an end to rising food prices.
Our agriculture system is almost wholly dependent on cheap oil.
Tremendous amounts of diesel fuel that are used in planting and harvesting
and then moving the stuff, all these vast distances.
By 2015 in the United States, add about 20 million people to the population
and then just play out what that does to consumption patterns.
I mean, the, the number of people that we've got to feed.
There's just basically this slow, creeping tension for natural resources.
As the American way of life becomes increasingly unsustainable,
the rest of the world will be trying to catch up.
The Chinese like cars.
And they like big cars.
You have 14,000 cars out onto China's roads daily.
Incomes are rising really rapidly.
They're moving into meat-based diets.
You need 10 pounds of grain to get one pound of meat.
There is simply no way that the rest of the world can start eating meat the way we do.
If everyone in the world consumed as much as the average American,
it would take the resources of four Earths to support the planet's population,
which raises the question,
should the rest of the world consume less,or should we?
American habits, though, are hard to break.
We in the US have gotten used to the idea that we're somehow
immune to natural limits and it's the other people who are going to suffer.
Good morning, Miami.
The summer of 2015 is on track to become one of the hottest in history.
Temperatures are expected to be in the triple digits.
My mother and I were waiting for gas.
The line went around the block and then some.
Nothing new.
But this time, the line had stopped moving altogether.
A man who worked at the gas station came out holding a sign.
People started yelling and they got out of their cars
and started moving towards him.
My mother got us out of there fast.
I've been staking out an area that's been
hit hard recently by gas snatchers.
Look at him, he gets out, walks right up to the car.
Wow.
Look at this, right in the middle of the day.
There's cars going by, and these guys are...
siphoning gas out of someone's car.
In the face of mounting protests over rising gas and food prices,
Congress today approved a plan to fund the construction of
40 new coal-fired power plants over the next five years.
The country took the easy way out.
Coal was once again touted as our so-called salvation.
But the more coal we burned, the faster our planet warmed.
You get the picture.
We're spewing more carbon, more methane,
more nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.
All the bad things of climate change are coming true.
And most people were just going along with their everyday lives
as if nothing had changed.
And until we have a crisis of some kind,
I don't think we're going to be motivated to wake up and say, okay, now we have to change.
Sometimes it takes a big shock to get people,
you know, out of the inertia that, that, that's built into the system.
They're calling it the storm of the century,
Hurricane Linda packing Category 5 winds.
Big storms weren't unusual.
But this one was bigger than the others.
And it was headed for Miami.
All coastal regions are being evacuated.
This storm makes landfall, we're going to see a tremendous storm surge.
My mother was a nurse,
and she wouldn't leave until all the sick were evacuated from the hospital.
My father was afraid we wouldn't get out in time.
I was afraid too.
Those who make the decision not to evacuate face life threatening danger,
between the howling winds and those giant surging waves.
Miami is a very scary place to be right now.
2015 is only six years away,
but many experts say that if the world has not reached an agreement
to massively reduce greenhouse gases by then,
we could pass the point of no return.
If we're still dragging our feet in 2015,
it really becomes almost impossible for the world to avert
a degree of climate change that we simply will not be able to manage.
The longer we wait without addressing these challenges in an aggressive way,
the more likely it is we're going to end up with really bad outcomes.
This morning, in the aftermath of Hurricane Linda,
we are seeing the first images of what remains of Miami.
Neighbouring communities have been overwhelmed
by hundreds of thousands of evacuees seeking refuge.
The evacuation center was as big as an airplane hangar.
Maybe it was an airplane hangar.
And so jammed with people, it was hard to move.
It was hot.
It was noisy.
We were there three weeks.
There was nowhere for us to go.
Nowhere for anybody to go.
We watched the news on TV.
I was only six, but it looked to me like the whole world was in trouble.
Some 250,000 Bangladeshi refugees fleeing from last month's devastating cyclone
are massing on the Indian border.
Thousands riot as China faces it's worst wheat shortages in a decade,
the result of seemingly endless drought.
World leaders are gathering in Washington, DC
to attend an emergency global summit meeting.
Hopes are high that the world might finally reach an historic climate agreement.
This is the first time the whole planet is in that kind of a crisis
and the whole planet has to join in meeting a crisis of epical proportions.
In 2008, the Center for the New American Security,
a Washington think tank, staged an elaborate game.
The goal was to simulate a global summit on climate change.
The year is 2015.
The context for the game is Lucy's context.
Miami has been devastated by a hurricane,
and Bangladesh ravaged by a cyclone.
The people who are playing the roles of global leaders
are in fact high level policymakers from around the world.
Let me be very clear, our time is running out.
John Podesta, President Obama's transition chief,
is playing the role of UN Secretary General.
Indeed today, in October of 2015, no country, no city
is exempt from the ravages of climate change as we saw so tragically
with the Category 5 hurricane that hit Miami.
In the game, the Secretary General has asked for a 30% reduction
in emissions by 2025.
The US team holds a closed-door strategy session.
It's very important for us to strike that very positive leadership tone
right out of the box.
We have to be much faster and more serious about emission reductions.
We need to do 30%.
- By 2025? - By 2025.
But there's a strong disagreement about whether the American public
would be willing to make that kind of sacrifice.
Basically, the odds of a 30% reduction in the United States in 10 years is zero.
The world is going to hell in a hand basket and we're saying,
gee, can we stretch this out?
Even if the United States were willing to make these reductions,
this is a global crisis that needs global action.
The US calls a meeting with China.
We have an inherent responsibility to our people to take action.
In 2015, China and India are in fact projected to account for more than 30%
of the world's carbon emissions.
But in the simulation, they're unwilling to agree to a treaty
they feel limits their economic growth.
