Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian thinks climate change is so “dire”, people can only make sense of it with the help of science fiction.
According to The Guardian;
Climate change is so dire we need a new kind of science fiction to make sense of it
Star Trek was one way of dealing with the social anxieties of the 1960s. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction.
Build an imaginary world in your mind, hanging in space. Spin it around a bit; kick the tires. Now change one thing about that world. Throw a bug of your choice into the machine. What if the oceans reclaim your coastal cities? What if you can’t support life? What if the life you bear can’t support you?
…
It can be difficult to conceive of something so enormous through facts alone. But the right fiction can be a mirror, a map and a crystal ball, helping us to see ourselves in the world, negotiate our way out of disaster and imagine how we might live differently.
…
The point is that Anthropocene fiction isn’t just science fiction; nor is it just climate fiction. It’s both those things and more. It is all the stories we should tell our children: near-future tales of ecological systems, collapse, responsibility and possibility along with visions of long-term cohabitation with our own environment. The point is to show them not just how the story ends but how we might get through the middle – while we still have a shot at changing it.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/20/climate-change-science-fiction
I must say, I find the green obsession with frightening the kids with apocalyptic fairy tales, dressed up as predictions, a little disturbing. My parents didn’t let me watch Star Trek, until I was old enough to understand that what I was seeing was just entertaining fiction.
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Climate Science and Science Fiction have always been first cousins.
But SF has better success at predicting the future.
It’s always been an interesting way to explore the possibilities. Deliberately using it to steer the next generation toward the writers’ desired results is only going to actually work if the writers’ near term predictions are correct. Mad Max scenarios of a scorching desert will be obviously fictional and entertaining, as the readers shiver in front of the fireplace through yet another frigid winter.
That’s confirmation bias- you only remember when it gets it right. Star Trek has technology that is backward from what is available now like autopilot.
One of my favorite authors when growing up was John Wyndham who didn’t like the title Science Fiction but wrote what he called Scientific Fiction taking something from the world as it is and changing one or two aspects and moving on from there. In one of his most famous stories he took plant breading (genetics) and satellite weapons and put them together to get the “Day of the Triffids”, which some ecoloons take to be the truth as far as genetic engineering goes.
They might not like the idea behind the story “The Secret People” based on flooding the Sahara desert to make a new sea. Oh and our hero traveled in a private rocket plane.
James Bull
One of my favorite anthologies was edited by Isaac Asimov, Where Do We Go from Here?”. Each short story looked at a world where one physical law was changed or discarded.
For example, a material made a bouncing ball with a coefficient of restitution greater than 1. I.e. on each bounce it bounced higher than before. The energy for that came from the ball cooling. Finally on one bounce it go so cold it shattered and the story ended with people scampering around collecting the fragments before they warmed up and turned into less predictable bouncing objects.
Charles Nelson — Climate Science Fiction — Eugene WR Gallun
You mean like “The Day After Tomorrow”?
Yep.
That’s why they shouldn’t marry.
“That’s why they shouldn’t marry.”
I don’t think they plan to marry, but it’s still incestual.
Star Trek, produced a couple of generations of people, who no longer are capable of separating fact from fancy.
The transporter is awaiting nothing more than support from a friendly government grant.
Have you pre-ordered yours yet ??
G
That is an extraordinarily offensive view of science fiction.
Why do you need science fiction when climate science is already 80% fiction?
interesting isn’t it that creative fiction is actually the one really worthwhile department in the University of East Anglia.
97% fiction!
Isn’t that the formula for any good Science Fiction novel/story? Read any of Michael Crichton’ books. He spent three years researching “State of Fear.” A thriller with footnotes, graphs and scientific references. In it he argues that the threat of global warming has been exaggerated by environmentalists. Is it Fact or Fiction?
Make Crichton’s “State of Fear” into a movie.
A movie of State of Fear is an excellent idea. Crichton was one of the better Sci-Fi writers.
