Claim: You need science fiction to make sense of climate change

“What if the life you bear can’t support you?”
Thats about the only true suggestion there.
Trying to mitigate AGW will most surely make our lives unsupportable – everyone except the Gores, Clintons the Sorros and Princes Phillip and Charles and co etc.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com

An answer to this is to have more skeptical cli-fi / sci-fi. Here is a FREE skeptical novelette first launched here at WUWT in December 2012, which newer visitors may not have come across:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/273983 (various formats).
The work also featured in Judith Curry’s Christmas 2012 cli-fi review.

“You might get rich writing peer reviewed science fiction. If you really want to get rich, you start a green religion” to misquote and misspell EnRon-Hubbard

The problem is that most professional science fiction writers are educated and experienced in the “hard” sciences, and have therefore been skeptical of this preposterous bogosity. The only one (to the best of my knowledge) who’s committed himself to the AGW error – now more properly classified as a criminal fraud – is Ben Bova.
By all means, unleash the membership of SFFWA on this topic. The climate catastrophe clowns are gonna get a dose of the proper medicine for what ails them.

My initial doubts about manmade global warming weren’t scientific, but … I guess you might say social. I am a novelist, and — when I’m not conversant on a particular subject — I’m inclined to depend on my judgement of the character of the actors involved. To some, I know, that may seem like a terrible confession, but others who write for a living will understand. The real question, after all, is “Am I being conned?”
That’s a social question, not a scientific one.
So,lacking other data, I looked at the character of those pushing the idea of Global Warming. They included leftist politicos I knew to be opportunistic liars in other contexts — particularly gun ownership — along with movie stars and other brain-dead celebrities that flock to any cause that attacks private industrial capitalism and individual liberty. Some may criticize me for ad hominem thinking, but when you don’t have reliable scientific information (which I didn’t back then), what else can you rely on but your understanding of the personalities involved?
There was also my experience with previous predictions of disaster…, and of conspiracy theories that seemed to me to have a similar structure. The whole “Paul is dead” thing comes to mind. I know a lot about this because I spent a lot of time in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy “movement”.
At least two shooters, maybe more, Kevin Costner to the contrary, notwithstanding.
I suppose my perception of precisely who stood to benefit from the spreading fear about Global Warming comes into it. Anyone who hates technology, of course, or the present economic system. Also, hordes who will get rich from all of the asinine proposals to reduce Global Warming — anyone who makes solar panels or water heating systems or nasty little cars that go short distances very slowly, carrying almost nothing.
Most persuasive, I suppose, was an anthropological understanding I have (that being my principle field of interest and study in college) of what constitutes a religion. The planet gets transmogrified into a goddess in the minds of the faithful, and all of the entities upon it, the birds and bees and flowers and trees (to quote an old song) — all of the entities, that is, except humans — become sacred objects. Exhaling carbon dioxide becomes Original Sin. Better that a thousand human babies should die than one single snail darter or a furbish lousewort.
In fact, what the Earth needs, they often say, is a good plague.
This religious interpretation helped explain the fact that Global Warming skeptics were increasingly being persecuted. They couldn’t be refuted, so university professors were being denied tenure or actually having it taken away. Government employees concerned with the weather were being reprimanded or threatened with firing. The new media were full of that kind of thing. (If academia — or science itself — ever recover from this debacle, it will be thanks to people who had retired or were just about to and didn’t have anything to lose by telling the truth.)
Of course the “mainstream” media somehow failed to report lunacy like this. And when hundreds of scientists who had literally signed on with the Global Warming hoax managed to learn more, had second or third thoughts, and withdrew their sanction, that didn’t get reported, either, except by those on the net like Matt Drudge who care about the truth.
I guess the final social fact that made me suspicious was the way people — especially legislators — were being pushed, rushed along, encouraged only to believe and act, not to think, “Because it’s too late for that, and even if it weren’t, we can’t risk not doing something.”
There were, by now, lots of physical data to support skepticism. It turns out, for example, that some of the first readings that seemed to indicate increasing world temperatures came from a weather bouy in the Pacific Ocean that was defective and had to be repaired or replaced. My suggestion was that they preserve it as a monument to Al Gore.
Similarly, official weather stations — those little white-painted structures with the louvred box on top—were increasingly being photographed where they had been placed near heat sources like factory smokestacks, the backs of restaurants, and industrial heat exchangers.
I thought for a while that the whole house of cards was going to collapse when it was realized that most of the temperature readings used to support the fraud were taken in “municipal heat islands”, tiny pinpricks on the map where human activity had indeed managed to raise temperatures, usually by pouring concrete and asphalt over everything that didn’t move fast enough to avoid it. My hometown, for example, is at least ten degrees warmer in the summer now than I remember as a boy.
Then came the ice core evidence showing that a relationship did, indeed, exist between changes in the mixture of atmospheric gases and global heat fluctuations, but exactly in reverse of what was expected: there was an average 800-year lag between a rise in temperatures and increases — which followed the increasing temperatures — in carbon dioxide.
I wouldn’t want to leave out the thorough discreditation of the fraudulent “hockey stick” model, a dramatic graphic presentation by academic warmistas which, largely by means of ignoring the established climate history of the past thousand years — including the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age, both of which are exceptionally well-documented by the actual people living in those times — produced the desired results on paper, but bore no resemblance whatever to reality.
Sort of like Keynesian economics.

— L. Neil Smith (science fiction writer), 3 May 2009

My contention is that good science fiction has some basis in reality.
If you go to the science fiction section on Netflix, you will see the same themes repeated over and over again:
Vampires
Zombies
Climate Disasters
Not very much interesting here.