Imagining Abrupt Climate Change Terraforming Earth by KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

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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.

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Paradigm Shift

Abrupt climate change. The first time I ran across this phrase it simply leapt off the page at me. What did it mean? How could it be explained?

Well, it meant what it said; which was an accomplishment in itself, given the habit I have described that geologists had developed, of regularly abusing terms like “fast,” “quick,” “rapid” and the like, applying these words to events that sometimes took up a million years. Sure, from their perspective as geologists a million years was fast—very impressive to the rest of us, and no doubt this amused them as a group; but with the arrival of this new data they found themselves in the position of Peter after he had cried wolf too many times. No one was going to understand that this time they meant really, really, really fast, no matter how many “reallys” they put in front of it.

So the world “abrupt” was both accurate (by their timescales anyway) and necessary to convey the news: they had found incontrovertible evidence showing that in the past, and not all that long ago, the world's climate sometimes had changed from one global pattern to another, in periods of time as short as three years, maybe even one year. It had really happened; and the scientists who had discovered traces of these events had therefore already begun the process of constructing an explanation for them.

So this was abrupt climate change, a new field in paleoclimatology, and in present-day climatology too. The new field is about five years old; the first book on the subject, called Abrupt

Climate Change and written by a committee of the relevant scientists for the National Research

Council, appeared in 2002. The chair of the committee was Richard B. Alley, a researcher involved with the Greenland ice core project who has been a leader in defining the new field.

As the introduction to this book says, “Recognizing the potential for abrupt changes in

6 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” climate has constituted a paradigm shift for the research community.” That in itself makes it interesting to a science fiction writer; paradigm shifts are exciting moments in science's ongoing project of self-improvement, making itself more accurately mapped to reality as it is discovered and teased out; this process of continual recalibration and improvement is one of the most admirable parts of science, which among other things is a most powerful and utopian set of mental habits; an attitude toward reality that I have no hesitation in labeling a kind of worship or devotion. And in this ongoing communal act of devotion, paradigm shifts are very good at revealing how science is conducted, in part because each one represents a little (or big) crisis of understanding.

As Thomas Kuhn described the process in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions, workers in the various branches of science build over time an interconnected construct of concepts and beliefs that allow them to interpret the data from their experiments, and fit them into a larger picture of the world that makes the best sense of the evidence at hand. What is hoped for is a picture that, if anyone else were to question it, and follow the train of reasoning and all the evidence used to support it, they too would agree with it. This is one of the ways science is interestingly utopian; it attempts to say things that everyone looking at the same evidence would agree to.

So, using this paradigm, always admitted to be a work in progress, scientists then conduct what Kuhn calls “normal science,” elucidating further aspects of reality by using the paradigm to structure their questions and their answers. Sometimes paradigms are useful for centuries; other times, for shorter periods. Then it often happens that scientists in the course of doing “normal science” begin to get evidence from the field that cannot be explained within the paradigm that has been established. At first such “anomalies” are regarded as suspect in themselves, precisely

7 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” because they don't fit the paradigm. They're oddities, and something might be wrong with them as such. Thus they are ignored, or tossed aside, or viewed with suspicion, or in some other way bracketed off. Eventually, if enough of them pile up, and they seem similar in kind, or otherwise solid as observations, attempts might be made to explain them within the old paradigm, by tweaking or re-interpreting the paradigm itself, without actually throwing the paradigm out entirely.

For instance, when it was found that Newtonian laws of gravitation could not account for the speed of Mercury, which was moving a tiny bit faster than it ought to have been, even though

Newton's laws accounted for all the other planets extremely well, at first some astronomers suggested there might be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, too close to the Sun for us to see. They even gave this potential planet a name, Vulcan; but they couldn't see it, and calculations revealed that this hypothetical Vulcan still would not explain the discrepancy in Mercury's motion.

The discrepancy remained an anomaly, and was real enough and serious enough to cast the whole

Newtonian paradigm into doubt among the small group of people who worried about it and wondered what could be causing it.

It was Einstein who then proposed that Mercury moved differently than predicted because spacetime itself curved around masses, and near the huge mass of the Sun the effect was large enough to be noticeable.

