Polar cities are proposed sustainable polar retreats designed to house
human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causes
the central and middle regions of the Earth to become uninhabitable
for a long period of time. Although they have not been built yet, some
futurists have been giving considerable thought to the concepts
involved.

I know, I know, the very thought of “polar cities” sounds like some
science-fiction movie you don’t want to see. But it might be
instructive to think about such sustainable Artic and Antartic
communities for the future of humankind. If worse come to worse, and
things fall apart, perhaps by the year 2500 or the year 3000, we must
might need polar cities. And perhaps the time to start thinking about
them, and designing and planning them (and maybe even building, or
pre-building them), is now.

Here is more food for thought, from an entry in Wikipedia:
“High-population-density cities, to be built in the polar regions,
with sustainable energy and transportation infrastructures, will
require substantial nearby agriculture. Boreal soils are largely poor
in key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but nitrogen-fixing
plants (such as the various alders in the Artic region) with the
proper symbiotic microbes and mycorrhizal fungi can likely remedy such
poverty without the need for petroleum-derived fertilizers. Regional
probiotic soil improvement should perhaps rank high on any polar
cities priority list. James Lovelock’s notion of a widely distributed
almanac of science knowledge and post-industrial survival skills also
appears to have value.”

Oh, I know it’s fashionable to mock global warming alarmists and doom
and gloom futurists with no credentials except a keyboard and a blog,
but there’s a method to the madness of thinking about polar cities.
Maybe, just maybe, if enough people hear about the concept of polar
cities and realize how serious such a possibility is, maybe, just
maybe, they will get off their tuches and start thinking hard and fast
about how we humans are causing climate change by our lifestyles and
inventions and gadgets and need for cars and airplanes and trains and
ships and factories and coal-burning plants across the globe — and
then maybe it won’t be fashionable to mock global warming alarmists
anymore.

The future does not look good. But we can do something now. No, not
building polar cities now. That’s for the future to decide. What we
can do now is stop what we are doing now and start planning in a more
sane way for the future of the species. If we even care. I do. We must
stop all human acitivity that is responsible for emitting carbon
dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere. Now. It’s getting later earlier
and earlier, I tell you.

http://blog.nam.org/ archives/ 2007/ 06/ heat_mongering.php

Webposted: July 1, 2007

Environmental activist Dan Bloom has come up with a solution to global
warming that apparently no one else is talking about: polar cities.
That’s right, Bloom envisions future polar cities will house some 200
million survivors of global warming in the far distant future (perhaps
in the year 2500, he says on his blog), and he’s lobbying on the
Internet for their planning, design and construction — NOW!

“Sounds nutty, I know” the 58-year-old self-described “eco-dreamer”
says from his home in Asia, where he has been based since 1991. “But
global warming is for real, climate change is for real, and polar
cities just might be important if humankind is to survive the coming
‘events’, whatever they might be, in whatever form they take.”

Bloom, a 1971 graduate of Tufts University in Boston, says he came up
with the idea of polar cities after reading a long interview with
British scientist James Lovelock, who has predicted that in the
future, the only survivors of global warming might be around 200
million people who migrate to the polar regions of the world.

“Lovelock pointed me in this direction,” Bloom says. “Although he has
never spoken of polar cities per se, he has talked about the
possibility that the polar regions might be the only place where
humans can survive if a major cataclysmic event occurs as a direct
result of global warming, in the far distant future. I think we’ve got
about 30 generations of human beings to get ready for this.”

Does Bloom, who has created a blog and video on YouTube, think that
polar cities are practicial?

“”Practical, necessary, imperative,” he says. “We need to start
thinking about them now, and maybe even designing and building them
now, while we still have time and transportation and fuel and
materials and perspective. Even if they never get built, the very idea
of polar cities should scare the pants off people who hear about the
concept and goad them into doing something concrete about global
warming. That’s part of my agenda, too.”

For more information: http://climatechange3000.blogspot.com
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