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xiii Preface June 2081 “Hey, Mom. I have a question for you. Grandma’s been tell- ing us stories about ‘the good old days,’ you know, back in the 2020s. And I’ve been reading about and looking at pictures of those times. How come so many things seem so different today than they did in the 2020s? “Like the winters, for example. Grandma showed us a pic- ture of big snow piles around her house when she was a little girl. We still have snow, of course, but I’ve never seen so much all at once in our town. And speaking of snow, what happened to those huge fields of snow and ice that I see in pictures of the Alps and Andes and Himalayas? Sure, they still have snow and ice too, but it’s nothing like we see in pictures today. And what about Greenland and the Arctic? Maps of those areas today look so different than they did in the 2020s. It looks as if some- one has colored large parts of the white in those maps with a green crayon. Why trees and bushes now rather than ice and snow then? “And other things too. Like that storm that wiped out San Juan last fall. Sure, hurricanes and tornadoes have been around forever. But how come they seem to be so much worse now than in Grandma’s day? “I love to look at the maps from the old times. Like the one from 2015 that shows Ocean City as being at the end of a long peninsula. Today, Ocean City is an island! What’ with that?