For both countries, the issue is fairness.
The Western countries went through a very energy intensive development process,
became rich by burning coal and burning oil.
Can countries like India and China do it
without burning as much fossil fuel as the West?
We have to go greener.
You have the technology and you have the capital
and you're prepared to help us grow on a greener path.
China and India say they will agree to the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions
only if the West hands over the technology needed to do so.
China would wish to get the technology for the third generation of nuclear power plants.
But Europe and the US refuse.
The technology belongs to private companies.
Instead, they offer to help pay the costs of switching to cleaner energy.
You do the emissions reduction,
and we give the money for the emissions reduction that you've done.
If... somebody, you know, you have the money but you do not have the technology,
and then you cannot reduce any emissions.
The whole summit hinges on whether they can come to an understanding.
So we're not putting any pressures.
We're just offering, and I think it's a good offer.
We do not accept the offer.
The planet summit broke down today when China and India refused to agree
to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Ultimately, all the teams fell short.
That perhaps is the, the saddest element coming out of this,
which is the pace of change just doesn't seem to be in keeping
with the magnitude of the challenge.
Scientists say that if this is how our leaders respond in 2015,
the entire planet will be at risk.
If we continue on the business-as-usual trajectory,
there will be a tipping point that we cannot avert.
We will indeed drive the car over the cliff.
There was a story my mother once told me I'll never forget.
You put a frog in a pot of cold water and turn the heat on.
The water warms so gradually that the frog doesn't notice.
It never realizes the precise moment it's cooked.
The frog will sit there because it's not able to detect the small changes in temperature
that are making his life increasingly dangerous.
And we're in the same sort of situation.
We're so adaptable in our evolution as a species,
an adaptability that's allowed us to really,
in a sense, conquer nature and conquer the world.
But at this point, that adaptability is actually a real threat to our existence.
As I grew up, it became increasingly clear that we were the frogs.
After our home was destroyed by the hurricane,
my family moved to San Diego.
Maybe because it was as far away from Miami as we could get.
Finally, this evening, saving our seas.
The federal government has released a major assessment on the oceans.
The news is not good.
It's going to be tough to drive this summer.
Gas prices are expected to soar even higher.
Increased heat speeds up evaporation cycles.
In fact, these changes can be seen worldwide...
Scientists report from the Arctic the tundra is thawing faster than expected.
The United Nations announced today
that there are now eight billion people living on earth.
It's amazing what you can come to take for normal.
By the time I was in my 20s,
shortages and higher prices were just a fact of everyday life.
After high school, I decided to train as an EMT.
I wanted to be useful, and this seemed the perfect kind of work.
So what else will be normal in 2030?
One thing, it will be warmer, about one and a half degrees Fahrenheit warmer.
Enough to dramatically alter the planet's weather and rainfall.
Canada and Siberia, for example, will be wetter and hotter.
But for much of the world, rain will be scarce.
And so will its most basic need, water.
By 2030, two-thirds of the world's population will be under water stress.
In Asia, for example, glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau
act as a giant reservoir for billions of people.
All over the world, as the climate warms,
mountain glaciers are melting at faster and faster rates.
By 2030, 80% of those glaciers may be gone.
If the glaciers disappear, much of the food supply will disappear, as well.
These glaciers provide stream flow in the summer during the dry months
that you can use to irrigate your crops.
When those glaciers are gone, you've got a massive drought situation.
In 2030, Africa could be facing extreme and widespread drought.
Rainfall levels are gonna continue to drop over time in Africa,
especially in these fragile regions, like the Sahel.
When the rains fail and people don't have enough to eat,
they often turn to desperate means to survive.
And in the US in 2030, many of the massive reservoirs
fed by the Colorado River will be drying up.
We talk about the Southwest moving into drought
as, as a way to, to describe what's gonna happen.
But technically, the Southwest, it's not gonna be in drought,
it's gonna become a desert.
In San Diego, they were ahead of the game.
In 2009, they had started building huge desalination plants.
It took 20 years and cost billions of dollars, but it worked.
The massive plants on the ocean turned saltwater into fresh,
and the city's water supply was restored.
400 miles inland, though, they were running out.
And no one had enough money to build a pipe that long.
So now, we're here rationing water.
I mean, people who are in Las Vegas are starting to totally panic.
People in Phoenix are starting to panic, too.
When I turn on my tap this morning, this is what I get out of my tap.
Something that will catch people's attention is the first city,
rich city in the world, that just runs out of water.
Three days after Tucson's taps ran dry,
Its parched residents finally got relief when a convoy of National Guard tanker trucks
carrying one million gallons of water finally arrived.
Anxious residents lined up to get their allotment.
What happened there scared the whole country.
In San Diego, when the private companies who desalinated our water
used Tucson as an excuse and jacked up our water prices,
I decided enough was enough.
I went to a rally.
A man standing next to me saw me yelling and said,
" I'm glad you're on our side. "
To make a short story even shorter,
we fell in love on the spot.
Two months later, Josh and I were married.
A year later, our daughter, Molly, was born, with a head full of red hair.
And the desalination companies, they backed down.
We had won.
Josh and I had friends who, like us, were determined to re-imagine the future.
We were all of us optimists.
Some of us worked on solar plants in the desert.
Others tinkered with super efficient cars in their garages.
Still, others designed fantastical cities on their computers.
It was an exciting time to be young.
But it was becoming clear that the problems of the world knew no borders.
Global population is now approaching nine billion.
Seems unlikely to me that we here in America can sit happily with all of our resources
while the rest of the world simply goes quietly into that good night.
very few people lay down and die.
When they recognize that their lives are threatened,
they do whatever it takes.