Whoah! This was a rather mind-bogglingly profound explanation for a little orbital discrepancy in Mercury; but Einstein also made a new prediction and suggested an experiment; if his explanation were correct, then light too would bend in the gravity well around the sun, and so the light of a star would appear from behind the sun a little bit before the astronomical tables said that it should. The proposed experiment presented some observational difficulties, but a few years

8 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” later it was accomplished during a total eclipse of the sun, and the light of a certain star appeared before it ought to have by just the degree Einstein had predicted. And so Einstein's concepts concerning spacetime began to be accepted and elaborated, eventually forming a big part of the paradigm known as the “standard model,” within which new kinds of “normal science” in physics and astronomy could be done.

That was one of the most famous and important paradigm shifts in the history of science.

This paradigm shift in climatology we are talking about now, an acceptance of the reality of abrupt climate change, is not as profound a shift as that one, in terms of fundamental understanding of how the universe works. But in practical terms, meaning its eventual implications for humanity, it might be as important as any paradigm shift science has ever gone through; because up until now, we have all been operating within a paradigm that said that the

Earth's climate was simply too big to change very fast; it was understood as essentially a geological or even astronomical phenomenon, and therefore, by definition, rather slow by human terms—in the realm where “really fast” meant a million years. Of course there were the occasional volcano eruptions or meteor strikes, and these happened quickly and sometimes had big effects on climate, but the tendency was to read these as perturbations in a system that was too big and robust to be strongly affected by them. “Real” climate change was slow by normal human standards.

This view, by the way, was in keeping with a larger and older paradigm called gradualism, the result of a dramatic and controversial paradigm shift of its own from the nineteenth century, one that is still a contested part of our culture wars, having to do with the birth of geology as a field, and its discovery of the immense age of the Earth. Before that, Earth's history tended to be explained in a kind of Biblical paradigm, in which the Earth was understood to be several

9 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” thousand years old, because of genealogies in the Bible, so that landscape features tended to be explained by events like Noah's flood. This kind of “catastrophism” paradigm was what led

Josiah Whitney to maintain that Yosemite Valley must have been formed by a cataclysmic earthquake, for instance; there simply hadn't been time for water and ice to have carved something as hard as granite. It was John Muir who made the gradualist argument for glacial action over millions of years; and the eventual acceptance of his explanation was part of the general shift to gradualist explanations for Earth's landforms, which also meant there was another time for evolution to have taken place. Gradualism also led by extension to thinking that the various climate regimes of the past had also come about fairly gradually.

But there were always anomalies to this kind of thinking about climate; evidence in the paleoclimactic record, that sometimes shifts happened much more quickly than seemed likely or explicable. It was, however, fairly easy (and sensible) to bracket most of these anomalies, because most of the kinds of evidence used to construct the history of Earth's climates is very indirect, and subject to damage or distortion. It made sense to put the various anomalies aside as representing some kind of problem with the data, or with the interpretation offered.

My impression is that it was the Greenland ice coring project that gave researchers the solid and undeniable anomaly that served as the “paradigm buster” (my term). That project was completed during the 1990s, and the ice cores that came from those drill sites gave researchers a very substantial and uninterrupted record of the weather of the past hundred thousand years or so, including evidence of past temperatures, snowfall amounts, air chemistry, dust content, even pollen types. All this data confirmed what partial evidence found elsewhere had already suggested about a period called the Younger Dryas: as the world was warming up from the last ice age, it had plunged back into Ice Age-like conditions for a couple of thousand years, then

10 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” bounced back out; and the plunge back into the cold climate had taken only three years.

This was abrupt climate change.

How Could It Happen?

That a physical system as big as the Earth's climate could change so fast was remarkable, but the evidence for it is there, and the explanations were quick to follow; the new paradigm's conceptual field was established by the researchers in very short order. This happened because the researchers were working in a context of new developments in climatology more generally, including the newish meteor explanation for the KT boundary ending the Cretaceous, chaos theory in meteorology, supercomputers and their new speed in simulating more sophisticated modeling, and new information in the paleo-record about what had happened at the end of the last

Ice Age some fifteen thousand years ago, coming from all over the Earth. Taken with older concepts, like Euler's work on nonlinear dynamics, there was a suite of concepts and methods that gave the researchers in this new field the tools they needed to explain the data they had. Climate now was understood to be a complex interrelation of physical systems that resulted in semi-stable regimes; change in these regimes was usually slow, but sometimes small and slow changes pushed a regime over a threshold, in the same way that slow and steady pressure on a light switch eventually snaps the switch from one position to another. Thus a big slow system could still exhibit occasional rapid major changes, moving over a tipping point from one regime to another.

