As a new Ice Age imperils the world, a lunatic fringe of the environmental movement has taken control of the U.S. government.
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
When outsiders like myself think of California, we normally think of the most rabidly pro-alarmist, anti freedom state in America, a sea of climate alarmist orthodoxy, tempered by the occasional voice of skepticism.
But some of California’s most prominent fiction authors, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn, were poking fun at global warming dogma way back in the early 90s. Their satirical science fiction book, “Fallen Angels”, written in 1991, depicts a world in the grip of a new ice age, triggered by green initiatives to reduce CO2 emissions, with radical green governments trying to pin the blame for crashing global temperatures on high technology and “air stealing” space colonists – the remnants of American and Russian space efforts.
Many, perhaps most of you have probably not heard of “Fallen Angels” – it never achieved the prominence of better known stories such as the Ringworld series, the Known Space series, Lucifer’s Hammer, Footfall, and many other Niven and Pournelle science fiction classics. But for me Fallen Angels planted a seed of skepticism – towards the end of the 90s, when a rising tide of voices claimed climate consensus, and predicted imminent doom, I remembered reading “Fallen Angels”, and wondered whether the anti science green dystopia they satirised was actually coming to pass. My doubt caused me to dig a little deeper, and helped me to see past the climate lies of the alarmists.
Perhaps other authors are out there, wondering if now is the time to take the plunge, to satirise that which must not be questioned. My suggestion – it didn’t do Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn’s career any harm. Author Scott Adams (Dilbert) still publishes a lot of cartoons, despite his occasional nods towards climate skepticism (e.g. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/20/dilbert-becomes-skeptical-of-climate-change-disaster/ ).
And who knows – if the lunatic fringe of the climate alarmist movement is sufficiently outraged by your effort, you could sell a lot of books.
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Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel)
The book is available on Amazon, here.
For some up to date skeptical sci-fi / cli-fi, my free-to-read novelette ‘Truth’ is available in various formats here:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/273983
This book is not satirical like ‘Fallen Angels’, but serious, about the memeplex that is the social phenomenon of CAGW. Featured here at WUWT and also in Judith Curry’s review of cli-fi back at Christmas time.
Andy.
P.S. there is a wiki page for cli-fi now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cli_fi
But I think mine and Michael Crichton’s may be the only skeptical works listed (though I’m not familiar with them all)
Andy
Indeed it was. I’ve got Rotary Rocket hats in a box here, and I ran the west coast office of the Space Frontier Foundation that did the streaming video when they rolled out their ATV. Tom Clancy was a pretty big hit there himself, but the wind was so high that it really screwed up the audio feeds.
It was an amazing, unique machine — and Jerry Pournelle’s son Rich is hip deep in XCOR, another similar venture.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Philip Peake
It was far from their best book, and as I remember, treated Richard Stallman as some sort of demi-god. I will give him his due for persistence, and he also seems to be a competent programmer, but on the political side he to way to the left of Lenin.
Stallman helped break the stranglehold of Microsoft – his free software foundation has done a lot to promote Linux, and bring real price competition and innovation to the IT market. WUWT runs on free software promoted by the likes of Stallman http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=wattsupwiththat.com . Nowdays IT companies which want to charge exorbitant fees have to deliver value.
And one of the most important climate skeptics, the person who did more than any of us to bring down the hockey team, is a left winger.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100055793/steve-mcintyre-total-bloody-hero/
A friend once described me as “right wing of Ghengis Khan”, I normally consider the left to be somewhere between impractical and contemptible. But you don’t have to be a right winger to advance the cause of freedom. Left wingers can also be good people.
As somebody who reads all these reports coming out of the UN and Club of Rome and what Ehrlich says he intends to do etc, the books and reports read like satire and bad fiction. Which they are except intentions coupled to political power and taxpayer financing have actual real effects.
I suspect the early 90s writers were looking at things like the World Order Models Project and the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and then the hype around Limits to Growth and then the 87 Brundtland Report and realizing this is all an excuse for unquestioned power. AND being the paymaster for all that redistribution.