Hundreds of thousands of environmental refugees
fleeing drought and famine are streaming toward Europe.
They will move across borders by the droves, by the millions.
And that will be something we've never seen before.
And that might be the thing that we would find the most difficult to cope with.
From Laredo to Tijuana,
millions of Latin Americans are massing along the US border.
You'll see intense pressure for people to move and be on the move from the Caribbean,
from Latin America, from Mexico in particular, into the United States.
And that'll put huge stress, I think,
on, on the systems in the United States to try to cope with that.
I can't imagine the horrors that will take place on the border
as millions of refugees try to get into the United States.
I was working the midnight shift when a call came from the border police.
"Be careful", Josh said.
"This doesn't sound good."
Thousands of refugees had been arriving at the border desperate for water and food.
Someone had blown a hole through the wall,
and thousands of people were streaming through.
They had called in the border police.
I don't know how it started, who fired first.
But suddenly, the police were shooting into the crowd.
There were people falling, panic everywhere.
Josh heard it on the news.
And how he found me in the midst of all that chaos I'll never know.
In San Diego, Josh and Molly and I took long walks on the beach to look for birds.
Over the years, our favorites started to disappear.
The worst was the end of the albatross.
These marvelous birds had finally been done in by fishermen's long lines.
It was a bad omen for the rest of us.
Probably a third of all species will be on an inexorable path to extinction by 2015.
They will include familiar species, like lions and tigers and bears,
but there will also be huge areas of the planet,
which presently are really lovely and beautiful and diverse.
Those places will have essentially disappeared.
In the history of the Earth, there have been five mass extinctions,
In which at least half the species on Earth disappeared.
They were caused by natural disasters, massive volcanic eruptions,
rapid climate change, meteors hitting the Earth.
Today, in the 21st century, we are in the midst of what scientists are calling the sixth extinction.
And for the first time, it is being caused by a single species, us.
When one species proliferates beyond any other, ultimately,
it sort of knocks out its own life support systems and it collapses.
And in a way, that's what we're doing at every level around the world.
Today in 2009,
the idea that we could do so much damage to our natural environment
that it could cause our global civilization to collapse,
may seem farfetched.
Think of all the signs of normalcy.
Water is still coming out of the faucet in my kitchen.
The electricity still turns on.
I buy food at the supermarket.
It seems inconceivable that our modern world could collapse.
Every society that collapsed thought it couldn't happen to them.
The Roman Empire thought it couldn't happen.
The Maya civilization thought it couldn't happen.
The Byzantine Empire thought it couldn't happen, but it did.
And it usually creeps up on you unforeseen.
At its peak, the Maya civilization numbered more than 10 million.
They had astronomy.
They had the only writing in the new world.
They had great art.
They were the biggest game in town.
They are the equivalent of us in their, in their era.
These city centers were supporting 25,000 to 50,000 people.
So, they were very well adapted to their,
their surroundings they were able to grow.
But they grew too much and exhausted their resources.
Growing population, meaning growing the demands on the land,
deforestation and soil erosion, which tied into warfare.
There was chronic warfare among the Maya city states.
And then, the climate suddenly changed.
There were these series of extended droughts.
And those droughts just kept hammering away and hammering away.
You lose your forest. You lose your soil.
If you lose your soil, you can't grow anything.
And if it stops raining, then forget about it.
The endgame for the Maya must have been horrible indeed.
It's highly likely there were also periods of starvation.
It's a truly hideous and ugly way to die.
The Roman Empire faced many of the same problems that we face today.
It was kind of a precursor of our globalized economy.
In just a few short centuries, Rome built an empire
that stretched across three continents.
As it expanded, the requirements for simply feeding its cities and feeding its army,
it became so large that the empire couldn't generate enough food energy,
enough grain, to adequately meet all its obligations.
So, there was a constant fiscal crisis and financial crisis.
As resources ran out, their empire collapsed.
The city of Rome itself went from a million people down to perhaps 30,000,
and that was the largest city in Western Europe at the time.
Civilizations in the past have lost the fight.
I mean, they, they have collapsed as a result of the inability to deal with
several different events going on at once.
And so, you know, I think the takeaway is that, honestly, we're not that special.
Easter Island, one of the most remote places in the world.
It's hard to imagine that a civilization once thrived on such a barren Island,
but it didn't always look like this.
Easter Island used to be covered by a forest of dozens of tree species,
including the biggest palm tree in the world.
But as their population grew, so too did their demand for wood.
As they gradually cut down more and more trees,
the trees didn't grow back rapidly enough to replace the trees that were being cut down.
So, some time in the 1600s, the last tree was cut down.
You saw all of the classic signatures of collapse.
The population plummeted. There was starvation.
And essentially, they turned to cannibalism.
The question is, what was that person on Easter Island thinking
when they chopped down the last tree?
The pattern is clear.
Civilizations that grow too large and consume too much
damage their own life support systems.
As resources run out, they begin to fight each other over what little is left.
Then, they either starve or leave.
But in our case, where can we go?
I think Easter Island is the perfect metaphor because it's this small, fragile island
sitting within the Pacific Ocean, it's very remote, and,
and it no longer was able to sustain the population that lived there.
It's no different than Earth being this small planet in a vast galaxy.
Think about that cartoon movie that was made about the Beatles music,
"Yellow Submarine."
There was a creature in it.
Hey, look who's back.
Full speed ahead.
Its head is a funnel that functions as a vacuum cleaner.
Suddenly, it's run out of things to point at, there's nothing left.
So, it's looking around for something.
And finally, it looks down,
sucks itself up. And then, we have a blank screen.
Here we are.
The moral of that story, by grabbing everything in sight,
we'll end up destroying ourselves.
