Water shortages…
Keeping with this Monday’s weather theme, let me discuss some consequences of global warming I’ve been worried about for a while, ever since I pounded stakes and did other menial and brain-numbing chores for a civil engineer in the San Joaquin Valley in California. Arriving home to tank up on water and take salt pills, my thoughts would start this way: It wouldn’t take much drought to turn my agricultural home turf into a barren no-man’s land.
While we tend to focus on extreme weather events as indicators of climate change and global warming, another related enemy for human civilization is water shortages. We’re finally seeing them mentioned more in relation to apocalyptic news about wildfires and forest fires—drought caused by global warming makes those fires all the more deadly because it’s hard to combat them with diminishing levels in lakes and reservoirs.
Burns, denuded hillsides, and water shortages play important roles in Book One of “The Last Humans” series. Because the primary “villain” in this first novel is a bio-engineered virus that travels around the world on prevailing winds even though the attack was aimed at the US West Coast, I don’t think the book, or the series, for that matter, has had as many readers as it might have had. Who wants to read about a fictional worldwide pandemic when we’re trying to survive a real one?!
Yet this novel represents much more than the tale about the survivors of a pandemic’s aftermath. This post-apocalyptic story (the second book is more a standard thriller) is more focused on global warming and water shortages, not the viral pandemic. The burn scars and dry conditions in Penny Castro’s apocalyptic landscape exist even before that virus turns Penny into a lonely survivor. And steps also have already been taken to alleviate the water shortage before the biowarfare attack: In the novel, offshore desalination platforms once pumped fresh water to thirsty Californians and crops. This technology is well-known today and constantly improved upon (see the notes at the end of the novel). More will be needed in the future.
These platforms play a key role in the novel, especially toward the end, as do water shortages. As you can imagine, controlling the platforms becomes a priority. The hostile environment from global warming becomes as much Penny’s enemy as feral humans. (Can you imagine that residual Covid “fog” becoming so bad that people behave like crazed zombies? I can, and it might happen—it does in the novel.) The desalination platforms become a coveted resource for different surviving groups who still have their wits about them.
When I wrote The Last Humans (which is not The Last Humans: A New Dawn as the stupid Amazon bots believe!), I had no idea that Covid-19 would come along, or the real pandemic that it caused. It also has an ally in global warming. Climate change is an enemy more deadly than Covid, in fact, as it is with my fictional virus. Perhaps the only difference between fiction and reality here is that my fictional virus was manmade. But even with Covid originating in bats and not in a Chinese lab (still an open question, by the way), there’s no doubt that climate change plus Covid is a real double whammy comparable to the one in my story.
I hate that I was so prescient with my novel! It was certainly meant to be just a warning, but it turned out to be one for a future that was right around the corner in real life. And human beings will surely struggle and might disappear altogether with this real double whammy of Covid and climate change. We have a vaccine against Covid that works well if people would just get vaccinated, but there’s no magic vaccine against global warming! We have to attack the latter on as many fronts as possible or food and water shortages (the last causing the first) will kill millions of human beings, just like Covid.
Water shortages might be the least obvious and dramatic natural assassin of human beings, but let’s build more desalination platforms to help mitigate them along with other programs to combat climate change. The technology already exists. It’s one place where Bezos and Branson, the two rich boys with their expensive toys, could help a lot. There are many other potential and useful solutions for chipping away at the consequences of global warming. It’s here…and it’s as much a killer as Covid! It will also continue to kill long after the virus is vanquished.
***
Comments are always welcome!
“Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries.” I put ex-USN Master-at-Arms Mary Jo through some tight situations in this trilogy, all because of the MECHs (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”). In Muddlin’ Through, she’s falsely convicted of killing her sister and brother-in-law, she escapes, and battles the secret US group that wants her to get the MECHs back from the Russians. In Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By, she moves from the East Coast to the West to start a new life as security chief for a computer games company, only to have CIA and Russian agents hassle her for the MECHs’ location and a psycho stalk her. In Goin’ the Extra Mile, she has to go to Beijing because the Chinese kidnapped her family to force her to tell them where the MECHs are. All three novels should get readers’ hearts pounding. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