Understanding WOMP from the early 70s is very enlightening to appreciating the mentalities and lust for money and power that have always been hand in hand with these Save the World by changing human values schemes. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/reorienting-world-order-values-via-the-intervention-of-activist-education-and-progressive-politics/ lays out WOMP.
The Club of Rome considered WOMP a peer in its intentions and credentials involved.
Michael Flynn is a statistician by training, and a Thomist by philosophy. I suspect many WUWT readers will enjoy his amusing and thought provoking blog, http://tofspot.blogspot.com/ (this reader does). He regularly gores sacred cows there.
Philip Peake says:
June 22, 2013 at 3:41 pm
It was far from their best book, and as I remember, treated Richard Stallman as some sort of demi-god. I will give him his due for persistence, and he also seems to be a competent programmer, but on the political side he to way to the left of Lenin….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yeah, but he is a great dance instructor of Balkan dancing.
On a related topic I saw a comment on HuffPo where one commenter said (paraphrase):
“What if we drastically reduced out co2 output as required and temperatures rose?”
May I also add what if we continued co2 ‘business as usual’ and temperatures fell? (which they have started doing recently???).
Good point Jimbo!
I’ll go even further.
Why not have a world-wide effort to INCREASE CO2. Maximum use of fossil fuels, plus burns of yard trimmings, plus burns of all waste paper products. Let’s see if we (mankind) can even increase CO2 in the atmosphere if we try!
Actually, Rich is with NanoRacks now.
Dad & Niven & Flynn owe the Blogfather a great pile of thanks for all the shout-outs, which he does use as a sort of punchline.
Book’s available for purchase for Kindle, Nook, etc.
I decided to have a bit of fun with this. Here’s a 1,000-word short story in a similar vein:
http://www.dehavelle.com/2013/06/greenspace/
The beginning: “In space, no one can hear you’re green. It’s a pity.”
I solemnly promise that it does not contain poetry.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
@Eric — I know all about Stallman and Gnu (Gnu was the OS he was working on which never actually made it). He didn’t break Microsoft’s stranglehold, Linus Torvalds was that man. I will acknowledge that Linux uses a lot of GNU utilities, and the licensing scheme that Stallman was responsible for — which is one of the reasons that Linux doesn’t actually trash Microsoft.
Stallman did a lot of good. He could have done a darn sight more if he had been a bit more pragmatic.
He never did get his printer software …
Niven & Pournelle are fun to read when you are tired and don’t want to make any mental effort, heir novels contain many clever ideas and elicit sympathy in all who are sick of police state, be it rightist or leftist (the same could be said about their feisty predecessor, R. A. Heinlein) — but their novels are much too wordy, hastily written and sketchy, their protagonists and their language are too tied up in the oversexed, drug-poisoned ambiance of 1960s, theirs is not really a food for thought but a chewing gum for passing time. In short, not really a great or noble literature.
If you are looking for a much more developed view of the enforced well-wishing environmentalism and its terrible consequences, with deep observations of human character, very much of current concern, read Jack Vance’s brilliant Cadwal trilogy (Araminta Station, Ecce and Old Earth, Throy). There you find ebullient imagination, enthralling plots, and real-life characters to identify with. When you read Jack Vance, you forget that you are reading — you see and hear everything that is happening in his books. That is a great, noble literature!
Auto said:
June 22, 2013 at 12:18 pm
Didn’t Jethro Tull do ‘Something’s On the Move’ – a track on the album ‘STORMWATCH’ – predicated on the nascent Ice Age back in the latest 1970s.
—————————————————
Yeah I got that “record” when it first came out. It was a global-cooling-themed album.
On the cover there is a picture of a pissed-off polar bear stomping a snow-bound oil refinery.
Many years later, after the global cooling fad was iced and the global warming hoax heated up, I saw Jethro Tull in concert, and between songs, Ian Anderson (the flute wielding leader of Tull), was railing against mankind “polluting” the atmosphere with CO2, thus hastening us to a fiery end.
I love Tull’s music (saw them in concert many times; the first in 1969), and was quite saddened with Anderson being duped first by the cooling fraudsters, then by the warmunists.