And by 2050, the population is exploding, the rainforests are disappearing,
and nine billion of us competing for ever scarcer resources.
A bad situation made worse by widespread drought and huge migrations of people.
Life is changing for everyone, including Lucy.
My parents both got sick the winter of 2050.
It was a horrible flu that year.
It seemed the viruses were getting worse each passing season.
I kept them comfortable.
And I'm glad they were at home and together when they died.
After that, there was nothing to keep us in San Diego.
Josh and I decided it was time to leave.
We were excited.
Josh had been offered an amazing job in New York working on the sea barriers
designed to protect the cities from the rising seas.
There wasn't much room in the truck.
We took clothes, a few books, and 50 gallons of water.
Everything else we left behind.
GPS 2100
Please select your destination.
New York City.
Calculating safest route.
We headed north across the Mojave Desert.
By dusk, we were on the outskirts of Las Vegas
and greeted by mile after mile of abandoned suburbs,
and acres of golf courses turned to dust.
The silence was eerie.
Well, by 2050, Lake Mead, one of the great reservoirs of the Southwest
on the Colorado River has finally gone dry.
There's not enough water to meet human needs.
People in Las Vegas had depended on Lake Mead for almost all their water and power.
Las Vegas, I would imagine, is gone.
With a drought like that, you've got a city in, in the desert.
And it's gonna be really difficult to live there.
When we got closer to the Strip, we were lucky to hook up with a convoy headed east.
Las Vegas was a strange sight.
Most of the hotels dark.
All those neon lights gone dead.
Sin City had pretty much folded.
From there, we drove through Arizona.
Daybreak.
Rising out of the desert, we saw something wonderful.
These huge, new solar plants.
50 square miles of reflectors.
They hadn't been built soon enough to help Las Vegas,
but one day, they were supposed to power the whole West Coast.
It was comforting to know.
There's tremendous possibility there in the desert Southwest.
There's a capacity to produce solar power and,
and move it to where the great population centers of the United States are.
The safest route heading east today is Route 40.
I think it would be almost impossible to do this journey
unless you had some form of intelligence as to what areas are lawless or dangerous.
I don't think strangers are gonna be very friendly.
By the time we got on to Route 15, we were grimy and tired.
The scene in front of us had jolted us out of our daze.
Hundreds of people packed the road.
All of them streaming out of the Southwest heading North.
It felt like the Dust Bowl all over again.
Think what it would be like if we had millions of neighbors to the South
heading North because of, they don't have food and they don't have water.
They shouted at us as we drove past.
Molly was half out of the window, catching everything with her camera.
Suddenly, a man grabbed her arm.
He had a gun and pointed it at Molly's face.
"Get out of the truck right now," he yelled.
I'd never been so terrified.
But within seconds, two men from the convoy pulled their own guns
and the man melted back into the crowd.
We knew now just how dangerous the border regions had become
and how lucky we were to be headed east.
Just as people were migrating, so too were the bugs.
In Oklahoma, acres and acres of corn were threatened.
To the degree that all ecosystems are extremely stressed by 2050, pests will flourish.
There's an arms race between breeding crops that are resistant to various pests
and the pests themselves, because to the degree that we simplified our food system,
we've also made it massively vulnerable.
For decades, this had been predicted.
These giant farms, which supplied so much of the world's food, were easy prey.
People get their seeds from single or just a few manufacturers,
and they're genetically very, very similar.
So, if in fact an agent were to come onto the scene that was capable of infecting one,
it would rapidly spread.
Halfway through Kansas, we split off from the convoy.
They were headed north to Canada.
We went east to Greensburg, Kansas, leaving the devastation behind.
Welcome to the Greensburg Visitor Center.
In 2007, a tornado destroyed our town.
Out of the rubble came a dream.
A town that was completely destroyed by a tornado
is being rebuilt as a global example of
of how clean energy can power an entire community,
how it can bring jobs and businesses...
This was a wonderful place, completely self-sustaining.
They had been one of the first, and they knew what they were doing.
They got their power from the wind and sun, their water from the rain,
and they grew everything they ate.
Feeling a lot better, we hot seated it the rest of the way.
Compared to the Southwest, the fields were green and fertile.
We saw some communities like Greensburg.
We wished there were more.
The closer we get to the end of our journey, the better we felt.
The next day, we hit the outskirts of New York City.
New York City is engaged in the greatest urban experiment of our time.
Skyscrapers that grow their own food, to an all-electric vehicle fleet,
to clean and tranquil parks.
Inspired leaders and creative minds are working together to create an urban paradise.
I looked across the George Washington Bridge at the skyline and felt a surge of hope,
but underneath ran a trickle of worry.
With all we had seen, maybe we had seen nothing yet.
By the middle of the century, I thought I'd seen it all.
Storms, migrations, and droughts that had destroyed whole cities.
But I had also seen so much more.
Brilliant people everywhere were working furiously to change our future.
I had a family,
and together, I thought we might be equal to whatever came out way,
but I had no idea of what the future would hold.
It's a new world.
And not a better one, as we catch up with Lucy, our fictional storyteller.
The year is 2060, past mid-century and into middle age for Lucy.
At 51, she has grown up in a world of soaring population,
dwindling resources and intense climate change.
The worst case scenario imagined by some experts is playing out.
But there are signs of hope.
A growing global movement led by cities like New York.
New York is probably the most geographically favored city in America.
Great port.
Rich fisheries around it.
This wonderful river that allows transport and access to great farmland.
It's a center of the arts.
It's been a center of finance.
I think it will continue to be so.
The Big "Green" Apple
After what we had been through, New York was a fresh start.
The city was full of hope and energy and promise.
