Global warming starting in 1200 makes Iceland a semi-tropical world by 1900. By that time people have started to live there. The big glacier-carved formations and volcanoes amaze people and tourism becomes a major business. Meanwhile France is a barren desert and most of the US is similarly uninhabitable. The only places for people to live now are Scandinavia, the Himalayas, northern Asia, Greenland, Antarctica and Canada. An epidemic kills all of northern Asia, leaving Iceland one of the most powerful countries in the world, next to Greenland, Norway and Ellesmere Island.