Climate Skeptics and Fiction

Why would a climate skeptic be interested in writing fictional stories?

John M. Cape – Author of Poorly Zeroed

Why would a climate skeptic be interested in writing fictional stories?

The simple answer is that they capture our imagination. There’s a real market for dystopian literature. The Alarmists have had great success in this arena.

Nature’s End, a 1986 adventure, featured mankind destroying the atmosphere with poor environmental decisions. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior was a poetic piece that dealt with Monarch butterflies incapable of dealing with global warming. Ian MacEwan’s Solar deals with a bureaucrat tackling global warming.

In the cinema, similar accounts blame mankind for environmental disasters of all sorts. The Mad Max series features a world of crazies burning up the final remnants of fossil fuels. Don’t Look Up ridicules skeptics as unreasonable and unscientific people. The Day After Tomorrow depicts catastrophic climate effects leading to oceanic events that lead to the start of the next glaciation.

Virtually all these tales feature a world where mankind upsets the natural balance and then Mother Nature pulls out a hatchet and takes scalps.

In my mind, the climate skeptic pushes plots where nature throttles our characters with natural processes – or mankind inflicts the damage and nature is “off the hook”. For example, the late Michael Crichton wrote State of Fear, a very commercial offering with more than a million printed copies. It’s about environmentalists inflicting damage that they can blame on manmade influences. It’s refreshing and well-written but follows a path rarely trod.

If you’re a writer and looking for a topic to explore, the climate skeptic genre has not been over-mined at this juncture. Granted, it might be a thankless and unloved project for you, but you’ve just got to take your lumps. Also, note that no movie was ever produced based on this particular Michael Crichton creation – so your effort might never see the Silver Screen.

Perhaps a better question is whether you would be happier in the blogosphere or writing nonfiction tomes. Of course, that depends on your personality.

I imagine that bloggers are generally chained to their computers. They must constantly track whatever issue is hot for the day and work quickly to get their two cents on the wire.

The nonfiction reference works are often proprietary. They have some angle of expertise that is essentially their nook. They tend to stick to their lane. They might be scientists or academics creating course materials. They often seek publicity through emails, YouTube videos, and editorial contributions in social media.

The generalists often try to consolidate lots of different themes for readers. It’s sort of like writing Climate Science for Dummies. The critical thing is to document the sources and try to tell it in a way that’s interesting, yet scientifically accurate. Sometimes those two goals don’t go easily together.

That’s where writing a novel gives you a lot more freedom. Your characters can say anything they want whether it’s consistent with peer written journals or not. You can push the story in any direction you want and make anything happen you want to. If you go overboard, you end up in the fantasy genre. If you get it about right, then you can pitch it as hard science. The net result is that these choices don’t have to limit your narrative, but will work better with certain audiences.

One last thing about a fictional approach. Climate Science is a slow-moving process. It’s part of what makes the science so difficult. Make a prediction and wait many decades to see if it happens. Politicians love these types of decisions. Eventually, it works out or it doesn’t, but they don’t need to sweat the outcome for many years; they’ve already left office before it’s ever tested.

Fiction can speed up the visualization of how science will play out in the distant future. It might reveal the truth, but more importantly, it describes the finer points of why the various possible outcomes matter. Books take a while to read, but they also allow you to get past sound bites and more fully develop multiple aspects of the issues at stake.

As Climate Skeptics, we are at a difficult crossroads.

• Our climate blogs and materials have never been better, yet at the same time, they are not easy to discover for the average citizen.
• Major search engines deliberately steer searches in the direction of .gov and .org sources – which unfortunately are often neither objective nor unbiased.
• The reality is that very few people can make sense of the myriad of climate science information tidbits coursing through the daily news and the Internet.
• Many of our brightest climate skeptic beacons are aging out or have already passed.
• Political parties take remarkably different positions in this country, but few of our leaders can intelligibly explain the finer points.
• There’s a lot of material floating around. Some are gems, but many are red herrings.
• Our media is not shy about reporting that any unusual weather event is caused by increased greenhouse gases. The statistics say otherwise, but they’ll rarely resort to those.
• Our young have been heavily indoctrinated in this arena and aren’t necessarily up to the task of educating themselves on what’s going on.
• Activists are doing stupid, but newsworthy things.

If you care about climate science integrity, now would be a great time to take an interest. You can do it the hard way or perhaps you can simply entertain yourself while doing it. If too many of us fail to do so, we will pay dearly for our ignorance.

John Cape is the Author of UnZeroed? the second offering in his Net Zero Policy Disaster series. Brutal Net Zero policies rapidly rid the United States of fossil fuels. Electricity is sporadic, bandits roam the highways, and major cities are rioting. Newly elected President Jenny Almond never expected to win and now faces an even more desperate situation. China remains the only global superpower. Billionaires, the media, and the global warming faithful join forces to stamp out the nascent recovery by supporting the previous President in her reelection campaign.