This model was supported by the evidence that was now there at hand; and so we now have a modified model of how climate works, less than a decade old and still being worked on and argued over.

But what was the specific mechanism that had caused the plunge into the Younger Dryas?

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The researchers suggested that it had been caused by a kind of stall in the northward course of the

Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is only part of a much larger world current, and while it runs north up the surface of the Atlantic, once the water in it chills enough, it sinks down to the seafloor and runs south. Thus the Atlantic is a kind of giant conveyor belt of water, and the Gulf Stream on the surface carries a huge amount of heat much farther north than it would otherwise go if the current were not running.

All that water sinks in the far north Atlantic, however, only if it is salty enough; fresh water, being less dense than salt, will not sink well in a generally more salty matrix. If a big infusion of fresh water were to arrive in the north Atlantic all at once, the whole conveyor belt would stall, and the Gulf Stream's warm water would have nowhere to go; it would then cool and sink much further south.

What could introduce lots of fresh water to the far north Atlantic all at once? Well, at the end of the last Ice Age an ice sheet covered much of the upper half of the Northern Hemisphere, especially over North America. As the climate slowly warmed, enormous pools of melted ice were gathering on top of the remaining ice cap, and from time to time these fresh water lakes would break through the melting ice dams holding them in place, and then they would drain down into the oceans in stupendous outburst floods. Lake Missoula covered most of Montana, for instance, and drained down the Columbia River basin more than once, leaving the scablands of eastern Washington as evidence of the outbursts' size and destructive power. Other outburst floods at the end of the Ice Age have been identified as running down the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Mississippi basins. And one of the biggest Ice Age lakes of all, Lake Agassiz, covering much of the northern Rockies, was so big that research indicates it first drained down the Mississippi, but then broke through to the north and drained down the Mackenzie River into the Arctic. And

12 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” at the time this happened, the Bering Straight was still covered by ice sheets or was above sea level entirely, so that all that fresh water pouring into the Arctic Ocean left it by the only exit there was—the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Norway—right where the Gulf Stream now makes it descent. Apparently this stalled the Gulf Stream's descent, and thus plunged the northern hemisphere abruptly into a much colder climate.

Interesting, eh?

Could Human-induced Global Warming Stall the Gulf Stream?

This was the obvious next question for researchers studying the matter to ask, and naturally, asking it has gotten them into hot water (so to speak). The question ties abrupt climate change to the issue of global warming—thus to human behavior—thus to our political decision- making—and the way we live our lives—in other words, to everything else. Sudden the geological timescales become individual timescales; and so, novelistic timescales.

To my way of thinking, it's an obvious story to tell.

The actual answer to the question is still being worked on by researchers. Global warming generally seems to have been thinning the Arctic Ocean's cover of sea ice. That ice is of course fresh water, and if it were to break up into individual icebergs and float south on the currents, a good part of its mass might melt very near where the Gulf Stream makes its descents (the stream breaks up in the far north into several gyres, but all are affected by Arctic Ocean water).

Meanwhile, Greenland's ice cap is melting faster every year, and the fresh water from that ice pours down into the Atlantic on both sides of it.

Researchers have calculated that a significant percentage of the amount of fresh water needed to stall the Gulf Stream has already been released to the North Atlantic in the last thirty

13 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” years. If the flow of fresh water continues or increases, one calculation has the probability of crossing that threshold into a stall at fifty percent, after which we would be cast into the “Youngest

Dryas” (my term).

Is That the Only Abrupt Climate Change that Humans Could Trigger?

