Owing to the increasing scientific consensus that our energy-intensive technological civilization is measurably and in all likelihood irreversibly affecting Earth's climate, consideration of climate change has become virtually inevitable in serious Near Future sf of the twenty-first century.
Traditional sf treatments of the theme sometimes depict climate change as the result of massive Pollution (which see); an interesting example is the spoof television documentary Alternative 3 (1977). Rather more frequently, human complicity is downplayed in favour of natural Disaster: a new Ice Age, for example, in John Christopher's The World in Winter (1962; vt The Long Winter) and again in The Sixth Winter (1979) by John Gribbin and Douglas Orgill. Earth's gravitational capture by a "dark star" leads to the freezing of its atmosphere in Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air" (December 1951 Galaxy). J G Ballard's moody The Drowned World (January 1962 Science Fiction Adventures; exp 1962) – a significant influence on the iconography of later sf climate-change scenarios – ascribes increasing heat, rising sea levels and the drowning of London to persistent solar flares. Other notable works shift the responsibility to Aliens, such as the deep-sea invaders of John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes (1953; rev vt Out of the Deeps 1953), whose ultimate weapon increases sea levels in order to drown tiresome humanity. The Newts of Karel Čapek's earlier War With the Newts (1936; trans 1937) do not raise the sea but use explosives to dismantle and lower the land. Scientific hubris can also lead to climatic doom, as in Piers Anthony's eccentric Rings of Ice (1974), in which vast masses of orbiting ice fragments moved into Earth orbit as solar reflectors (> Power Sources) soon fall to become planet-drowning rain and floods. The 1980s added the plausible speculation that one side effect of World War Three would be Nuclear Winter.
Among the unlikeliest scenarios of human-triggered climatic disaster is Frederik Pohl's "The Snowmen" (December 1959 Galaxy), which incorrectly assumes that widespread use of heat pumps to warm houses will lower outside temperatures and ultimately bring on an artificial ice age; however, the protagonist's wilful indifference to global issues is oddly prophetic of more recent climate-change denial.
Plausible climate change is central in Dakota James's Greenhouse: It Will Happen in 1997 (1984), whose timescale proved overly pessimistic; in George Turner's The Sea and Summer (1987; vt Drowning Towers 1988), with the seas steadily and oppressively rising owing to greenhouse-effect melting of the polar icecaps; and in John Barnes's Mother of Storms (1994), whose eponymous killer storm is made possible by a sudden, human-triggered increase in atmospheric methane levels. Further novels set in futures made bleak by global warming include Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! (1976), Dakota James's Milwaukee the Beautiful (1987), Richard Kadrey's Kamikaze L'Amour: A Novel of the Future (1995), Julie Bertagna's Exodus (2002) and Ray Hammond's Extinction (2005).
Inevitably, some authors have adopted contrarian positions. Environmentalists concerned with climate change are portrayed as villains in Fallen Angels (1991) by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn, where global-warming scenarios are rebutted by the coming of a new ice age. Much the same attitude, bolstered by dubious science and (according to the scientists themselves) misrepresentation of actual work in climate science, pervades Michael Crichton's State of Fear (2004).
A particularly thoughtful sf examination of Near-Future climate change – including some plausible US Politics – is Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capitol trilogy, comprising Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). Crises here include the drowning of Washington DC in book one (foreshadowing the 2005 impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans) and the stalling of the Gulf Stream, which is restarted at heroic cost.
The pervasiveness of the scientific consensus has spread awareness of climate change as a likely near-future default into more mainstream literary circles. Examples include Maggie Gee's The Ice People (1998); T Coraghessan Boyle's A Friend of the Earth (2000), offering a vision of related devastation as early as 2025; and Ian McEwan's Solar (2010). In the Cinema, The Day After Tomorrow (2004) perhaps inevitably hypes up global-warming effects, converting steady decline to a rapid-action Disaster scenario. [DRL]
see also: Andrew Bovell; Pseudoscience; Steve Waters; Weather Control.
further reading
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