Climate Beyond the Twenty-First Century

It makes good sense to consider climate change and its impacts on agricultural and economic activity over the next century in the planning and decision-making process (see Chapter 15). The need to consider climate change beyond the twenty-first century, and thousands of years into the future, is less obvious. The Last Glacial Maximum (about 21,000 years BP), for example, is considered relatively recent in geological terms (see Chapter 4), but is prehistoric (part of the Palaeolithic period) from a human perspective. ¹ The dramatic changes in human technology since this prehistoric period make it difficult to envisage how society might change over the next 10,000 years, let alone the next 100,000 years, or to accept that climate change so far into the future is of anything other than academic interest.