You'd walk down the streets and meet each other's eyes and see a sense of purpose.
It was a great place to be a part of back then.
The first years we were there were the best of our lives.
Josh was working as an engineer on the Great Barrier Project.
I was at Bellevue Hospital, a historic institution already more than 300 years old.
The building we lived in was green in every sense of the world.
And Molly worked in the gardens that grew our food.
They were a part of the building itself.
You're going to see greenhouses, multistory greenhouses.
And each floor will be growing, you know, carrots and potatoes, etcetera.
And that will be just considered normal.
The building supplied not just our food, but most of our own energy.
Instead of having solar panels, big heavy bulky things,
we can just put this thin film on rooftops,
on window panes and generate electricity that way.
I rode my bike to work every day, a mere 30 blocks.
We had designated bicycle lanes.
The traffic was manageable, and you could breathe the air.
All the vehicles were electric.
You hook your car up to a mega transport system.
It will move you a good bit of the distance to your final destination.
Kind of a train of cars.
And then you get disconnected from the mass combination transit
and drive the last little bit yourself.
Molly fell in love as quickly as her parents had.
She married George, who was studying to become a botanist.
A year later, my grandson Daniel was born.
And a lovelier child I had never seen.
It was a happy time.
And when Molly told me they were moving upstate
to work on a real farm,
Josh and I understood.
It had always been their dream.
The city was getting a lot of attention.
And money flowed in, both private and public.
The biggest and maybe the most important project was my husband Josh's.
Since without the barriers, the city was at risk.
It would be the biggest civil engineering project in US history.
Be comparable to putting man on the moon.
The project had been under way for years,
and those who worked on it had a tremendous sense of pride.
There was three barriers going up.
One at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge,
one at the top of the East River.
And one in Staten Island at Baton Hills.
You could see them rising a little every day.
Sea level was rising.
And without the barriers, big storms would flood the city.
I think it would be like in medieval times,
people building a beautiful huge cathedral.
Took generations to build.
And there was a great sense of purpose,
and gave purpose and meaning to life.
The project drew thousands of people into the city looking for work.
New York City was then, as it had always been, a beacon of hope.
New York, it will be a magnet
as any viable city will be a magnet.
These cities where people come to flee
become petri dishes for diseases and new diseases and resistant forms of disease.
There are a number of infectious diseases that are currently confined
to tropical and subtropical areas.
They're likely to spread into temperate zones.
And this is something that I'm very concerned about.
Keeping New York safe from disease was crucial.
And Bellevue was busy.
I didn't feel as tired at end of the day as I might have.
We were doing important work.
Keeping a close eye on any new diseases.
I remember the night I was called to the worker's camps in Flushing.
A young Ecuadorian family had just arrived in New York.
And they all had high fevers.
And blisters on their hands and feet.
We sprung into action immediately, closed off the neighborhood,
and called in the CDC.
They knew right away they were looking at a new virus.
We set up a mobile clinic at the camps,
where we treated dozens of workers and their families.
Everyone recovered.
And the disease was contained.
Imagine now the year 2070.
Things are in danger of unraveling.
Sea levels have risen nearly three feet,
redrawing the map of the world. Island nations have disappeared.
Much of Bangladesh reclaimed by the sea.
Some of California's famous beaches gone.
The Florida Everglades, underwater.
Now, the richest countries are being forced to come up with innovative
and expensive solutions.
Lucy's husband, Josh, is one of the leaders.
Josh was an engineer on the Great Barrier Project.
After 30 years in the making, It was nearing completion.
Within a few months, they would be testing the massive gates.
If I was the engineer in charge, I would be very nervous.
But you would have practice runs.
And during nice weather, you would say, all right, let's close the gates today
and make sure everything's working right, it's not going to jam up.
Josh was worried about something else, too.
New York City's barriers, like others around the world, had been built on the assumption
that sea level rise would be gradual.
But it was becoming clear that might not be the case.
Scientists say they are detecting a massive spike
in the level of methane in the atmosphere.
Climate in general doesn't change smoothly the way,
you know, we're used to seeing projections from climate models.
We find that the transitions from warm to cold or cold to warm,
some of those transitions can be really, really abrupt.
Abrupt meaning within the time scale of a decade,
or sometimes even less than a decade.
We knew there were certain things that could rapidly turn up the heat.
But we didn't know what that tipping point would be until it happened.
Maybe the tipping point is you heat up the tundra and the permafrost so much
that there's a huge burp of methane and carbon dioxide out of those northern soils.
Methane is a big worry in my mind because it's some 20 to 30 times more potent than CO2.
An enormous reservoir of methane,
produced by decomposing plants and animals,
les burled beneath the frozen arctic tundra.
It has been there since the Ice Age.
If the tundra thaws and a large quantity of the gas is released,
global temperatures would soar.
This is a bit like a light switch.
You push the light switch a little bit and nothing happens.
You push a little bit more and nothing happens.
Then you push it a little more
and it flips completely to a new state.
The methane emanating from the arctic could raise temperatures worldwide.
A panel of experts is convening to recalculate how warm the planet...
drastically raise global temperatures...
This is what specialists call a nonlinear flip or nonlinear change.
When that happens, we don't know what the consequences will be.
Spiking global temperatures are wreaking havoc with the Greenland Ice sheet.
Some fear that the colossal sheet is on the verge of collapse.
Unless drastic measures are taken, low lying coastal cities around the world
could expect to see disastrous flooding.
Citizens are demanding their governments respond
to the impending temperature...
The Pentagon today held closed door meetings to discuss climate change.
Our top story tonight,
the President is announcing the cosmic shield project
which aims to halt the disintegration of the Greenland Ice sheet.
