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Is Climate-Themed Fiction All Too Real? We Asked the Experts

By LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA SEPT. 26, 2017

Photo

When extraordinary hurricanes and floods battered parts of the United

States and Caribbean this month, Paolo Bacigalupis readers started sending
him news clips. In Ship Breaker, which was nominated for a National
Book Award in 2010, Mr. Bacigalupi, a science fiction writer, had invented a
monster Category 6 hurricane.

Now, his readers were asking: Is this what you were talking about?

Climate change presents a peculiar challenge to novelists; it often seems to

simmer without a singular moment of crisis. So fiction writers like Mr.
Bacigalupi hurtle current science into drought-ravaged, flooded, starved,
sunken and sandy futures. Climate-themed fiction, like most science fiction,
is extension, not invention.

But as scientists projections about the effects of climate change have

increasingly become reality, some works of apocalyptic fiction have begun to
seem all too plausible. We chose seven climate-themed stories and asked the
experts: How likely are they to come true?

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CLIMATE EFFECT: WATER WARS Photo

The Water Knife
by Paolo Bacigalupi

In his fifth climate-related book, published in

2015, Mr. Bacigalupi asks: What would happen
if drought became the new normal in the
American Southwest? His answer: Refugees,
apocalyptic cults and drug dealers roam a land
where water is controlled by thugs.

What if our underlying prosperity is ripped out

from underneath us? Mr. Bacigalupi said. If
you put those questions in peoples mind, it
changes how they look at their daily life.

Leon Szeptycki, an attorney and professor specializing in water rights at the

Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, described the book as
fictional extension. Climate change will cause a lot of social and economic
disruption in the American Southwest, but not at the level the author
envisions, he said.

Eighty to 90 percent of water in the Southwest is used for agriculture, so

rural communities would be hit first by shortages, Mr. Szeptycki said.
Available water will shift to cities, he said. There will be less water, less
food, fewer jobs.

CLIMATE EFFECT: DESERTIFICATION Photo

Gold Fame Citrus
by Claire Vaye Watkins

Claire Vaye Watkinss 2016 novel, her first,

imagines drought differently. Sand has
swallowed California; now its known as the
Amargosa Dune Sea. Nothing grows in the
lawless desert, but a wandering dowser claims
that new species a diurnal owl, carnivorous
plants and albino hummingbirds have
emerged through a super-speed evolutionary
time warp.

Absolutely, climate change can accelerate evolution, said Jeffrey

Townsend, a professor of evolutionary biology at Yale. Humans have set off
many evolutionary changes, like when insects have adapted to pesticides or
when the peppered moth lost its spots to more closely resemble industrial
soot. Plants becoming meat eaters would be more of a stretch, Dr. Townsend
said.

The novel is not an unreasonable fictional depiction of drought, said Noah

Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system science at Stanford. California

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already has a new climate, he added. Anthropogenic warming has

increased the states drought risk, but permanent rainlessness remains
unlikely.

Thats probably where the scientific literature and the novel diverge, Dr.
Diffenbaugh said. Humans are able to probe these issues in ways that are
different through the lens of fiction.

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CLIMATE EFFECT: SPECIES EXTINCTION Photo

Flight Behavior
by Barbara Kingsolver

The central character in Barbara Kingsolvers

2015 novel doesnt believe in climate change
until she has a vision of glory a colony of
monarch butterflies from Mexico appears in
southern Appalachia, disoriented by warming
temperatures.

I think it could happen, but pretty far into the

distant future when global warming really has
an effect further north, said Lincoln Brower, a research professor of biology
at Sweet Briar College, whom Ms. Kingsolver consulted while writing the
book.

Dr. Brower, who has been studying the death of monarch butterflies for six
decades, said their numbers were already way down because of a
combination of pesticide use, logging and the impacts of climate change. But
he guessed it would take about half a century before temperatures in
Appalachia rose enough to accommodate the butterflies during their winter
migration.

Its hard to know whats going to happen, Dr. Brower said, but I dont
think it will be good.

CLIMATE EFFECT: DISRUPTED FOOD CHAIN Photo

The History of Bees
by Maja Lunde

China, 2098: Tao is up a tree, hand-pollinating

its blossoms with a tiny brush. The bees are
long since gone. Maja Lundes first book,
published in 2017, chronicles three generations
as they exploit, try to save and eventually mimic
bees, whose extinction has become a familiar
device in climate-themed fiction.

