UNUSUAL CLIMATE APOCALYPSE

Part of the challenge of climate change is that the apocalyptic consequences of our carbon use are emerging slowly and globally, rather than in a single newsworthy disaster, making it difficult to muster the vision and motivation to fight it. Fiction exploring the possibilities of a changed and changing climate can be a powerful way to make these abstract futures more immediate for ourselves and our students.

Most climate fiction, or cli-fi, paints a bleak future. However, some authors also imagine ways that humanity might manage to respond positively to the crisis. Below, we offer two lists of literature and novels to consider reading and discussing with students.

The first list includes short stories, novels, and poems that take the more positive, visionary approach to the subject of climate change, focusing on fighting and adapting to climate change. Through envisioning cultural tools and social strategies for transitioning to a post-carbon world, these stories offer inspiration and guidance for how we might address our very real problems-- not just through magical new technology, but through cultural shifts that make use of the technology we already have. These texts could be used for whole-class reading, and could enrich a larger unit on climate change or even lead to students researching and creating their own artistic explorations of futures altered by climate change. Questions for discussion follow each listing.

The second list includes various other climate futures for students interested in reading further. It, too, covers YA and adult fiction that is focused on the social and practical issues around climate change. Many of these latter texts focus on vividly conveying the emotional weight of various disasters that come with climate change.

We have already seen how the Pentagon incorrectly predicted ‘mega-droughts’ in the US Midwest. In reality, rainfall in the region has been well above average since then, and the sort of severe droughts that used to be commonplace have been extremely rare in the last thirty years.27 Other scientists have predicted permanent drought in the US southwest, due of course to global warming. For instance, in 2007, one study claimed that the Dust Bowl droughts would become the norm within a few years.28 In fact droughts in the southwest are not becoming more common, and nothing in recent decades has matched the severe droughts of the 1950s.29 In 2011, Andrew Dessler, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University, proclaimed that the hot Texas summer that year would become the new norm.30 As is so often the case, this scare story was based on single unusual event, and, just as typically, after he made his claim, temperatures quickly returned to their previous levels.31 Predictions of apocalypse are not just limited to the US. Tim Flannery was Chief Commissioner of the Climate Commission in Australia between 2011 and 2013, and is still considered one of the leading experts on climate change there. Over the years he has made a habit of predicting that Australia will run out of water:

Over the years, we have been assured by many experts that the sea ice in the Arctic would soon melt away. In 2007, for instance, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told us that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.34 In December that year, Jay Zwally of NASA agreed, giving the ice till 2012.35 A year later, in 2008, Professor David Barber went one step further, saying the ice would all be gone that very summer.36 For sheer persistence in getting it wrong, however, the prize must go to Peter Wadhams, Professor and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge: • In 2012, he predicted that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2015/16.37 • In 2014, he thought it might last till 2020.38 • In 2016, he confidently predicted the Arctic would be ice -free that summer (though curiously he now defined ‘icefree’ as less than 1 million square kilometers!).39 And the reality? The record for lowest sea ice extent since these predictions first appeared was recorded in 2012. Since then no year has recorded less than 4 million square kilometers.40 Antarctica While the Arctic was going to melt, other experts predicted we would all soon be living in the Antarctic. In 2004, Professor Sir David King, then the UK Government’s Chief Scientist, claimed at a Parliamentary select committee hearing that we were rapidly heading back to the climate of 55 million years ago, when the Antarctic was the most habitable place for mammals, because it was the coolest place, and the rest of the earth was rather inhospitable because it was so hot.41 According to the Independent, King stated that ‘Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked’.42 Four years later, experts from the highly reputable Forum for the Future were much more alarmed, declaring that 3.5million refugees would have flocked to the Antarctic by 2040 because of rising temperatures.43 I don’t think we really need to look at the temperature records in the Antarctic to know that it is still icebound and totally unsuitable for human life. But even in coastal stations like Mawson, average annual temperatures rarely get above −10°C, and there is no sign they will get any warmer anytime soon!44 This was not the only crackpot suggestion from Sir David. At the same select committee hearing, he also reckoned that the Greenland icesheet might be gone within ‘50 to 200 years’. Since he spoke, Greenland has lost about 3000 gigatonnes of ice.45 But Greenland’s icesheet contains approximately 2,600,000 gigatonnes, so at the current rate of loss, the icecap will take about 14,000 years to melt.46 Sea-level rise to wipe out entire nations! One of the most persistent scare stories over the years has concerned sea-level rise. As long ago as 1957, a notable physicist, Dr Joseph Kaplan, was warning that the oceans would rise by 40feet in the ‘next 50 or 60 years’.47 Later, in 1983, the US Environmental Protection Agency reported that the sea level could rise as much as 11feet by the end of the next century.48 As we have already learnt, the director of the UN Environment Program claimed in 1989 that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend were not reversed by the year 2000. And in 1995 the IPCC’s scientists said that most of the beaches of the US east coast would have disappeared within 25 years.49 One of the leading climate scientists of recent decades, James Hansen, then head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was very specific in 1988.50 He claimed that New York’s West Side Highway would be under water within 40 years. Needless to say, the highway is still there and full of traffic.51,52 Sea levels have been rising steadily at a rate of 2.87mm/year in New York, so since Hansen made his prediction, they have gone up by just over 4 inches. Given that the highway is 10 feet or more above sea level, I suspect it is safe for a few more centuries yet.53 Island nations have been the poster children for sea-level scares. The Maldives government even held a cabinet meeting underwater in 9 2009, in order to highlight their supposed plight.54 But that has not stopped them continuing to build new airports and resort complexes on the islands. Five new airports were opened in 2019 alone, to bring tourists to several new hotel resorts now under construction on under-developed atolls.55 It appears that they, along with investors such as the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, know that sea levels are not the threat painted. And for good reason. Expert studies have revealed that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking, largely due to coral debris, land reclamation and sediment.56 In fact, all around the world – including the UK, we find that sea levels are now rising no faster than they were a century ago.57 But this has not stopped ‘experts’ falling over each other to see who can predict the biggest rise in sea level. One example is the authors of the Climate Central website, who in 2019 reckoned that the seas could rise by as much as 10.8metres by the end of the century, submerging Cardiff, Swansea and north Wales, east Yorkshire and Hull, Peterborough and Norfolk,