This is part 5 of a series on world-building Climate Change scenarios for fiction.
So far we have only considered one factor on Climate: greenhouse gas emissions.
But other things could happen too. We’ll call these “Curve-balls”. The more wild ones generally don’t turn up in any of the scientific scenarios, but they could belong in a fictional world.
Here’s three big ones to consider:
1) Carbon Dioxide Removal
2) Solar Radiation Management
3) Nuclear Winter
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
Fairly self-explanatory, CDR means removing Carbon Dioxide out of the atmosphere. Planting trees. Injecting stuff into old oil wells. Whatever works.
CDR means we put all our emissions back in the bottle. A sufficiently large amount of CDR ends Climate Change (excluding the wobbles resulting from what we’ve done already). Problem solved.
The critical element here is “sufficiently large”. Think of every car exhaust you’ve ever seen. Every container ship. Every smokestack. All of it. Two hundred years worth of it. Across the entire planet. All we have to do is build that, but in reverse. And we need to put energy into the process instead of getting energy out of it.
Good luck with that.
Any optimistic scenario is going to include some CDR. The more optimistic the more CDR. At some point this becomes unrealistic. More trees than we have land to plant them on. Technologies which do not exist deployed at unimaginable scale. And all of it needs to gets done tomorrow.
So beware: if you want to write an extremely optimistic scenario, then it probably needs to include someone inventing magic.
Another role CDR might play in a fictional scenario is messing up that tidy “Climate Curve” from before. That curve is based on a pulse of emissions which then stop, and are removed at a very slow rate. If someone ever does invent magic, that slow rate could be a lot faster depending on when the magic gets deployed. Optimistic scenarios turn the climate curve into more of a climate speed-bump.
Solar Radiation Management (SRM)
When people talk about Geoengineering this is usually what they mean. Greenhouse gases are one factor that controls the climate. Another factor is Solar Radiation, otherwise known as sunlight.
The idea with SRM is to forget about fixing the greenhouse gases, and instead mess around with the sunlight to cancel out what we did to the gases. About now a lot of people go, “Gee, that sounds like a bad idea.”
And it might be.
The effects will be different than merely limiting Climate Change. Like a medicine it will potentially have troubling side effects distributed unevenly around the world. What those side effects are will depend on what method is used, how long, where, etc.
The most troubling aspect of SRM is Termination Shock. SRM merely masks the problem. If SRM is ever stopped that masked warming comes back fast. This is potentially worse than having done no SRM at all. Faster changes are harder to adapt to. Hence shock.
Some possible fictional scenarios:
Limited SRM is tried, then stopped. Has minor effects.
Large scale SRM is tried while emissions keep rising. SRM is then stopped. Earth experiences catastrophic Termination Shock.
Large scale SRM is tried while emissions cease. SRM is then stopped. Earth experiences a limited Termination Shock (maybe large scale CDR is used too, reducing this shock even more).
Large scale SRM is deployed forever, and ever, and ever. Climate Change is limited, and instead the world is transformed by the side effects of SRM.
We could probably get more sophisticated here, but that’s a rough idea.
Nuclear Winter
Can we put civilization through extreme turmoil without having a nuclear war?
Maybe we can’t.
A common comment I see is, “At least the nuclear winter will fix Climate Change.” Unfortunately this is not the case. Nuclear Winter is Solar Radiation Management gone insane. Here’s some problems:
Vaporizing humanity would release large amounts of Carbon Dioxide.
Annihilating most of life on Earth would release large amounts of Carbon Dioxide (on the upside it might take a while to decompose, seeing as we froze and irradiated all the mushrooms too).
While it is true that vaporizing humanity will reduce any further emissions to near zero, this does nothing to change the Carbon Dioxide already in the atmosphere.
Annihilating most of life on Earth significantly impairs the biosphere’s ability to remove Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere.
Annihilating most of humanity means technology probably won’t save us either. Forget about that Carbon Dioxide Removal program.
Nuclear Winter is temporary. Get ready for one hell of a Termination Shock. Afterwards the planet will return to the underlying warming trend in one giant crazy climate swing so extreme I don’t even want to think about it.
In summary: a Nuclear Winter does not fix Climate Change. No. Just no.
Conclusion:
Many other possible Curve-balls exist (asteroids, volcanoes, nanobot grey goo), but the above seem to me the main Climate Change relevant ones. Not every scenario will include one of these. Settings in the far distant future might not even notice the difference. A violent Termination Shock might eventually get the planet to the same place as a gradual warming anyway. Either way these Curveballs are worth thinking about. The world might yet live through one.
Concluding the basics:
This brings us to the end of the basics for choosing a scenario:
1) The amount of warming
2) The time period
3) The presence of any “Curve-balls”
This should be enough to get a rough idea of what your scenario will look like.
Next we’ll look at how to translate this into something more usable in a story.
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