Signs of environmental decay are evident even from the skies. The Great Barrier Reef has been bleached to death and, despite concerted efforts at revival, it will soon look like a petrified, skeletal mass off the Australian coast. Colossal hulks of glacial ice are dissipating in the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Rockies. What is for now called the Dead Sea is becoming a desert; eventually, it could sprout strange statues of salt.
Despite grave warnings (almost 15,000 dead in France in 2003 and 56,000 dead in Russia in 2010), many societies are woefully unprepared for the heat waves and wildfires that will continue to blight them with increasing frequency. Australia, for example, long resisted links between climate change and the calamities visited upon the country long after its Angry Summer of 2013. India had been a heat-death forerunner, with much of its population having no access to adequate shelter or air conditioning as the country boiled, resulting in thousands of deaths.
As temperatures rise in countries of temperature complacency, infrastructure will begin to deteriorate. Electricity demands will cause brownouts, extinguishing the lights and the sight of eclipsed cities from the air. But it will also bring fans to a halt. The very young, the infirm, and the very old will die first, as they did in the European heat waves. In a rural setting, the story told from above will be one of absences: herds of animals missing from traditional migration routes and villages lying eerily still and silent.