Imagine that you are the president of the United States,
and you have word that Greenland is going to collapse in the next ten years,
adding seven meters to sea level.
I'm not saying that is happening today.
I'm saying imagine that were to happen,
and you were told that technology exists to stop it.
Wouldn't you be tempted to use it?
It didn't take long for the world to agree.
A technology existed that could stop the Ice sheets from melting.
It should be used.
Hundreds of jets from all around the world were spraying a mist of sulfur dioxide
into the atmosphere.
The gas would form particles
which would shade the Earth and temporarily cool it.
This is your solution of last resort.
You say all belts are off, we are just going to intervene
in this system with reckless abandon.
For a year, there were these spectacular sunsets.
But what are the other consequences of those things?
Maybe it would cool the Earth, maybe it would cool it too much.
That might be a disaster in the opposite direction.
Maybe it would cause some other environmental problem that we don't foresee today.
The Earth cooled.
But that was the least of it.
Tonight in Washington, there's debate on whether to follow China and Great Britain
and cease flying cosmic shield missions.
We've learned that in all aspects of engineering,
there are unintended consequences.
The Surgeon General testified before Congress today
on the health effects of further...
The cloud was burning off the ozone layer.
Once that was gone, every living creature would be exposed to a massive dose of radiation.
The experiment was halted.
Once they stopped spraying the gas, the ice sheets continued to melt,
but now at a quicker pace.
Sea level rise would soon be measured in feet, not inches.
If you end up with several meters of sea level rise,
you change life as we know it.
In New York, watchdog groups are now suggesting storm surge barriers may be too low.
Josh and the other engineers were working around the clock
to try to build the barriers even higher.
But we all knew we were in a race against time.
Society is not set up to deal with rapid sea level rise.
It would be a catastrophe of... a magnitude we've never experienced.
One of our political leaders said not too long ago
that the American way of life is non-negotiable.
We're going to discover the hard way that when you don't
negotiate the circumstances that are sent to you by the universe,
you automatically get assigned a new negotiating partner named reality,
and then it will negotiate for you.
You don't even have to be in the room.
A vicious nor'easter is headed up the East Coast.
It is expected to hit New York on the high tide this afternoon.
Storm surge could be over 20 feet.
As the storm approached, the engineers started closing the entire bay wall.
It absolutely had to work or the city would be devastated.
It was terrifying.
Then the winds picked up and a gate got stuck.
That's a nightmare scenario, getting stuck halfway shut.
Because the water will pour in and flood the city.
A team was assembled to manually close the gate.
They would have to go out into the harbor by boat.
I asked Josh not to go.
I begged him to stay safe with me.
But this was his project.
He had to see it through.
Cities abandoned.
Large parts of America suffering from drought.
The possible collapse of civilization.
The worst case scenario in tonight's special broadcast
sounds like something out a science fiction movie,
but it is based on the work of some of the world's foremost scientists and thinkers.
If you want to learn more about how we developed our ideas,
go to abcnews.com and click on Earth 2100.
There you'll find an annotated script of the entire program.
For each scenario portrayed in our broadcast,
we have included the expert quotes and facts on which we base this vision of the future.
All ecosystems are extremely stressed by 2050.
You will also be able to view expanded sections of selected interviews.
Preliminary reports that one of the gates in the Great Barrier
has failed to close.
We're a waiting confirmation from the mayor's office.
It was high tide when the storm hit.
Flooding in subway tunnels throughout...
Four, five, and six trains are affected.
The streets were fling with water.
The mayor has made the decision to evacuate City Hall.
Something had gone terribly wrong.
Seeing truly catastrophic flooding.
The tide comes in and on top of that, the surge.
The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels are fling with seawater...
When New York began to flood, it would be total chaos.
There's an evacuation order in effect for...
The Office of Emergency Management says we have to evacuate.
We've got a problem.
The subway is full of seawater and it will shut down.
What do people do?
Authorities are now telling anyone still in the city
to remain calm and stay inside.
Outside, the storm raged.
All I could do was wait for Josh to come home.
When I heard the knock on my door, I knew.
He died a hero, they said.
But that was no comfort.
I called Molly and she wept.
She wanted me to come live with her.
But I couldn't leave.
I just couldn't leave.
Looking at four or five feet of water.
We could see the worst of this storm by 3.00 AM.
New Yorkers are going to wake up in a very different city tomorrow.
As the sun rose the next day,
it was clear that both my city and my life had been destroyed.
Battery Park fills up with seawater.
Lower west side... lower east side.
Brooklyn, Queens is flooded.
Kennedy Airport's flooded.
Newark Airport's flooded.
It's all gonna be underwater.
In the coming days, when the waters receded,
the city was filthy and everything that could rot was rotting.
People wanted to leave.
But for many of them, there was nowhere to go.
How welcoming will people be when New York or Boston sink under water
and all those people, in their millions, come to New England or to Pennsylvania?
How welcoming will people be?
I packed my things and set them at the door.
But I didn't leave.
I suppose you could say I was stubborn.
And I was needed at Bellevue more than ever.
There were millions who needed someone to care for them.
As the seas rose, the wealthy moved uptown to higher ground
and hired private companies to pick up the trash.
But in the low-lying slums, tap water was contaminated.
People were so poor they ate only once a day, if they ate at all.
When people are hungry and people are malnourished,
as you continue to have displacement with floods,
there's no doubt that's a perfect setup for certain types of infections.
I was working the late shift when the first case came in.
A young man with a cough and a high fever.
And then I noticed the blisters all over his body.
Was this the virus I had seen years ago?
Another case of Caspian fever...
Health officials have issued a statement, asking people to avoid public...