Sorry for the late comment. I just got back from a science fiction convention.
To fit with a vision of preschool through high school education globally where “Education…must nourish a core of generic and conceptual and practical capacities to make the new out of the old, It must also equip the mind with the means with which to resist the present. For this very reason, the school should not remain under the control of the community of local families, who tell the child, become like us.”
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/evolution-to-a-holos-consciousness-is-certainly-not-my-idea-of-education-reform-is-it-yours/ is where that quote came from. That Holos Consciousness push comes out of the Club of Rome affiliate Club of Budapest but its authors beyond the Dalai Llama are Ervin Laszlo, with all his ties to UN entities and Nicholas Negroponte, who heads the MIT Media Lab. The Media Lab is under grants from NSF to create virtual reality gaming for the classroom that turn science fiction into the images of the games it creates. Instead of the student imagining via print, the desired visual images and engineered consequences get directly registered by the student’s brain as dramatized. Much different and designed to rewire the brain neurologically to act on these created false beliefs.
Orwell and Huxley together could scarcely imagine what the behavioral scientists admit they are planning to do now in classrooms.
designed to rewire the brain neurologically to act on these created false beliefs.
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a clockwork orange. what could possibly go wrong.
“Instead of the student imagining via print, the desired visual images and engineered consequences get directly registered by the student’s brain as dramatized. Much different and designed to rewire the brain neurologically to act on these created false beliefs.”
I think you make a very important point. Images are processed very differently from words. We humans have been speaking with each other for a very long time; I suspect that lying was developed very soon after speech was, and so we have had a very long time of being wired to understand that words alone may or may not be true. The old sayings are “take what you hear with a grain of salt.” What you hear and what you read are automatically accompanied by a certain level of scepticism. On the other hand, consider the saying, “seeing is believing.” Up until just a few decades ago, what we saw happening around us, was certainly real. Now, anyone with access to movies or TV can see — actually see with their own eyes! — things which never happened and most likely never will happen. Those images are accepted (even if weakly) by our brains as being true. We know rationally that the things we see are not real, but the deeper parts of our mind are not convinced. Why else do we have nightmares after seeing obviously fictional horror movies?
‘neurological social engineering with a collectivist political purpose’. This is Robin’s gorgeous phrase written elsewhere.
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That’s not the only place. Someone on Madison Avenue figured out that if they can just keep everyone’s cortisol level high by means of apocalyptic fiction, the useful idiots will say “Live for Today!” and max all their credit cards. Enslavement? Serfs? I’ve never seen a method that works any better than enslaving people to their own limitless, advertiser-generated, “desires.” Almost Biblical, when you stop to think about it! Also, if “we’re all going down, soon” there’s no need to take responsibility for one’s actions. Perhaps we get the “reality” we DESERVE!
Yes but no science yet.
Has anyone ever tallied up all the science fiction stories that use man’s careless/malevolent “destruction of the planet” as a plot device, premise or setting? There must be hundreds.
“The end is near”
Isn´t that the archetypical fictional predictions.
we got kicked out of the garden of eden because we ate of the fruit of knowledge.
The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As opposed to the Tree of Life.
I read “Stranger in a Strange Land” (1961) back about 1965. A science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Not sure if it was the first but those kind of books were even popular then.
Heinlein’s “humans destroy the planet” story was Farnham’s Freehold and humans didn’t destroy anything, just put a big, temporary dent in it. Stranger in a Strange Land has no planetary destruction except for the Martian’s historical destruction of the former fifth planet – now the asteroid belt, which happened in the far past.
Quite a few but the vast majority are Cold War era and latch onto atomic warfare as the cause. Some are considered classics, others were crap. There distopian novels like Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, or William Gibson’s stories that lead you to ask, “would you want to live in a world like this?” But “destruction” is mostly atomic or extraterrestrial.
