Introducing: After 2C, Histories of the Future of Global Warming

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Can today’s history students shape the future of climate change? And how will the history students of the future remember global warming?

These are questions I’ve been wrestling with for many years. And they’re a heart of a new website, After2C, that uses history to imagine the future.

Explore the After2C Website

I had an epiphany while writing the final chapters of my new book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System. I learned that, in 1967, an MIT professor had created a class that challenged students to address what seemed like an emerging risk to humanity: the possibility that an asteroid could collide with the Earth. 

The professor, Paul Sandorff, challenged his students to develop a plan that would use existing technology to deflect or destroy an inbound asteroid. Over a semester, the students worked out the principles of what would later be called planetary defense: the effort to protect the Earth from celestial impacts. They published a plan for protecting the Earth that, in time, informed planetary defense programs that dramatically reduced the risk of an asteroid colliding with the Earth.   

By taking Sadorff’s course, MIT students had, in effect, given themselves a slightly safer future.

Uncovering this history led me to design a new seminar at Georgetown University. I called it “Existential Risk.” In the first half of the seminar, students would learn about the history of risks that seem to imperil our species: risks like nuclear war, self-improving artificial intelligence, or climate change. In the second half, students would work in groups to create something – anything – that could meaningfully reduce one of these risks.

I debuted the course last semester.

For nine harrowing weeks, my students learned about everything from bioengineered viruses to the insect apocalypse. Then, they crafted proposals for a project that would organize their remaining time together – a project that could actually reduce one of the risks they’d learned about.

After my students reviewed the proposals, they joined me in voting on them. It was close call. We had to weigh not only the seriousness of each risk, but also the extent to which it was already being addressed. And we had to consider whether we could actually design something, in a matter of weeks, that could meaningfully aid efforts to reduce a threat to humanity.

Some of my students sought to tackle the economic risks associated with the continued development of artificial intelligence. A slightly larger group wanted to find a way to reduce the risk of encountering a hostile alien civilization.

But in the end, most of my students resolved to address the risk not just of global warming, but of the deliberate changes to the atmosphere – known as geoengineering – that states could someday deploy to limit warming. The students proposed a website that would use fictional essays, ostensibly written by the history students of the future, to raise awareness of the risks posed by both global warming and geoengineering.

A scene one of the bleakest After2C timelines: the beginning of a US-led solar radiation modification project in 2051.

The students worked with me to begin to imagine different ways – different timelines – in which climate change could unfold in their lifetimes.

They worked in small teams. Five teams wrote first drafts for five of the timelines on the site. A sixth team with two students helped keep the project on track, created a rough mockup of the website, and used open-source data provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to create initial drafts of the website’s maps and graphs.

Classes were devoted to updates on the project, group consultations, and virtual interviews with leading scientists. I created resources that aided the work of each group, including links to online climate simulation tools and lists of important publications. Eventually, my students submitted rough drafts of their timelines, viewed each other’s drafts, then revised their drafts with my guidance. They also created a draft website design.

But by now, it was obvious that I’d erred in designing part of the course.

Sandorff’s students had had a whole semester to develop a plan to reduce the risk of an asteroid impact. My students had had just six weeks. And while the MIT students of the 1960s were engineers, tackling a technical problem, my students were a diverse bunch, many of whom had never studied climate change before.

The timelines and website created by my students provided a fantastic guide to building a unique resource that could, perhaps, influence public discourse about global warming, but it would need time to build out that resource.

After the course was done, I decided to undertake the work. I rewrote each timeline, adding storytelling components, deepening descriptions of scientific, political, and economic changes, adding citations, and revising or creating visualizations. And I built an interactive website that could vividly communicate exactly how the world would warm in every timeline.

After a summer of tinkering, I debuted the website.

After2C, as it’s called, presents fictional history papers that imagine a catastrophe in the year 2046 – brought on by a very strong El Niño – and then four plausible futures, each with more or less warming. Because these futures are presented as history papers, they can dive into the complexities of climate adaptation, mitigation, and geoengineering – exploring tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and path dependencies. 

While working the site, it struck me how easy it is to imagine plausible futures in which warming spirals out of control and threatens the world as we know it. Worsening El Niño forecasts also led me to suspect that the catastrophe I imagined in 2046 could happen a lot earlier.

But I was also reminded, yet again, that the future could yet take many forms. It is still possible to imagine a twenty-first century in which warming slows down and stops, preserving a habitable Earth.

I hope After2C makes a tangible difference in realizing that goal.

Many of our students fear the future. Rightfully so. But creating a project with plausible real-world impact felt like an antidote to that fear. My dream for After2C is to provide a model for the kinds of projects we can develop with our students to give them genuine cause for hope.

Explore the After2C Website
Feature Image: A world that has warmed by 4 °C, relative to the late nineteenth century: it’s the outcome of two timelines on After2C.
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Dagomar Degroot

Dagomar Degroot is the 2024/25 Baruch S. Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation at the Library of Congress, and Associate Professor of Environmental History at Georgetown University. He hosts The Climate Chronicles, a podcast on the history of climate change.

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