Guest humor by David Middleton
When I saw this on Real Clear Energy this morning, I just had to click the link…
Science Fiction Helps Understand Climate Change
Why… Of course it does. Here’s an “oldie, but a goody”…
The First International School on Climate System And Climate Chang (ISCS)
Author：Yan Zhang,Yiming Liu 2004-11-19
The First International School on Climate System And Climate Chang (ISCS), sponsored by China Meteorological Administration (CMA) and co-sponsored by the Office of IPCC Working Group I, State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs and National Natural Science Foundation of China, was held in CMA from August 23 to September 1, 2004. It received extensive attention from the meteorological departments and relevant scientific research institutions. More than 16o students including young researchers, doctoral candidates and master degree candidates specialized in climate system and climate change research took part in the study. They are from over 40 organizations, such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education as well as CMA National Climate Centre, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences (CAMS) and eight meteorological institutes, National Satellite Meteorological Centre, seven Regional Meteorological Centres, provincial meteorological bureaus, etc.
Fifteen world famous experts from countries including France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, U.S.A., Canada and China, were invited to serve as the lecturers of ISCS. They were: Dr. Jean Jouzel from France, Vice-Chairman of IPCC Working Group I; Dr. Robert Delmas from France, Director of the Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysics and Environment; Dr. Ulrich Cubasch from the Meteorological Institute in Free University Berlin; Dr. In-Sik Kang, Director of the Climate Environment System Research Center of Seoul National University; Dr. Akio Kitoh, Director of the Climate Research Division of the Meteorological Research Institute in Japan Meteorological Agency; Dr. John Ogren and Dr. Zhanqing Li from U.S.A; Dr. Daniel Rosenfeld from Israel; Dr. Chung-Kyu Park and Dr. Won-Tae Yun from Korean Meteorological Agency; as well as some renowned scientists in China, namely, Prof. Ding Yihui, Dr. Dong WenJie, Prof. Lin Er’Da , Prof. Pan Jiahua, Mr. Chen ZhenLin.
[…]
This session of School includes 45 teaching hours altogether and most of them were conducted in English. The wonderful lectures given by Chinese and foreign experts attracted great interest of the participants. During the session, the students were also invited to watch the American scientific film “the Day After Tomorrow”, which demonstrated “the breath-taking catastrophe brought to mankind by climate change”, and visit the GAW station in Shangdianzi, Miyun District, Beijing and the Great Walls in Simatai and Gubeikou.
[…]
I found this 14 years ago… I am shocked that it’s still on the Internet. Just in case it gets vanished, I took a couple of screenshots:
During the session, the students were also invited to watch the American scientific film “the Day After Tomorrow”, which demonstrated “the breath-taking catastrophe brought to mankind by climate change”…
I couldn’t make this kind of schist up if I was trying.
Can imagined futures of drowned cities and solar utopias help us grasp the complexity of climate change? Diego Arguedas Ortiz takes a look.
By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
15 January 2019It’s the year 2140 and two kids ride their skimboards in the heart of Manhattan, near the point where Sixth Avenue meets Broadway. If you are familiar with this junction you would know it is far from the US’ current coastline. But in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140, Manhattan is flooded after unabated climate change causes the sea level to rise by 50ft (15.25m). The amphibian city is now a SuperVenice, a grid of canals populated by vaporettos where characters must learn how to deal with a world both familiar and unrecognisable to us. Mid-Manhattan skimboading is all too possible in this future.
Robinson’s 2017 climate-fiction novel belongs to a growing cadre of works about drowned nations, wind farm utopias or scarred metropolises decades into the future. As diplomats draft the rulebook for the global response to the climate crisis and engineers race to produce better solar panels, writers have found their role, too: telling what Robinson calls “the story of the next century”. In doing that, they might be helping readers across the world comprehend the situation in which we currently find ourselves.
[…]
In all of my years in the oil & gas business (~38), we’ve never viewed this as a training device…
“We bring in the world’s best deep core driller…”
After discovering that an asteroid the size of Texas is going to impact Earth in less than a month, N.A.S.A. recruits a misfit team of deep core drillers to save the planet.
—Devin Rush
It is just another day at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a few astronauts were repairing a satellite until, out of nowhere, a series of asteroids came crashing into the shuttle, destroying it. These asteroids also decimated New York soon thereafter. Then, NASA discovered that there is an asteroid roughly the size of Texas heading towards the Earth, and when it does hit the Earth, the planet itself and all of its inhabitants will be obliterated, worse, the asteroid will hit the Earth in 18 days. Unfortunately, NASA’s plans to destroy the asteroid are irrelevant. That is when the U.S. military decides to use a nuclear warhead to blow the asteroid to pieces. Then, scientists decide to blow the asteroid with the warhead inside the asteroid itself. The only man to do it, is an oil driller named Harry Stamper and his group of misfit drillers and geologists. As he and his drill team prepare for space excavation, the asteroid is still heading towards the Earth. When the crew are launched into outer space, they are determined to destroy this asteroid.