No. Let's go back to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is perched on an underwater sea mount, and there is volcanic activity underneath it. The break-up of the Larsen Ice Sheet, on the

Antarctic Peninsula, has given researchers a great deal of data on ice shelf break-ups, and they have learned that it is not a matter of the whole mass of ice melting. Crevasses form and are filled with water, and these apparently serve as wedges, melting downward, and the tides are constantly flexing the ice; so the entire system, though still poorly understood, is apparently much more fragile than anyone had thought.

So my six months for a WAIS break-up may not be as much science fiction as it looked when I wrote Green Mars; and global warming, which is now almost universally acknowledged to be happening because of humanity's burning of fossil fuels to power our civilization, is no longer just a matter of warming up the average temperates by a few degrees over the next century or four. That would have been bad enough; but it was always possible for those of us alive today to continue living the way we do, assuming that our descendants would be clever and figure something out when they had to. That was the prevailing attitude, and quite understandable, really; every generation has its hands full with the immediate problems of its time.

But now it looks different. Now it looks like because of the way we live, in the industrialized countries and especially the United States, things could change fast; they could change catastrophically. The evidence is there is the record, and in the changes we are seeing

14 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” now; and for whatever reason, the polar regions are reacting much faster to global warming than anywhere else. And the polar regions are the homes of the most pressing dangers.

Or maybe not; it could be that abrupt change could affect the El Nino/Southern Oscillation system in the tropics; or the monsoon system that support and feed so many people, and seem tied to the ENSO system as well. All the climate of the world is connected; so danger locally is danger everywhere. If the Gulf Stream stalls, it puts Europe especially in a cold dry climate, and the eastern half of North America; and right now Europe, with almost seven hundred million people, grows enough food to feed itself. If much of the WAIS comes off and floats, coastlines everywhere flood; low-lying countries are devastated; some twenty percent of humanity might be affected; and there is nowhere else for them to move. If the ocean grows so acidic that coral reefs die and the little creatures at the bottom of the ocean food chain are harmed. . . .

And so on. You get the picture; this is crucial stuff for the future of human civilization; or in other words, a good topic for a science fiction novel!

Another trilogy

So, now I am two-thirds of the way through a trilogy describing an abrupt climate change, happening in the near future. Forty Signs of Rain described the situation as we approached it, from the viewpoint of a cast of characters living in Washington D.C. Fifty Degrees Below continues the story into the years of the abrupt change itself. The last book will go beyond that, to some kind of conclusion—open-ended to an extent, because that's the history is, but with some conclusions too, because that's how novels are shaped, and part of what makes them satisfactory as art.

Why another trilogy? Well, mainly, I suppose, because it's a long a complicated story, and

15 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change”

I like those. Trilogies are often just Very Long Novels, like Victorian triple-deckers; George

Eliot's Middlemarch was first published in multiple volumes, but no one calls it a trilogy now.

Some stories just need lots of pages to tell right. I wanted to describe what such the experience of abrupt climate change would feel like, from the point of view of a number of individuals. I wanted also to describe how science works in the real world, today, and how it relates to the worlds of power politics, capital, and daily life. I wanted to explore some ideas about how certain Buddhist concepts might apply to the situation, and help us think our way through it. Because in the end this environmental crisis, and the possibility of catastrophic abrupt climate change, is being brought on because of the way we live now; and the way we live is formed by the values we share. The culture of consumption that has we Americans, at five percent of the world's population, burning twenty-five percent of the world's fossil fuel burnt every year, is part of a culture of denial of reality. And the interesting thing is that this excessive consumption is not actually making us any happier or healthier; rather the reverse. So it seems to me there are things we can learn from the other cultures of the world, and I admire Buddhism's attitude to many of these issues. I think they can help us to invent a better way of life. What's interesting to contemplate is the idea of a way of life that is both more satisfying—more fun— while also being better for the future of the planet and its inhabitants; so that right action is not a matter of Puritan denial, but increased joy. Certain Buddhist concepts are very helpful here.

So that is part of the mix; and so is my experience with the National Science Foundation.

Since they sent me to Antarctica, I have had other interactions with them, and visited their headquarters in Arlington Virginia many times; and I have come to admire them as an institution, and an example of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It struck me that science fiction ought to sometimes be about science as it is practiced today, and that NSF should

16 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change” therefore be the hero or the protagonist of a science fiction novel. This has allowed me to express my tremendous admiration for science as a way of thought (kind of Buddhist already) and a form of social organization, a utopian political system ready and waiting to be used by the larger political choices we make as well.

