This is part 6 of a series on world-building Climate Change scenarios for fiction.
Recently I tried writing a story set in a future Antarctica.
My character stands on Ross Island and looks out across the Ross Sea, south towards the mainland. They watch boats sail past. Are you shocked?
You should be.
But this probably isn’t all that thrilling.
The truth any good Antarctica nerd knows is this: most of the Ross Sea is currently a gigantic ice shelf. People land aircraft on that ice. Nobody is sailing a boat across that thing. In my story that ice shelf has collapsed.
Shocking!
Here’s another example:
One of my characters was from South Africa, so I done some research to figure out what his home town might be like.
Finding data isn’t hard. The problem is I get a bunch of facts like this: 2% more rainfall in June, 8% increase in rice yields in certain select provinces, and a 5.8% rise in downwelling longwave radiation.
What the hell does any of that mean?
“Gee Bob, how about that 5.8% rise in downwelling longwave radiation!”
“Gosh Pam, didn’t you see? It’s up to 5.9% now. Soon we’ll hit 6%. Frankly I’m not even sure what’ll happen when we hit 6%.”
“Good Lord! 6%? Hold me Bob. I don’t think I can go on!”
We have a problem here.
Most climate statistics are irrelevant and invisible. Most of this stuff just isn’t noticeable on a human scale.
Even including something as enormous as the collapse of an ice shelf can be a non-event, if the reader never knew that ice shelf existed to begin with. And yet, the climate scenario profoundly changes what the setting looks like. Modern day Antarctica is a very different place compared with a future where yachting on the Ross Sea is a pleasant activity.
I suspect this invisibility is part of the motivation for creating pessimistic worlds, even exaggerated hyper-pessimistic worlds. How else will anyone notice?
“Gee Bob, our story needs to warn people of the dangers of a 0.1% increase in downwelling longwave radiation!”
“Gosh Pam, no one’s even going to notice 0.1%. Even if it kills us all. It’s useless. Give it up!”
“What if we made it a 1% rise?”
“Nobody cares Pam! They aint listening!”
“God damn it Bob, we’ll make it a 1000000000000000000% rise in downwelling longwave radiation!”
“But Pam! Wouldn’t that melt the surface of the Earth?”
“Damn right. And people will pay attention too!”
Exaggeration is one way out of this problem. But it’s not the only approach, nor it is necessarily a good idea. Here’s some other approaches I’ve found useful for communicating climate information, plus some related issues worth noting.
Historical Signposts
At the same time as I was writing about the Ross Sea, I was also generating ideas for a story set in a future Amazonia.
The average reader has a very strong image of the Amazon rain-forest. My future Amazonia would be a starkly different place: a tropical savannah so hot and humid mammals cannot survive there.
My characters would need to walk around in some kind of coolant space suit to prevent death by heatstroke. I expect most readers will notice that change. No need to exaggerate, the reality is bad enough.
In contrast, the problem with my Ross Sea setting is that the average reader has never heard of the Ross Sea.
The reader has no comparison, so I needed to give them one. Here and there I decided to drop little “Historical Signposts”. Clues about how life used to be. Old photos, a museum, casual conversations about the past. Small things woven into the background. Once the reader knows that polar explorers once froze to death where children now play, they’ve received a pretty good point of comparison.
The Biggest Human-relevant Change
I’m still not entirely sure what Downwelling Longwave Radiation actually is (and I did look it up). In contrast I do know that if Amazonia experiences persistent lethal wet bulb temperatures, then that fact will dominate the story.
Many, many other climatic changes might have happened too. But those changes are side issues compared with my characters literally dying if they step outside. That’s a major plot point in every scene.
In Antarctica things were more subtle. The biggest change is the fact that anyone lives there at all.
Again, many other changes will have happened: krill populations, wind patterns, ocean currents. But the biggest human relevant change is habitability – Antarctica as the new frontier. When properly signposted this change is so visibly enormous that once again exaggeration feels unnecessary. At least to me.
Climate Change feels subtle and invisible not because it is small, but because it is confusing.
The subject is full of noise. Focusing the attention down eliminates much of that noise. For any setting maybe only one or two climate factors will actually matter. Most of the other stuff just isn’t that important.
This is where a fictional scenario differs from a scientific scenario. Fictional world-building serves to tell a story. Stories are about people: struggling, eating, loving, dying. Only some climate factors intersect in a humanly noticeable way with those activities. Everything else is background noise, merely of academic interest.
Drama vs Reality
Every fiction stretches reality to fit the needs of the story. Programmers cannot “hack the system” by randomly pushing keys. Faster than light travel is not possible, not even if you reroute power to the secondary phase inverters.
But showing the actual reality of these things can destroy the story.
“We’ve finally received the DNA results from that Johnson kid murder case we had five years ago.”
“You mean the administrative backlog has cleared? What were the results?”
“Inconclusive.”
“Ha! Just as I suspected. Nothing meaningful has changed.”
Climate stories can do this too.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 includes a sea level rise scenario which strikes me as being on the high end. My guess is that he done this deliberately, pulled closer to the present what in reality is likely to take longer. It helps the story. It makes things visible.
Unfortunately pushing the truth to make it more dramatically viable tends to make Climate Change stories more pessimistic. Drama requires visibility. We’re back to exaggerating so people notice.
The great thing about New York 2140 is that despite being a pessimistic scenario it does remain plausible, though extreme. Indeed, in the long run we end up in the same place anyway. It’s just a question of timing. This is profoundly different than, say, Waterworld which drowns all Earth under seven kilometers of water for dramatic effect.
Communicating World-building via Idiots
In part 2 I attempted to pedantically crucify a short story about orange trees. That was a harsh reading of the story.
A more generous reading is that the characters are idiots. They were criminal teenagers after all.
Every moment of making a world-building fact visible has a different level of evidential strength. A character walking through flooded houses is very solid and strong. A photograph of the flooded house is weaker. Maybe it’s a fake.
Some evidence is inherently dubious.
Such as idiots.
Many characters in a story might be idiots. They get facts wrong, they simplify, they exaggerate. At the same time, characters are a major vehicle for making world-building facts visible.
If a character tells me that people live on the Moon, then I take it as truth that – in this world – people do live on the Moon. I assume the character is an expert on their reality. Now, if I am told the character has schizophrenia then this is different. But unless I am told, how do I know?
In the orange tree story the characters told us that oranges come from Mongolia while all the oranges in Florida died from heat. If this is true then they live in Hell-world. But it could be bullshit. Maybe those kids are terrible at geography?
But the story never gives me reason to doubt these kids, no alternative perspective. Without that push-back, I can only assume that Mongolia is now like Florida, which means they all live in Hell-world.
This is something of a dilemma. Truth to character means letting the character talk nonsense. Truth to reality requires communicating the facts accurately.
Conclusion:
If the climate scenario is going to play much role in a story then it needs to be visible. In a given setting Climate Change will likely cause a handful of shifts that are big enough and noticeable enough to focus on. They might need slight bending to get them in, but exaggeration seems unnecessary even ethically dubious. In my view Climate Change is too serious a topic to twist it too far.
Now, figuring out which of those climate factors matter is a difficult task. Thankfully there is one gigantic shortcut available. More on that next time.
Return to menu.