I’ve been focusing on the climate crisis since around 2015. I first became very concerned about the climate around the turn of the century. Prior to that, I understood that we might have a big problem, on top of the ones we knew about (pollution, plastic garbage, lung disease, etc.) related to our dependency on fossil fuels.
Around that time, a series of experiments retrieved ice cores from Antarctica that documented atmospheric CO2 levels going back before the existence of modern humans. More recently, that has been extend back about 2.7 million years. What these cores proved beyond any reasonable doubt is that human activity in the last 2,500 years, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, has dramatically increased atmospheric CO2.
Taken together with parallel studies that correlate climate with CO2 emissions historically, it became clear that climate change was absolutely real, underway, and serious. How serious we are still trying to understand, but suffice it to say that we are already experiencing climate change in the form of higher temperatures, droughts, fires and floods, with all of their attendant consequences.
My view of climate change is this:
- It is already irreversible in the sense that if we stopped CO2 emissions completely tomorrow, temperatures would continue to rise for the rest of the century anyway. In fact, for probably two centuries, as CO2 remains active for a long time in the atmosphere. Less so for methane, the other prominent greenhouse gas.
- The challenge for humanity is not technological. Give me $50 trillion and 30 years and I could fix the world’s energy supply eliminate the lion’s share of fossil fuel-based emissions. Okay, not me personally, but you get the idea. The challenge is political, it is one of having the will to overcome vested interests and get the job done.
- The climate, per se, will not kill humans off. We could see mass deaths from heat, flooding and fire, no doubt. The bigger threat, to me, is that the disruption of climate change is leading to an ever growing amount of territory being unproductive and uninhabitable, leading to ever growing numbers of climate refugees. And this number will balloon into the hundreds of millions, perhaps even a billion, by 2050. So the challenge will be how to manage that without large-scale warfare, without nuclear weapons, without cyber warfare that destroys the systems we count on (power generation, banking, healthcare, etc.) to live in the modern world.
- The current world order of wealthy capitalist countries plus China and Russia will not survive the climate crisis. Currently, we are in the early stages of a collapse of certain sectors of the insurance industry, as just one example. People in many parts of Florida, as just one case, currently pay more for home insurance than their mortgages. We are not far from the day when either the Federal government or some other body has to prop up the insurance industry or it will fail. And when it fails, as it will eventually under all these pressures, how will banks secure loans on uninsured property?
Sometime in the next 20 years, these sorts of pressures will lead to a series of crises in the political and economic system with entirely unprecedented and unpredictable consequences. My belief is that the latter half of the century will see the collapse of imperial states like the US, Russia and China, and that collapse will be within their borders, not just of their foreign holdings and influence. And the same forces will dramatically reshape Europe and mid-level countries like Brazil, India and so on. - What will the future look like? I believe that in the global south and more generally poor to middle income countries, will emerge from great power control. These states will also fail, for the same reasons as the big powers. Their citizens have long had to be more self reliant than people in the rich countries. And they will now be more free to experiment and develop solutions that make sense for them. So that will happen over the next 150 years.
- In the meantime, I believe that the late 21st century and the early 22nd century could see the beginnings of a Dark Age. Practical skills like making computer chips, manipulating materials a the atomic level, genetic engineering and other kinds of state of the art technology will become rarer. Knowledge of them will fade as their practice fades. Where will it stop? I don’t know. But it’s not hard to imagine a world with a modicum of technology but mostly on a small and local scale. And that could last centuries, depending on how much war ensues, how the climate behaves, and how succesful humans are at reinventing human life in a sustainable fashion.
And ultimately, this is what interests me. How can we live sustainably? Not just in the sense of recyclable processes and so on, but also in the social sense. How can hundreds, maybe thousands, of devolved nations, provinces, cities, go about the business of trade and aid that doesn’t make things worse? That doesn’t trap us in an endless downward spiral of death and decay?
This is what I try and focus on in my climate fiction.
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