All New York City schools have been shut down.
Representatives from the CDC...
This virus is cause for concern.
Within a week, over 20 were dead.
People on the streets wore masks, avoided each other.
The air was ripe with panic.
Reminding citizens to wash their hands and cover their mouths.
You would shut down factories. You would shut down trade.
You would shut down commerce.
Everything would shut down.
Death toll from Caspian Fever has now reached 107.
The virus continued to mutate and spread.
So some long incubating virus that kills very fast,
that's the kind of thing that's going to get us.
It only took an few people on a few planes to spread it around the world.
Cases of the fever have been confirmed in over 100 countries...
Now estimated that 10,000 have died in Mexico...
Temporary morgues have been set up in the streets of Shanghai.
The Vatican conducted a national funeral mass today.
From Singapore to Sydney, the globe shut down.
Farmers wouldn't bring food into cities.
Cargo ships wouldn't dock, let alone unload.
Billions were on the verge of starvation.
I saw hundreds of people die every day.
I was immune.
One of the lucky ones.
It was hard to feel anything.
There was too much to feel.
You think about the effect that this kind of disaster would have.
Everybody's depressed.
What do you do with all the bodies?
People just gonna, you know, take their loved ones to the local park and leave them there?
At that point, cities will be unbearable.
You could see it on people's faces on the street.
They had given up.
As more and more people died, all services broke down.
There were frequent blackouts.
And now connections to the internet were intermittent at best.
Around the world, deaths from the Caspian Fever show no signs...
And then one day, the power just went out.
The phones, the internet, the whole data network went down.
Some said it was a terrorist.
Others thought it was the flooding.
Suddenly no one knew anything for sure.
If communication breaks down, rumor becomes the communication system
and a mob psychology takes over.
Collapse is not something that actually happens overnight.
It's the result of an accumulation of stresses,
an erosion of the internal strength of society, so that it just becomes like an eggshell.
And one last shock breaks it.
Looting was rampant.
Most of the police force deserted.
The mayor was nowhere to be found.
We waited for the President or the National Guard to appear.
But no one came.
That's when it dawned on us that the government,
like so much else, had failed.
If the world breaks down, if globalization breaks down,
then even the capacity of the United States to kind of manage a degraded global environment
I think will come into question.
What we'll see is the federal government being viewed as
something not to be taken seriously anymore.
Reports were sketchy, but here's what I know for sure.
The virus continued to spread.
India and China had gone to war over water and who knew what else.
Millions were dying from famine.
The human race was collapsing under its own weight.
By that time, I will guess that we will be seeing a substantial die off
of the human population.
Most of civil society will have degenerated.
I was 75 when I walked across that George Washington Bridge.
There were no check points anymore.
I left with a couple of friends and a dog who had adopted me.
Rosy, I called her.
She never left my side.
But where was I going?
I didn't know If Molly was still alive.
Let alone still on the farm up north.
I didn't know If I had a grandson anymore.
But that was my hope, that I could somehow find them or they me.
A few hundred years down the line,
they'll look back and say the Dark Ages began in the 21st century.
Our city, beautiful city, was abandoned.
And nature took over quickly.
As it always has.
The breakdown would be rather rapid.
The flooding of Manhattan would have a real destabilizing effect.
The subway tunnels would flood and they would stay flooded.
The columns that hold up the streets, they're steel, they will rust, they will corrode.
The streets above them start caving in, and low and behold,
we have surface rivers once again in Manhattan.
Nature has that momentum, you see.
Take the thing back.
Practically become like a jungle.
From the asphalt jungle to the real jungle.
Your big skyscrapers here are well anchored into Manhattan schist.
On the other hand, they weren't designed to be water logged.
It just takes one hurricane to hit New York.
Buildings are going to start to get taken out.
And it wasn't just the city.
Our whole way of life had crumbled.
But I found my daughter Molly, and Daniel, my grandson.
He was a young man now.
Moly's husband George had been killed.
Both of us were widows now.
It is a hard life.
The United States is fragmented into a million chards.
We're all cut off from each other.
Each protecting what little we have.
It would be a wrenching transition, it would be a catastrophic transition.
It's something we don't want to experience.
The Dark Ages were called the Dark Ages for a reason.
I fear that we'll see a world like medieval Europe
where you have feudal states
fighting for what remains of a source of water, a source of energy.
We managed to produce our own power and communicate over radio waves.
The cities that have endured are now walled fortresses.
Jealously guarding whatever remains of the Computer Age.
I'm picturing enclaves of affluence and wealth,
but surrounded by vast masses of people who will be barely surviving.
In effect, humanity could very well be in hell.
Where hell is defined as truth realized too late.
We have had to re-learn what we had unlearned centuries before.
How to live off the land.
How to make do.
I think we'll see a world in which literature, the arts, democracy,
those will disappear, largely disappear.
How much of the wonderful scientific breakthroughs of the 20th and 21st century
will still be retained?
If it's some electronic-based thing, it could all be lost.
My grandson Daniel might never hear a symphony, go to college,
or read the books I read.
He will never marvel at a right whale,
the beauty of a coral reef or a spotted owl.
You ever actually get outside and just kind of look at the wonder of the world,
it takes your breath away.
And I think to think of a world where somehow that is taken away, is really sad.
We're going to leave a planet that is so desperately beaten up
that it will probably take hundreds of thousands of years to get it back, to restore it.
We will have lost so much of our natural heritage.
I can teach him poems and songs.
I can tell him what I saw and what I learned along the way.
I can try to tell him what is precious.
What is precious?
I ought to know that.
They say I am the oldest woman on Earth.
With age is supposed to come wisdom.
What is precious?
This Earth of ours.