—John Wiggins
Although, I do know one petroleum geologist who did become an astronaut.
Disclaimer: I actually love the movies, The Day After Tomorrow and Armageddon… Bad science fiction is some of the best entertainment there is… 2012 is one of my favorites… particularly when Los Angeles falls into the Pacific Ocean and Yellowstone blows up Woody Harrelson!
So… There you have it. Climate science is the only science best understood through the lens of science fiction!
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I’m rather fond of movies with giant drooling ants and hunky guys who shoot them… but that’s just me.
I prefer the good looking young blonde, who’s only purpose is to scream theatrically at the proper point… but that’s just me.
I was turned on to science fiction by a couple of my former students and as a result have read hundreds of science fiction books. One of the things that I enjoy most is the authors extrapolation of currently proposed alterations to our societies, economies, medical treatments, the physical sciences, military capabilities and other areas. They often cause me to stop and consider how sometimes seemingly small changes can be amplified through time. Some of the earlier books have turned out to seem almost prophetic. I have used these books as an escape from reality yet sometimes they have resulted in bringing me back to confront current issues. It is amazing how sometimes impossible occurrences can be made to sound so rational and believable. To think that an author’s skill in weaving a story and combining facts with the impossible could somehow result in people buying into a theory which is ludicrous in the extreme causes me to realize just how ignorant and gullible my fellow humans can be.
You must admit “Rossum’s Universal Robots” – broadcast as RUR – from the original 1920 play as being relevant to current views about what happens when robots take over all the menial jobs and then take over all the middle management jobs and leave millions of people with nothing to do and no reason to exist – except as cannon fodder when they revolt against the Deep State.
Science fiction is always ahead of science. Just think Jules Verne – “A voyage to the moon and around it” and H G Wells. But the latter was a convinced socialist and anti Christian, just like many of the current politicians. Also as shown in the “Murdoch Mysteries” – a skirt chaser. Comment in the Encyclopaedia Britannica – “None of his contemporaries did more to encourage revolt against Christian tenets and accepted codes of behaviour, especially as regards sex, in which, both in his books and in his personal life, he was a persistent advocate of an almost complete freedom.” – Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/H-G-Wells .
I don’t really subscribe to the idea that Wells was this massive visionary. Time Travel? Still to be commercially viable. Invisibility? Think they are waiting on cold fusion before they start on that one. Modern Utopias? I am sure they will get it right ONE day.
It does seem that he at least followed developments. He became away of the pedrail system being developed by Diplock and used the ideas in his short ‘The Land Ironclads’ and in The War in the Air he has gyroscoped monorails (which do actually work) replace all conventional railways and 4 wheeled cars.
Problem here is he backed evolutionary dead ends and ignored the growth industries. Diplock abandoned pedrails not that long after and despite working, the advantages of gyro stabilised rail were never that impressive. Wells also seemed to have a habit of willing anything he didn’t like out of existence. In Land Ironclads his machines succeeded because artillery couldn’t hit lumbering 100 foot long targets and were quickly overrun. In War in the Air conventional fixed wing aircraft were a technical dead end that everyone soon gave up on – although it may be argued that he did this it help drive his overall plot.
To be honest I am never completely sure what to think of Wells’ fiction. I struggle a bit with his style. Burrows and Conan Doyle I have never really had a problem with style wise, so it can’t just be ‘the era’. The quality and quantity of his works definitely deserve him a place in writing history and his influence is widespread. I think I enjoy the fact he did write and did have a big influence more than the fact I actually enjoy reading him. Not sure if that makes sense, but like I said, I struggle to define to myself what he and his books means to me.
Just don’t think he was the amazing future visionary everyone wants him to be.
I think his stories displayed a common theme: unintended consequences. Especially “The Food of the Gods”.
SR
After 40+ years in the petroleum service industry (GSI, 4; Gearhart Industries, 12; Halliburton Services, 11; Computalog/Precision Energy Services/Weatherford, 15) I was chosen to rep/assist Sandia Labs (1985) in the area of high pressure (20+ Kpsi)/high temp (400+*F) seals for geothermal down hole research. Most of the wells serviced were 400+*F @15,000 to 20,000 feet in depth. Dewar Flask and engineered polymer o-rings with PEEK backups would allow for several hours of down hole ops with wireline/slick line logging tools. At times blackened stainless/high nickel alloy outer pressure housings were observed when high % of H2S was incurred at elevated pressures and temps.
With todays technology, geothermal wells are ripe for HPHT steam generation for turbines, mimicking coal, oil and gas fired steam without the pesky CO2 and other gasses in the emissions. It’s time to consider these technologies as the best viable option for “FREE GREEN” low cost energy. Regards, George Reagan, retired engineer, Fort Worth, TX.