This is part 2 of a series on world-building Climate Change scenarios for fiction.
Today we shall do a case study, mostly because I got distracted by oranges.
I got myself in one of those situations where I’m not sure if I’m right, or if the other guy is actually a genius and I just can’t see how.
Here we will analyze a short story: The Hilarious Inside Joke of Our Overwhelming Melancholic Nostalgia - by Francis Bass.
I don’t like picking on people. My apologies to the author. My aim is to be instructive of a broader problem in writing about Climate Change.
This story jumped out to me because of the title. I like that title. In fact, Inside Joke is a reasonable little story. At first nothing seemed particularly amiss to me. Not at first, not until I went… hang on… oranges?
Really? Oranges?
Inside Joke turned out to be a good example of the kind of iffy climate scenario I run across so often. This story stands as a representative here, not something uniquely bad. Also, Francis Bass may well be an orange tree genius, and everything I’m saying could be wrong (this is Jack Waro Writes Bad Ecology, you know).
Inside Joke is a Solarpunk sci-fi story. Here’s the author’s description: “My story is set in a future Florida radically changed by climate change, where “Crimes Against the Future” are punished by implanting memories of the world before, the world lost to rising sea levels and changing ecologies.”
Let’s look at the scenario:
We are in Tallahassee, Florida
Tallahassee is now coastal, meaning a sea level rise of at least 10 meters, possibly >15 meters. The author’s intended level appears to 30 meters, with Tallahassee partly submerged.
No orange tree is alive in the entire Southeast because it is way too hot.
Orange trees only grow in China now. Mongolia is where you get oranges from.
Things have not yet stabilized, suggesting temperatures are still rising.
The turn of the millennium was a little less than a century ago. Meaning this is a scenario for about 2100.
Reading the story I can see this is an unpleasant scenario. People are unhappy. They talk about loss.
But I have little indication of just how bad. Is this a worst case scenario? A best case scenario? People talk about going to the movies. You can get expensive oranges shipped across the world via online delivery. It feels like a moderate scenario. It’s bad, but surely things could be worse. As a reader I can come away thinking this is my future.
But is it? Is this scenario mild, moderate, or extreme? Could it really happen?
When we crunch the numbers the answer gets weird.
Inside Joke is extreme. Very extreme. I mean Hell-world ultra-apocalyptic crazy nightmare fuel extreme.
First, sea levels. The IPCC puts high end estimates for 2100 at about 2 meters. Inside Joke’s minimum of 10 meters means all of Greenland has collapsed and Antarctica is starting to join in. If it’s 30 meters then Antarctica is collapsing. Maybe this could happen. Maybe? But this is a nightmare scenario.
Now, the real action. Orange trees.
Tallahasse has a daily mean temperature of about 20°C. In this scenario no citrus grows here anymore. Not even backyard trees, or abandoned orchards. And, importantly, heat was the problem (if the story’s criminal teenage characters are to be believed).
Got that?
Citrus trees are warmth loving plants. They can be grown in tropical, subtropical, arid and semi-arid areas. Costa Rica can grow orange trees. Saudi Arabia can grow orange trees. Killing orange trees via heat is going to need a lot of heat.
I had some trouble finding just how hot you have to heat up an orange tree to kill it, but it’s at least somewhere in the high 30s to mid 40s Celsius.
One source said citrus trees stop growing at about 45°C (note: this is not the same as dying). Taking this 45°C value, that means killing all the orange trees in Tallahasse by heatstroke might require an average temperature 25°C warmer than today (or equivalent heatwaves).
Remember, in this scenario Mongolia is now presumably like modern day Florida. Modern Mongolia experiences temperatures down to -30°C. Oranges are a warmth loving plant. 25°C of warming is how you get oranges on the frigid Mongolian steppe. And if you want 30 meters of sea level in a century, then yeah. We cooking.
Okay. So are you getting all this?
Let’s call it at 25°C warming by 2100, and still rising.
The RCP 8.5 climate scenario puts Florida at 4.2°C warmer in 2100 (between 2.3°C and 5.4°C). RCP 8.5 is a high-emissions scenario. RCP 8.5 is bad. Really bad.
Inside Joke’s scenario appears to be five times worse than the upper bounds of a pessimistic scenario. Inside Joke is living in Hell-world.