Of course valorizing science and the NSF as one of its central institutions brings certain comic aspects to the fore, because for a world-saving hero, NSF is a fairly small, with a limited assignment in the federal array of bureaucracies; but as we have learned from climatology, sometimes small actions can have big effects, and the position of the NSF, at the intersection of science and government, seemed to me strategically full of potential. It made for a good story possibility.

Actually a lot of this story, as it came to me, struck me as comic. Global catastrophe as comic; maybe this means I have a sick sense of humor. But the discrepancy between what we say and what we do, what we intend and what we achieve, is always partly comic; it may be black comedy, but it's still funny (think Triplets of Belleville).

So I have decided to write about characters who are scientists, working for the U.S. government (thus for all of us): a domestic comedy about global catastrophe—and how we might avoid it, or even counter it once it starts. I've taken this comic approach because ultimately I want the novel to be a utopian novel, despite the dangers outlined. It has occurred to me more than once that the imminent possibility of an environmental disaster—indeed the sheer fact that we are already entering one, either abrupt or not—might force us to change our ways sooner rather than later, and that this would be a very good thing for our children and our children's children, and all the generations to come. Thus, depending on how we react to it, the possibility of abrupt climate change could be a good thing.

17 Kim Stanley Robinson “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change”

Naturally if we ignore it and deny it and go on as we have, it could be disastrous—it would be the kind of Gotterdamerung response that Hitler exhibited in his last days, the insanely egotistical attitude that if I'm going down the whole world has to go too. All this Rapture talk we hear from parts of our culture is really just another Gotterdamerung . But most people are not like that, and the species as a whole is much more adaptive than that; being alive, it wants to live.

If we have to adapt to get by, we will. Abrupt climate change has struck our species before, and we have adapted very well in these past crises, even prospered. It could happen again, and I think it will; no reason to despair; no reason to deny all problems and carry on stupidly in our destructive ways and our ridiculously unjust economic system; rather, time to adapt.

But the story of that adaptation has to be told, and told many times over, I think, so we can imagine it better, and see how we might take the first small steps. Utopian science fiction is therefore, in that context, a kind of scenario—making, part of the effort of modeling that we do to figure out what we should do to get through. Naturally we will never be perfect in this effort, but that's what can make it such a funny story too.

Or so it seems to me. Wish me luck with the third volume; but it will take all of us to make the real story turn out with the traditional comic ending—dancing, singing, marriage, children all happy.

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KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer who

finds it funny to write about himself in the third person. Kim

wonders if he can do it. Kim lives in Davis California with his

family—wife, two boys, two cats—and he enjoys gardening,

backpacking, playing frisbee golf, and travel. Not that he does

travel, but he used to. His novels include The Wild Shore,

Icehenge, The Memory of Whiteness, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge, A Short Sharp Shock, Red

Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, Antarctica, The Years of Rice and Salt, Forty Signs of Rain, and

Fifty Degrees Below. He likes novels. He has also published a number of short stories. In 1995 he went to Antarctica as part of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’

Program. His works of fiction have been awarded the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Asimov, Campbell,

World Fantasy, Seiun (Japan), Ignotus (Spain), and British Science Fiction Awards, and have been translated into twenty-three languages.

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Also by KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Fifty Degrees Below

Forty Signs of Rain

The Years of Rice and Salt

Nebula Awards Showcase 2002: The Year's Best SF and Fantasy (Editor)

Ghosts, Spirits, Computers, and World Machines

Blue Mars

Green Mars

Red Mars

The Martians

Escape from Kathmandu

Antarctica

Icehenge

Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias

The Memory of Whiteness

A Short, Sharp Shock

The Gold Coast (Three Californias)

Pacific Edge (Three Californias)

The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych)

Remaking History and Other Stories

Remaking History

Journey to the Center of the Earth (Introduction)

The Blind Geometer/the New Atlantis (Tor Double Novel, No 13)

A Meeting with Medusa/Green Mars (Special Double Release)

The Planet on the Table

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