Anderson is a musical genius – science, not so much.
*sigh*
What happens when the original calculation of a disaster is incorrect? Ozone comes to mind, considering the status of our ozone hole and the radical steps that were taken to “cure” it.
Thank goodness J.P. and L.N. are still with us, else the haters would disappear their works in the same way they caused Michael Crichton’s heirs and publishers to pull his last decade’s and perhaps (as he said he believed) his most important works (arguing, writing, even testifying in congress against science-ism, with agw as but one example). Good news is (so far) they haven’t forced the Wayback Machine to delete their snapshots of his site. What these radicals have done to Crichton is the digital age equivalent of desecrating a grave.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070827043626/http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20071002031116/www.crichton-official.com/speeches.html
Oho! I’ve not kept up recently. I wish him well, and hope the transition is a good thing for them.
I wish XCOR success also. Hmm… A vague recollection. By any chance, were you at the Playboy Gala when the XCOR test ship was parked in the Mansion’s yard? (And I was a very early subscriber to BYTE, back in the day.)
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
I’m not sure what Niven’s thoughts are these days. “Bowl of Heaven” which Niven co-wrote with Benford takes global warming as canon. Niven certainly used to lash out at the State in the past, but I always thought Pournelle was the more political and right-of-center of the two.
FWIW, the Git believes that The Mote in God’s Eye is the best alien encounter novel of all time. Pournelle certainly challenged me to view the world somewhat differently, though I suspect he resented the fact that I never saw it entirely the way he does. We have had some heated arguments. So it goes…
Keith DeHavelle says:
June 22, 2013 at 5:58 pm
=======
(from your short story)
“…..And I wonder how long I’m going to last.”…
———–
It is a wonder, that some can wonder, while others never got the chance.
Wonder what might have been missed ?
Due to war, famine etc.
It seems like our betters have decided that wonder is overrated and needs to be squelched.
Evolution denies such hubris, so fight we must, it has been built into our genes.
Phillip Peake:
Richard Stallman…seems to be a competent programmer, but on the political side he to way to the left of Lenin.
A puzzling thing to write. Lenin advocated a totalitarian state; Stallman objects to the misuse of state power to create state-enforced monopolies by means of copyright.. A bit eccentric perhaps, but strongly in favor of intellectual freedom.
The growing influence of free software movement is a team effort, as evidenced by the preferred phrase “Gnu-Linux.” As far as pitting one leader against another, that’s too much like the media to suit me. Their stance always seems to be, “Let’s you and him fight.” (So we can cover the story.)
I feel the love.
Wonderful words and text, Fallen Angels was a good read at the time, and I still find it so today. Anything with Niven and Pournelle as authors is worth reading. Even their delinquent romps in Fantasy worlds.
I do, however, disagree with Alexander Feht@6:41: they didn’t always challenge one’s mind in the way that Charles Sheffield could be expected to (R.I.P.), but I found them to be neither formulaic nor predictable, which is rare in authors with that many words to their names. I don’t regret the purchase of any of their books.
(PS to AF – I’ll give Vance a try, see if you can get your hands on a copy of The Ganymede Club by Sheffield, I promise you won’t be disappointed.)
Mr. Flynn (from the old “magister”, a term of respect, I assure you), how does one write a novel with three authors? Is it like mixing concrete, some blocks form the base but sand and cement are needed to tie them together? Are there mutually agreed upon areas of expertise wherein ones words are taken as gospel, and battles over the storyline test between them? Is it all democratically decided?
Thanks for enjoyable read(s). It’s great to find good hard sci fi.
how does one write a novel with three authors?
Superbly.
Philip Peake says:
June 22, 2013 at 3:41 pm
It was far from their best book, and as I remember, treated Richard Stallman as some sort of demi-god. I will give him his due for persistence, and he also seems to be a competent programmer, but on the political side he to way to the left of Lenin.
###
My respect for him as a programmer dropped a great deal after he ruined GNU Make with the Charley Foxtrot of changes he made for the 4.x release. Before that I thought he was merely a passable programmer. Goes the show you that a Marxist world view contaminates everything.