Everyone in this story is dead.
All mammal life in this region will have ceased due to lethal wet bulb temperatures that exceed the thermoregulatory capacity of mammalian physiology. Never mind the oranges. Our characters need to be wearing air conditioned spacesuits. Civilization has collapsed. Most of life on Earth is dying.
Warming of this level might be possible. Maybe? We could probably rationalize this story’s scenario if we tried hard enough too. Maybe the kids are just wrong. It’s also possible Mr Bass knows more about oranges than I do, and they actually die at lower temperatures, and the sea-level went blotto for reasons, and maybe just forget we ever mentioned Mongolia. Maybe.
But if not, Inside Joke’s scenario really isn’t that likely to happen.
A more probable case is that Florida warms by around 2.7°C, an entire order of magnitude less than Hell-world.
2.7°C is a problem. All sorts of havoc gets set off by that kind of change. People need to be prepared for the things that are coming from that change. But chances are, shifting orange juice production to Mongolia just isn’t one of those things.
This accidental off the rails uber-mega-hyper doom is why I am writing a guide to world-building Climate scenarios. A story like this is both profoundly pessimistic and naively optimistic. Kids can still go to the movies in Hell-world. They serve popcorn. The ultra-doom isn’t even necessary for the story, I suspect it was mostly unintended, the result of a Shrug-n-Guess.
Again Inside Joke is merely representative of something I see repeatedly. Again I apologize to the author! It seems people want to write about Climate Change. They know Climate Change is bad. And then... and then... Earth spontaneously combusts.
“Bob! You turned the climate parameters up too high!”
“It wasn’t my fault Pam. I didn’t know what that dial did.”
“Don’t press that button!”
“What button?”
“Damn it Bob. THAT button!”
“Wait? Where did all my orange trees go?”
“Mongolia, Bob, you sent ‘em to Mongolia.”
Let’s take a quick look at what might actually happen to Florida’s orange trees. Some of these things could form the basis of a much more plausible story (in my view).
Heat means fruit quality might decline. Dramatic thrills ensue within the fruit juice world.
An end to frosts is good news for warmth loving citrus. We actually get more orange trees.
An unstable jet stream means Arctic cold snaps might reach this area more often, maybe. Orange trees dislike cold. This would be very damaging. Such cold snaps would likely be a rare event, something people have to deal with occasionally. Such weird backwards unexpected things is how Climate Change actually causes chaos. Plenty of trees would remain alive.
The industry might get scuppered by pests in the near future anyway. Orange trees are dying from disease due to invasive species and monoculture farming. Climate change might facilitate the spread of disease vectors. This cascade of secondary effects is how Climate Change actually wrecks things. It’s seldom ever “just too hot”. Even here, plenty of trees would remain alive.
The biggest problem might be the workers, not the trees. People die of heatstroke much quicker than citrus trees (as far as I can tell). Even at more plausible levels of warming, Florida might have a serious problem here. What good are orange trees if no one can pick the fruit? The trees are alive. The people are gone.
Meanwhile in Mongolia... things have heated up to a warmer version of cold. They could be dealing with droughts, desertification, and even too much snow. On the upside, maybe it will get warm enough to attempt growing an orange tree somewhere. Florida is safe from that competition.
So then, those are things I might base a story on. Those are actual real things real people will really have to think about right now.
Getting these facts right is incredibly difficult.
I have significant self-doubts about the orange tree number crunching in this piece for example. However, sometimes the facts people use fall so far off the mark it’s a sign something went wrong. That’s not a judgement upon the author necessarily, it’s a judgement about the accessibility of information, about society’s commonsense perceptions of what is plausible.
Many people’s intuitive sense of plausibility seems to be calibrated to the ultimate worst case scenario imaginable, plus a little.
Meanwhile, many people out there are severely depressed because they think Climate Change will annihilate everything of value. It won’t. But it will cause a ****load of problems.
Am I being a pedantic asshole here? In this moment, right here, yes.
Is this an unfair reading of Inside Joke? Probably.
But I’m doing this to make a point. Climate Change education matters. People need to understand the facts. Our societies need to make rational decisions about these issues.
Next time we’ll get into the basics of how you can do an actual climate scenario.
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