2055: A New Armistice

The destruction of the American Orbital Defense Network, and its air and naval fleets only prolonged the time until the Coalition defeat by the Alliance system of the United States. With an American decalartion of war, rather than the expected negotiations, Japan committed itself to an invasion of American assets on the Moon, believing that while they may not be able to win the war, they could at least secure their positions in Space. Japan easily captured the cities of Aldrin and Armstrong, securing the largest Helium-3 supplies outside of Triton, and pushed south to Tycho. Meanwhile American armored and robotic infantry units fought to secure Pacific territory from the Japanese, who had gone so far as to deploy troops to defend their assets in British Columbia and the Yukon, prompting an American invasion North into Canada. The United States bought crucial time for its Alliance in a daring strike on Japanese and Turkish facilities on Earth with the limited air forces, while the newly commissioned Space Force deployed Marines to defend Tycho along side American personnel stationed in Lunar military bases. Eventually the space forces retook Armstrong and Aldrin, and expelled Japan from the moon after the capture of Horikoshi Base. Even with Germany and France's entrance into the war, and the invasion of Poland led by the Turks, defeat was ultimately assured after the deployment of OCS Retribution, a canceled Orbital Command Station that had been steadily upgraded in the Tycho shipyards over the last decade, and the deployment of next generation hypersonic drones by 2054. Germany and France separately sued for peace after US reinforcements arrived in Poland, and by 2055 Japan and Turkey, beaten back to their original claims, surrendered at the Geneva Peace Conference. 

Hope may come from the Earth Working Group, a consortium of businesses, NGOs and governments that for the last ten years have undertaken an ambitious project to apply terraforming techniques being used on Mars and Venus to Earth to cope with the effects of climate change. After a decade of work in Greenland, Antarctica, Kazakhstan, the Sahara Desert, and the Australian Outback, as well as several smaller projects from Utah to the Great Rift Valley, sea levels have already fallen to 20 meters above pre-Anthropocene levels. Operations continued uninterrupted by the war, as artificial basins were created in existing basins and ancient river beads. The excess of sand and rock would be used to reconstruct the world's beaches, and create hills around the new Seas and lakes to create an artificial rain-shadow effect. New forests and grasslands were planted along the Kanduna river's expanded tributary, and around the growing new seas and rivers to further promote a healthy biosphere. With the positioning of several solar shields in polar orbit above the North and South Poles a rapid drop in polar temperatures and return the North and South polar ice has begun as well, further dropping sea levels. The shields would not return the Glaciers of the South Greenland Ice Sheet, however, as this ice sheet was the last of those from the ice age, and was doomed regardless of human intervention. Rather the temperature would fall just enough to keep snow on the ground and Solar radiation from being absorbed by rock and soil to heat the pole.