I have found a rare thing; a blank piece of paper. Since it is no longer produced, on account of the death of trees, writing surfaces are reserved for significant statements. Here is mine.

Even in the twentieth century the authorities knew that the earth’s weather systems were becoming erratic to unstable. I studied climate science in the University of Boston at the end of that century and applied what I had learnt to analysis and interpretation. The United States of America (as it was then known – before global disintegration ) used information gathered from sources hidden deep in the oceans to the outer limits of the atmosphere. This was my ‘bread and butter’ as the saying goes before bread was a luxury of the past.

My best analogy to what ultimately occurred, reducing the earth’s population to the estimated 10,000 currently, is that climate is like an avalanche. There is an imperceptible slow build up of stress within a system over a period of time. It cannot be measured but the signs that it is likely are well known. When the cataclysm occurs and tons of snow and ice hurtles down a mountain taking everything in it’s path – then the survivors look back knowing that what happened was expected.

The earth’s climates behaved in precisely the same way. When newspapers talked of ‘climate change’ at the beginning of this century, it was a simplification of the facts. The earth has multiple climates and micro-climates which interface with the local events known as ‘weather’. Even the super computers of the day, ( which we used to carry on our wrists before this happened ) even these computers could not track climate interrelationships, growth and transition with sufficient detail and fluidity. The dynamics of this flux was to be the deciding factor in our government’s miscalculation.

Perhaps the politicians listened more to voters than to those paid to research the subject. No, for sure they did! The popular imagination saw ‘climate change’ as reversible. Stop doing this and you get back to normal. But as with an avalanche in the making, or a glacial crack – the damage was already done.

The radiation from the sun – so called ‘space weather’ – was a particular interest of mine and I admit I should have been the first to issue warnings to the administration. Solar mass ejections were known and monitored but their exact influence on the earth’s atmosphere was guess work at best. When the first of the ten cataclysmic ejections came, we lost not only our ability to monitor but some of our best scientists – along with a portion of the global population. Computers were down, transport stopped, power supplies – in fact anything that needed electricity to function was kerput.

We had weeks of electrical storms. The HARPA grid was one of the earliest to go…one of the few ‘climate influencers’ that was operating at that time. But no amount of intervention on the scale needed was possible. Storms created floods, and floods washed away mountains and cities, quite literally. Tectonic plates moved and water came up from inside the earth to raise sea levels in addition to the melting glaciers and snow fields.

We kind of knew this would happen, but we also knew not to talk too much about it because it was well, just too frightening. Just as skiers will happily spend a day on a mountain after rain the previous night and knowing avalanches could occur.

I was in the Stable Weather Initiative and Study, but it was a bucket put out to catch an ocean. Perhaps the things we did made things worse?

I am coming to the end of both sides of this paper now. So I have to record that the days are still dark. From my view out of the cave on our island there are sometimes views of the sun above. We are hoping for light to re-enter our world before we have grown too weak. If I had any advice for the people of the past and the ‘good times’ they enjoyed, it is to carry on carrying on. For weather, climates and space weather proved just too multi-complex for us to know about. We didn’t evolve in the direction of ‘earth management’ fast enough to counter the forces heading to destroy us. We were a parasite destroying the host but ultimately the host is destroying us.

We are clinging on here living each day on found food and storytelling. Record these days in your books if you find this message. We were the generation ‘damned for all time’ because we allocated our resources to the easy life we had built for ourselves, rather than the planet.