It’s a winter’s day late this century and London is engulfed in a December blizzard, its third of the season. The air is sharp with ice. Oxford Street is deserted. For nearly two days, Heathrow’s runways — all four of them — have stood empty. Visibility on the roads is near zero.
In the following months, many English football pitches will lie idle, the groundsmen having given up trying to protect the surfaces from the elements. Bookmakers no longer take bets on a white Christmas: the probabilities have shifted too far.
This future is so much colder — and indeed so much drier — that British farming has dramatically shrunk. The complaints of the 2020s, such as Brexit and farm taxation, turned out to be minor shocks compared to the rapid cooling of the following decades. A proposal for irrigation — piping water from Scotland southwards — was deemed too expensive. The land of the second agricultural revolution no longer grows crops at scale.