Imagining Abrupt Climate Change Terraforming Earth by KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Back to Amazon.com Imagining Abrupt Climate Change Terraforming Earth by KIM STANLEY ROBINSON Somehow my job has made me think about climate change for years now. I spent most of the 1990s writing a trilogy about the human inhabitation of Mars; my characters in those books were part of a huge multi-generational effort to change the climate on Mars, by melting its ice and pumping its frozen atmosphere back into the skies. All this was part of the science fictional enterprise that Jack Williamson named “terraforming” in a story he wrote in the 1930s. Terraforming is climate change with a vengeance, and pretty early in the process of writing my Mars books, while reading about the various environmental problems that were going to be caused by global warming, it occurred to me that we were already terraforming Earth, in the here and now, but by accident, and in ignorance of how it worked or what might happen. All the aspects of terraforming were already present in one form or another: we alter the Earth's surface 1 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” faster than any natural process, we're altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere, making it more of a greenhouse than it was before, and this change in turn is altering the chemical composition of the ocean, which is rapidly becoming more acidic. Most of these processes are destructive to the biological communities already in place, on land and in the seas; and so the first result of our inadvertent terraforming seems likely to be a mass extinction event, an extinction to rival the huge mass extinctions that ended the Cretaceous and the Permian. The human species itself is not likely to escape such an event unscathed; we live on the top of a food chain that might be damaged or might even crash in such an extinction event. This was a dark thought, and as I wrote my Mars novels it was always present in my mind that what I was describing as happening on Mars—the conscious and successful management of an entire planet's biosphere—might serve as a model for what we will have to do on Earth too. In that sense as well as others they were utopian novels, and I believe part of their popularity is due to this fairly obvious analogy to our current situation. Then also, as I went for my runs on the ultra-flat floor of the Central Valley of California, I would occasionally glimpse the Sierra Nevada to the east, white with snow even in summer. One time during these years I read a scientific study that suggested that global warming would impact California more severely than most places, because only a slight rise in average temperatures would change most of the snow falling on the Sierra to rain, so the precipitation would quickly run off, and the mountains would no longer serve as an immense reservoir through the dry summers, and California would become even more of a desert than it already is. People would have to leave—I didn't care about that, because too many people have moved to California anyway and it needs an exodus—but the high Sierra meadows would likely die in the summer droughts. I love those high meadows, and the thought that I might be part of the last generation 2 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” to see them, that the beautiful high Sierra might become like the blasted wastelands of Nevada, filled me with rage and grief. Love, fear, anger, grief: it all seemed to be adding up to a new novel. The novels I write organize and define my mental life, so that I move from one to the next as if living successive reincarnations, each one more all-consuming than the last. So what to write about becomes a very important choice, and long ago I learned it's best to write about what I care for the most at that time, what interests me the most; it makes everything go better. So I choose by the way things feel; it's an emotional, intuitive act. Strong emotions lead me from one story to the next. So as I finished the Mars trilogy, thinking “we're terraforming the Earth already, in ignorance, we're blowing it, we have to learn to think of ourselves as terraforming it on purpose, in order to keep it healthy and save human civilization,” it was a very natural progression then to think: “You should write about this directly.” Finding the Way The first novel to result from that train of thought was Antarctica. I applied to the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program, and was accepted into it, mostly because of the Mars novels. I joined the NSF teams down there for a couple of months of travel in 1995, during which time I mostly stayed with research teams in the field. That was a stunning experience in planetary consciousness; standing on the polar plateau, a ten-thousand foot tall continent of ice, it becomes obvious at the sensory level that you are standing on a big ball in space, rolling around the sun; also, that it is big, but only so big; and that that climate can be very different from what you are used to. All this we know intellectually, but to see it with your own 3 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” eyes is somewhat like the experience of the astronauts when they look down from space, I imagine. Down there in Antarctica, the topic of global warming and its impact on rest of our planet was often on people's minds, and part of their conversation. The team I spent the most time with was trying to prove that Antarctica had been substantially free of ice two to three million years ago, during the Pliocene, a warm period in Earth's history when the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were similar to what we are approaching now. The implication of their work was that the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, a huge mass balanced on land that is actually below sea level, might not be as stable a feature as had been believed. Other teams of scientists had calculated that if the WAIS were to slip off its underwater perch and float away, sea level worldwide would rise five to seven meters higher than it is now. It's hard to imagine that much ice, isn't it? Enough to displace the amount of water necessary to raise the level of the ocean (all the oceans, as they are all one) by up to twenty-five feet? I still find this amazing. And the resulting catastrophe was impressively dire; twenty percent of humanity lives near the world's coasts, and there's not really anywhere else for them to go. The glaciologists at that time did not think it could happen very fast, but they couldn't be sure; there was volcanic activity detectable under the WAIS, and no one knew what might happen for sure. I had already depicted this event happening at the end of Green Mars, and in Blue Mars when my Martians visit Earth, they find a world much changed by the higher sea levels; the catastrophe is part of what allowed my Martians to get away with their revolution, establishing themselves as an independent or at least semi-autonomous world. I had called up one of the researchers involved to ask about the possibility of the WAIS detaching, and how fast it might 4 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” happen, and he had said, “Oh it could happen really fast!” “Good,” I said, thinking only of my Martians. “How fast?” “Like five hundred years.” Uh huh. This is how geologists convey to the rest of us the long time scales of their discipline—which little bit of pride became a problem for them later on, as we shall see. “Shoot,” I said. “I was thinking more like six months.” “Well,” he said, “you're a science fiction writer, you can do anything you want.” I had never heard my profession described in such positive terms before, but I merely said, “I'm not that kind of science fiction writer. I need reasons that make sense.” “Well, postulate a bigger volcanic eruption under the ice sheet. It could happen, and there you would have it.” Which is what I did in the Mars books; and in Antarctica, all this again became part of the subject of the book. The process of global warming was depicted as having started, and the effects in Antarctica included the detaching of the Ross Ice Shelf, prelude to the break-up of the WAIS. Still, that novel's focus remained a short period of time somewhere in our near future (I used to say, the day after tomorrow); and in the end, Antarctica is almost as remote from most people's consciousness as Mars. Also, sticking with the best scientific understanding of the situation at that time, I suggested there that although the long-term situation could be catastrophic in the extreme, it was only happening “fast” in geological time. In individual human time, which also means ordinary novelistic time, it would almost certainly happen so slowly that it was hard to imagine or depict what it would mean. 5 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” Paradigm Shift Abrupt climate change. The first time I ran across this phrase it simply leapt off the page at me.

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