Recently the preference is to prevent those capitalists from cynically destroying the environment (episodes of CSI that pillory fracking for instance) or the horrible lefties from destroying most of the human race to initiate a “better” world (like Clancy’s Rainbow SIx or Crichton’s State of Fear [my vote for best story]). These however don’t actually ruin the planet, which is bravely rescued from the baddies instead.
It sounds as though he’s just thought the possibility of writing fictional stories to warn, enthral and entertain.
Most of Arthur C Clark’s work was exactly this, warning of future possibilities. Though he didn’t demand everyone turn off their TV’s and turn off the lights in case they wake the local residence of Rama.
He’s only about 2,000 years behind some of the great masters.
We have plenty of dystopian future fiction already. We have 1984, Brave New Word, and Fahrenheit 451.
All brought about by government “helping” us.
We also have Atlas Shrugged.
The main reason why Star Trek became a perennial favorite is precisely because it was NOT “dystopian”–it showed a human race of the future that had matured beyond primitive stupidities like nuclear war and survived to colonize the stars. The Atlantean tradition, transferred to deep space!
An excellent point. Nearly all ‘space opera’ SF is really very positive about human development – even James Blish’ Cities in Flight series is about mankind escaping a decaying earth to populate the galaxy. Dystopian SF is nearly all based on a decaying earth with no hope of escape – Hunger games etc.
Did they mean to say ” Disfunctional Utopia ” ??
Nope.
These people need help.
Indeed they do – I suspect they need the help of handy little 1 hour packets of Star Trek “science” or what passes as science in the climate world, where inconvenient past plot lines can simply be ignored as tho that happened in a different reality.
At college we used to watch Star Trek avidly – one of the fun things we did was watch for episodes where a premise that had appeared in a previous episode was dismissed by the scriptwriters of one of the later episodes. So you got too good stories but each based upon contradictory and conflicting premise.
This is fine for a fiction writer – Terry Pratchett used to say of his wonderful Discworld series that the entire concept was like a toy railway set and that at anytime he could and did – alter its shape and construct.
It really is not that surprising that Climate “science” hankers after a Scriptwriters “reality” – as someone has already said – the UoEA is well respected for its literary prowess.
As for Terry Pratchett’s Discworld “railway analogy” – well, did we not have a railway engineer in charge of the IPCC?
Perhaps he had a train numbered IPCC 1701
+1! 😉
I just went through an enlightenment discussion tonight with a 17 yr old who only heard talking points. I pointed him to data sources, and he viewed facts.
Things changed.
Ossqss – really satisfying isn’t it!
My own “Road to Damascus” was via someone simply putting facts not spin in front of me. And the great thing about kids is that they question “authority”.
We sceptics are benefiting from lots of young agile and questioning minds rebelling against the tosh rammed down their throats in schools.
Let’s all of us keep being honest and acting with integrity – kids are not fools!
We could do with a slogan……………!!!!
What about?
“The Truth is Out There!”
Has that been done before?
kids are not fools!
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they eventually figure out that santa, the tooth fairy, the easter bunny and the boogeyman aren’t real.
so about the time you tell them the climate is changing, that it will be summer all year long, they are pretty sure they can’t be that lucky. like santa, it will turn out to be a lie, and they won’t be able to party on the beach during winter, no matter how often they ride the bus.
“I must say, I find the green obsession with frightening the kids with apocalyptic fairy tales, dressed up as predictions, a little disturbing. ” Other – more established – religions have been getting away with something not dissimilar for a long time now…
organized religion: give us your money or burn in hell.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Extortion (also called shakedown, outwrestling, and exaction) is a criminal offense of obtaining money, property, or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion
Any “Christian” organization, at least, that tells you this, is selfishly lying and glorifying itself. Hell represents God’s respect for man even when he is so stubbornly wayward that he would never ever under any circumstance accept and act on help from God. God would rather permit them to be miserable slaves to the devil forever, than wipe them out. And heaven represents God’s mercy.
So much as for climate science scams: they can’t even ape faith right. They are only aping a caricature of it.
climate science: give us your money or burn on earth.