This garden we must tend.
These people we love.
Lucy's story is a worst case scenario of what could happen
if we continue on our current path.
It's a wakeup call, a challenge for us to plan a different course.
But our experts say we must act immediately.
Where did Lucy's world go wrong?
What can we learn from their mistakes?
We turn back the clock now to show you a vision of a future we can still create.
There's a future out there that's a much present future
than the present that we're living in right now, to be sure.
If we took the measures we should take,
2100 would be at the beginning of an era
that we, today, would regard as paradise.
We have a chance to get it right,
to move from a disconnected inefficient world
of fighting populations,
to a sustainable planet.
The problem we face today is how do we get from here to there?
The world that Lucy was born into is our world today.
There are plenty of signs that it's in trouble.
But there are hopeful signs as well.
The problems that we face, water, soil, climate change,
they're all problems caused by humans.
So we're capable of solving those problems.
It could be overwhelming if we let it.
I just try to take it one brick, one chunk at a time.
I think that's how you have to deal with it.
So what should we do right now to chart another course?
How do we avoid ending up in Lucy's world?
Many experts say the first step should be transforming how we use energy.
Much of what we need to do we already know.
Plant a garden.
Use compact fluorescent bulbs.
More mass transit for people.
Insulate your homes.
Smaller cars.
There's no simple solution,
but 100% of the Earth's population doing a very small thing
makes a very big difference.
But individuals alone won't be able to turn things around.
Governments and industries are going to have to change on a massive scale.
We're going to have to come up with more solar, more wave power, more geothermal energy.
Beyond the familiar technologies, amazing new ones are already in the works.
Fields of solar balloons that could power thousands of homes a day.
A nuclear fusion facility that could produce the energy of a tiny manmade star.
We can't drill and burn our way out of our problems,
but we can invent and invest our way out.
Getting enough of these projects up and running will take people.
And that means jobs.
And if we can put more people back to work, then by 2015,
instead of communities disintegrating, they could start to rebound.
You could fight pollution and poverty at the same time.
You can beat global warming and the economic downturn with the same dollar bill
if you invested in green jobs, green energy, green technologies.
If we start those investments today
there wouldn't be gasolines and fights as in Lucy's world.
Instead, there would be electric cars that could run 300 miles per charge.
But completely redesigning our energy system would require rapid change.
It would mean both sacrifice and hard work for the whole country.
But we have done it before.
The thing I would compare it to is World War II.
After Pearl Harbor, FDR turned to Detroit, the automakers,
and said, you will now make tanks. You will now make Jeeps.
Just like that.
That was like overnight almost, and they did it.
And we won that war.
It's going to take that same level of commitment.
Imagine that all of us did enough things that it made a real difference in our country.
What effect does that have on China, on India, on other nations?
Well, if we don't set an example as the strongest and most important country in the world,
what do we expect them to do?
They're not going to follow if we don't lead.
World leaders are gathering in Washington, DC,
to attend an emergency global summit meeting.
A turning point in Lucy's world was the global summit of 2015.
When the world leaders failed to agree on actions to slow climate change.
We do not accept the offer.
They set in motion all the disasters that would follow.
But what if they had agreed?
For the first time ever, China, India, the US and Europe
have reached an agreement that could avert catastrophic climate change.
By tackling climate change, you end up tackling energy,
you end up tackling food, you end up tackling water resources.
You could change this vicious cycle I think into a virtuous cycle.
Then what we could see is actually billions of people
coming into far more stable sustainable prosperous economies.
As we move forward in the century, we will see the investments
and hard choices we made early on begin to pay off.
A positive scenario is fossil fuels will be disappearing.
We're growing more food with less water.
We've restored ecosystems.
By the middle of the century, we would be using water and other resources
much more carefully.
Farmers would be planting drown-resistant crops.
Water would be recycled, and there would be enough to support the US Southwest.
In 2050, places like Las Vegas could survive.
The hope is that once we figure out how to solve these problems,
we'll be in a much better position to help the rest of the world.
If we can actually raise the prospects of the bottom few billion people,
we actually make global stability possible.
We reduce mass migration.
Refugee movements.
Desperation.
Actually slow the population growth.
And if we do all those things,
we just bring a sustainable world prosperity closer to hand.
There's a very good chance by about 2050,
the worst part of the crisis having passed,
doesn't mean there aren't going to be big problems still to face.
But it means that we will have avoided sailing right off the cliff.
By 2100, our world could be transformed.
Just imagine a city that is not polluted,
that has a great transportation infrastructure.
Stackable cars or cars that are folding and then they would charge
and be a shared ownership model
and you would just pull out the one that's available that's fully charged.
Everything happens inside the city itself.
That means our food production, our waste and recycling, our energy.
We're going to have joint management of water resources, of energy resources.
We're going to be living on a planet where we don't see things
at a national level, but we see things at a global level.
By the time we get to 2100, the challenge of building a global green economy,
where we're sharing technologies, not fighting wars over water and oil,
that's going to bring out the best in the human family.
Humanity will be relatively disease free.
Children will be treated as rare treasures.
Most people don't realize not only can we change, we must change.
And I think that's how you own the future.
That's how you take control of your destiny.
I have huge faith in humanity.
We will be able to create a world that will have a livable planet for our kids and their kids,
that is our opportunity.
That is our obligation.
Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity,
which is can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it.
In December this year, nearly 200 countries plan to meet in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Their mission, to draw up a strategy to finally come up with a global agreement
to slow climate change and safeguard the planet.
If you'd like to learn more about "Earth 2100" or if you want to get involved in the solutions,
go to our web page at abcnews.com.
I'm Bob Woodruff.
For all of us here at ABC News, good night.