After 2C - Histories of the Future of Global Warming<br>If Earth warms by more than 2 °C, everything could change.<br>How hot will<br>Earth get?
Looking back from the future, fictional history students begin with one shared crisis in 2046, then follow four possible paths to the end of the century.
ColderWarmer<br>Replay warming ↻<br>1850202620462100
2025<br>2046The Great Hunger Read the shared timeline ↓
Four possible futuresWarming by 2100 · vs. late 19th century20472100<br>01Back From the Brink Survival Through Geoengineering1.5 °C<br>02The Termination Shock Geoengineering Catastrophe4.0 °C<br>03Unequal Stabilization A World Stabilized Below 3 °C2.85 °C<br>04No Safe Latitude The Four-Degree World4.0 °C
Each vertical stripe represents one year. Historical colors end in 2025; stripes after 2025 are narrative projections, not climate-model outputs.<br>Historical visualization based on Ed Hawkins’ “Warming Stripes”; source image: Climate Central / UK Met Office.
Timeline 01 · 2026–2046<br>2046, The Great Hunger<br>Emissions plateau, warming continues, and synchronized harvest failures break the global food system.<br>Voice Sophia MillerDate October 25, 2046Location Georgetown University, Washington, DCWarming 2.0 °C
In this timelineIntroduction: Living at 2 °C<br>2026-2046: Emissions Plateau, But Warming Continues<br>2036-2042: Cracks in the System<br>2042-2044: Decarbonization, Rising Emissions, and a New Baseline<br>2044–2045: The Failure of the Breadbaskets<br>2045–2046: The Great Hunger<br>2046: An Uncertain Future<br>Introduction: Living at 2 °C<br>Scientists just made it official. In this year - 2046 - the world's average temperature is 2 °C hotter than it was in the late 19th century, when humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions were just beginning to alter the climate.<br>It feels like it shouldn’t matter. I’m not sure I’d notice if my room warmed by 2 °C. But when averaged out over the whole Earth, it represents an almost unimaginable accumulation of heat. Worse, that heat isn’t spread out evenly. Land has warmed about twice as quickly as water. The Arctic has warmed four times faster than the world as a whole.<br>And it’s not like every day is just a bit warmer. The worst heat comes in waves, and the waves are much hotter than anything people have felt before. Heatwaves that were once-in-50-year events in the late 19th century now happen every few years. And heatwaves that were simply too hot to happen are now all too real – and all too deadly.<br>Changing temperatures are disrupting precipitation patterns. Rains don’t come as expected, or they fall too hard, too fast. Water in soil dries up so quickly that ecosystems are beginning to break down. Now, the world’s food growing regions, its breadbaskets, no longer produce enough food for the world’s 9.4 billion people.<br>I was born in 2026, when average global temperatures were about 1.4°C warmer than they had been in the late 19th century. In my lifetime, a threat that once must have felt distant and abstract – climate change – became a matter of life and death for hundreds of millions of people.<br>This is the story of how we got here.
Simulated warmingThis map simulates regional temperature change when Earth has warmed by 2 °C, relative to its average temperature in the late nineteenth century. It is a modified version of an image obtainable from the IPCC WGI Interactive Atlas. Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “WGI Interactive Atlas,” accessed August 10, 2026.<br>2026-2046: Emissions Plateau, But Warming Continues<br>When I was born, most governments still supported the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. In public, they pledged to limit warming to “well below” 2 °C, relative to Earth’s average temperature in the late 19th century.<br>In private, policymakers understood that they had little chance of meeting that goal. Human emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most responsible for global warming, were plateauing – not falling. That distinction, between stabilization and decline, turned out to matter enormously.<br>By the late 2020s, global carbon dioxide emissions peaked at roughly 40 billion tons per year. Many celebrated that emissions had stopped rising. Politicians took credit. Pundits argued that global warming wasn’t, after all, the crisis it had seemed to be. Leading scholars declared that by tackling the emissions problem, governments had shown the capacity to deal with other, world-threatening issues – like the continued development of artificial intelligence (AI).<br>But carbon dioxide takes a long time to leave the atmosphere. True, it was no longer accumulating as quickly in the atmosphere as it had been. But overall atmospheric concentrations of the gas were still rising, trapping heat from the Sun by absorbing and re-emitting infrared radiation that would otherwise have escaped into space.<br>And because emissions didn’t fall, global temperatures continued to rise. By 2036, when I was ten years old, the world had warmed by about 1.7°C since the late 19th century.<br>The impacts were growing more...