The 1984 Newspeak for “Catastrophic Anthropomorphic Global Warming” is “Climate Change”.
The global warmers find instances of “Climate Change” and immediately start talking about CAGW even though they are saying “Climate Change”. “Climate Change” and CAGW have nothing to do with each other.
“Climate Change” as used by global warmers is something you should find on the SyFy channel and not the Science channel.
When I meet people using that phrase, I always correct them – you mean Global Warming, right?
“Sigh”.
Yeah, but now that it isn’t warming and isn’t likely to warm they have update their advertising and literature.
The threats they are trying to push are:
1. 2°C warming from 1900 – with no proof it will be harmful or that CO2 contributed more than 1.05 W/m2 to past warming, and completely ignoring the benefits of more CO2.
2. Sea level rise – with no proof it is worse than the twentieth century.
3. Ice sheet melt – with no proof it is more than a cyclical change.
4. Water shortage – ignoring the fact that CO2 is part of the cure.
5. Methane release/warming – with no evidence it is a real threat instead of just a virtual one.
Given that CGAGW (raw data adjustment).has been over 0.23°C in the 7 years since 2008 for the period 1915 to 2000, or 3.28°C per century per century 2100 will be at least 5.5°C warmer if nothing changes, so there is no point in worrying about future warming.
We really need to permit class active civil lawsuits against global warmers for fraud. It is the only way to stop the hoaxers from endlessly bombarding us with fictitious threats. They are stealing US tax dollars and fraudulently increasing our energy bills and lowering our standard of living. We should have legal recourse.
Well, that truly IS some scary Sci-Fi right there. Hominid Glowball Warming! “Shoot it, it’s assuming human form!” Arrgh!
What you ~really~mean is:
Things like this drive me bat poop crazy. Pet peeve of people referring to their steering damper as a “dampener”. What, ya trying to get it wet?
Or describing fractions as multiples. “500,000 times lighter than the electron”… It is inaccurate and intellectually lazy to describe fractions as multiples. It’s not “500,000 times lighter”. It’s 0.000002 the mass of an electron, or 0.0002% the mass of an electron. You could perhaps say 2 ten thousandths of a percent the mass of an electron. It’s a fraction, not a multiple…. Argggh
….slinks away off of soap box…
Well, … …
https://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm
“Here is a link to US Senate Committee on the Environment that lists in detail 400 scientists who disagree with the anthropomorphic global warming hypothesis:”
http://www.ted.com/conversations/19491/where_is_objective_non_politi.html
“Where is objective, non-political “anthropomorphic global climate change” research?”
http://ivn.us/2013/08/10/global-climate-change-as-an-anthropomorphic-phenomenon/
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=400321
“Why is anthropomorphic global warming so difficult to prove?”
It is what it is. CAGW actually means “Cult of Anthropomophic Global Warming” or the “Climate Cult” which believes the climate is going to sneak up and attack us with malice aforethought when we aren’t looking. In this case anthropomorphic is correct.
But the reality is the term is incorrect.
Only about 40% of “anthropogenic” emissions are anthropogenic.
About 40% of “anthropogenic” emissions are gynopogenic.
About 20% of “anthropogenic” emissions are paedopogenic.
There are no studies that have proven that gynopogenic and paedopogenic.emissions have the same effect as anthropogenic emissions. There are even theories of gynopogenic global cooling.
And it is 1/500,000th the mass of an electron.
Ok, PA – that’s funny right there!
The Guardian article mentions the “cli-fi” film “Snowpiercer”. As I recall, the ice age in the film comes about through unspecified meddling with the climate. That suggests that humanity badly overcompensated for real or imagined global warming. Perhaps it’s the alarmists who could learn something from cli-fi. 🙂
Yup… they should be careful what they wish for. They could get it!
In fact The Day After Tomorrow use the same device. The melting of ice in the arctic suppresses the NAC and triggers an Ice Age. Cold is always so much scarier than heat. Water World was simply pathetic.
