When it finally happened, the Great Climate Readjustment (‘The Collapse’) was not wholly unexpected. Indeed, scientists had been warning of such a possibility for several decades and had urged governments to act to cut greenhouse gases in a bid to reverse the process of climate change. However, only during the late 2020s, when climate records continued to be set at a rapid rate and the occurrence of previously extreme weather events became commonplace, did governments around the world finally commit to seriously addressing the issue. Working together, their measures included banning non-essential travel, mandating working from home, heavily taxing meat and dairy consumption, and introducing stringent carbon rationing schemes. But in the end, humanity simply ran out of time.

On 17 July 2030, after four months of unrelenting high temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere, coupled with grassland and forest fires raging across Siberia, Western Europe and North America for the fifth successive summer season, the global climate passed a final tipping point that set in motion a series of increasingly significant and irreversible changes. First, the cumulative effect of the fires destroyed not only isolated communities, infrastructure and agricultural capacity, but also entire towns and cities, and turned many previously fertile areas into de facto deserts. Second, the pyro-cumulus clouds caused by the fires pumped huge amounts of smoke into the atmosphere, which dramatically increased the level of brown carbon in the upper atmosphere, thereby increasing the global temperature of both air and sea. Hotter air led to ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream shifting onto trajectories much nearer the polar ice caps for prolonged periods, causing the temperatures there to rise precipitously and initiating the carving of several huge icebergs from both the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves over the following year.