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Its a crazy idea, and its being done, said

Jeremy Kerr, a biodiversity researcher at the
University of Ottawa, describing the hand-
pollinators of Hanyuan County in Chinas
Sichuan Province.

Pollinators like bees (and birds, butterflies,

moths, flies, wasps, beetles, bats and
mosquitoes) are crucial to the food
chain because they move pollen between fruit,
vegetables and nuts. Plants that depend on
pollination are 35 percent of global crop
production. While Colony Collapse Disorder
previously believed to pose a major threat to all bees has declined
substantially in recent years, Dr. Kerr said it was conceivable that five or six
keystone species, which pollinate crops like canola, tomatoes, blueberries
and strawberries, could be lost, in part because of global warming.

But hand-pollination? The question of whether you could do something like

that on a planetary scale, Dr. Kerr said, Holy moly, if thats where we got
to, I think other things would probably kill us first.

CLIMATE EFFECT: REFUGEES Photo

Borne
by Jeff VanderMeer

In Jeff VanderMeers 2017 novel, rising waters

force a child named Rachel to flee her island
home, so she moves from camp to camp,
country to country, hoping that she could
outrun the unraveling of the world. Later, in a
nameless ruined city, the 28-year-old Rachel
befriends an amorphous creature, Borne, who
smells like brine and reminds her of the sea
animals of her childhood.

Extreme weather events uproot 21.5 million people each year, according to
the United Nations refugee agency, and climate change is expected to
increase that number. But there is no internationally accepted legal status
for people who have been displaced by the impacts of climate change.

What would be fair, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for
Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, would be for each of the
major emitting countries to accept a portion of the worlds climate-displaced
people proportional to its historic contribution of greenhouse gases.

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CLIMATE EFFECT: DROWNED CITIES

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New York: 2140 Photo

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Veering from the dystopic futures common to

climate-themed fiction, Kim Stanley Robinsons
2017 book is what the author calls a comedy of
coping, set in a Venetian-like half-submerged
New York City. Seas have risen 50 feet, making
lower Manhattan a low-rent intertidal zone;
water washes up to 46th Street every 12 hours.
New Yorkers commute not by subway, but by
vaporetto.

While multi-meter sea level rise in New York City is realistic, the timescale is
not, said Benjamin Horton, a professor at Rutgers who focuses on sea level
change. He said that current modeling predicted extreme flooding of New
York City by around 2300, but that the city would likely protect itself from
rising waters with sea walls and other infrastructure.

Mr. Robinson said he had chosen the year 2140 to balance scientific
predictions with a plot that could incorporate a transformed economic
system.

Climate change is basically a capitalist catastrophe, he said. We have to

create post-capitalism to deal with climate change.

CLIMATE EFFECT: ADAPTATION Photo

The Machine Stops
by E. M. Forster

Forsters eerily prescient novella imagines a

world where life on earths surface besides
ferns and a little grass has become
impossible. Humans live underground, where
they communicate via glowing blue-lit plates
and eat, drink and sleep to the rhythm of the
eternally humming Machine.

Written in 1909 just over a decade after the

Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggested anthropogenic emissions
could change the climate The Machine Stops prophetically described
something like the internet. But it was far off in imagining how we would
adapt to climate change, said Jonathan Foley, executive director of the
California Academy of Sciences.

The idea that we could have self-sufficient civilization underground

basically requires we replace the sun, Dr. Foley said. And any technology
thats capable of doing that whether it be fusion, or some kind of magical
technology would have to be so powerful that Id ask: Why didnt we solve
the climate problem first?

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Dr. Foley said the novels ideas werent that far from the science-fiction-like
discussions he heard coming from Silicon Valley, where vertical gardens,
orbiting microwave transmitters or machines that harvest carbon are touted
as silver bullets for climate change. The actual solutions are far simpler, he
said. But theyre not as sexy. Like, hey: What if we threw less food away, or
we ate less meat?

Dr. Foley said that if he ever wrote a novel, it would be one in which we all
do the slow, hard muddling work of just pitching in, but no hero rides in on
a spaceship to save us all. It would be a terrible novel, he admitted. No one
would buy it, and Hollywood wouldnt make a movie, but its the one I want,
and it would surely save the world.

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