Nah, we told the kids that most things on TV were fiction. That if they had any thoughts about something possibly being correct, ask us or better yet look it up.
Fiction is fine for daydreams, bad for science.
Like Paul Newman in Quintet… the Global Ice Age movie?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079770/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_24
When they say “you need science fiction to make sense of climate change” they are really saying “you must indulge yourself in the storyline and not the science”.
How much more obvious can they get?
You just can’t make this stuff up, can you?
CAGW is 100% fiction but there is nothing entertaining or enlightening about it.
Science fiction. Yes that kind of sums up the Greenhouse Effect.
Dystopian future fiction (some of it based on ecological problems) is an ever-popular genre: Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Blade Runner, Mad Max, etc. There was also that recent one where global warming produced a new ice age. Not sure why the Grauniad thinks this is a novel idea. But I would love to see the Guardianistas lose millions by producing preachy rubbish that no-one will bother to see.
Can’t wait to see what the Thermians make of these historical documents. Galaxy Quest II could have a lot of fun with this.
Climate science ends up in the same group of SciFi movies as ‘The Blob‘ (1958, remake 1988), ‘I Married a Monster from Outer Space‘ (1958, remake 1998) and simular. Might be amusing and even funny, but far from realistic …
In ‘Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman’ an abused wife grows large and then pursues her abuser.
Perhaps it could be re-shot with Gaia in the title role…
That’s a good example! Forgot about that one …
“Who goes there?”, the John W. Campbell novella that keeps getting remade as “The Thing” is on the list.
Which is appropriate since global warming is a “disaster” that really isn’t.
Wasn’t Day After Tomorrow about Climate Change writ large? Not only did the seas freeze, they simultaneously rose 50 meters to bury NYC in ice in a few days. That Hollywood movie is probably more realistic than most CAGW horrors being tossed around today.
Day After Tomorrow was a bit like a Heinrich Event squeezed into a few weeks.
Ironically it was Waterworld that depicted the warmist nightmare.
Science fiction used to mix hope and possibility in with the risks, but now it is all doomsday stuff, and it is our fault always.
It’s only your fault if you’re NOT an Earnestly Concerned hand-wringing underwriter of NPR, driving a Prius you charge off your solar array, which also powers the treadmill you run on wearing a FitBit that beams your internal telemetry to Obama. While eating organic kale and obsessing over your “numbers.”
Peter Hamilton’s ‘Greg Mandel’ SF novels are set in a post warming, sea level rising world. And the WORST damage to England was done by the extreme socialist/Stalinist government that was elected to save the country!
The Guardian obviously doesn’t know the difference between science fiction and fantasy because their the purveyors of fantasy.
my favorite
http://www.baenebooks.com/p-137-fallen-angels.aspx
Indeed, did a post on it a while ago 🙂
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/22/prescient-fallen-angels-a1991-satire-of-climate-alarmism/
You try to get a novel with a non climate change belief standpoint published mainstream. You will not have a hope. It is interesting that the people at the top of the green promotion chain are often those whose one skill is in presenting fantasy as reality i.e. media stars. Others heavily promoting it are the aristocracy who clearly in the case of Prince Charles is keen to recreate a feudal primitive culture as demonstrated by his own vision of an ideal village.
Just documenting how the present scandal has unfolded, in a storytelling voice, would be quite damning to it. Call it a docu-novel, maybe. WHATEVER THIS STUFF IS, FOLKS. IT AIN’T SCIENCE.
Read Crichton’s State of Fear. You can’t find an author that was more mainline than Crichton, and he certainly was dubious of AGW.
An interesting comment on the geology of Star Trek here….http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2015/08/19/the-geology-of-star-trek-from-extraterrestrial-minerals-to-alien-life-forms/
Note that carbon, in two crystalline modifications, as coal and as diamond, saved Captain Kirk´s life in the already mentioned episode “Arena”!
“ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction”?
Have they never read any of J.G.Ballard’s novels?