Greenhouse warming

Unless you’ve lived in a cave for the past several decades, you’ve undoubtedly heard of global warming and the greenhouse effect, but a brief and therefore simplistic recap of the salient points is helpful to provide context for what follows (particularly if you’ve been living in a cave):

Since the start of the industrial revolution (roughly speaking, the past two centuries), humanity has been pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels (mostly coal and oil). At the same time, we’ve seriously damaged many of the systems responsible for taking up that gas, one example being massive deforestation to make room for industrial agriculture. The result of increased production and decreased reduction is that carbon dioxide is being produced at rates significantly greater than the world’s ecosystems can absorb this gas, causing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to rise dramatically. For simplicity, let’s consider some ballpark figures, namely a broadly accepted level of about 260 ppm (parts per million) before 1800 versus a level greater than 360 ppm now—an increase of nearly 40%. At this rate, levels could potentially double from pre-industrial levels by the end of the current century; since the rate of increase has accelerated during the past decade, that’s potentially a conservative prediction. Worse still, with warming temperatures in arctic regions, huge supplies of peat will unfreeze for the first time since the last glaciation, releasing huge quantities of methane as the peat decays. Unfortunately, methane is an even more potent greenhouse-effect gas than carbon dioxide. This may lead to positive-feedback effects that accelerate the rate of change.

These changes create a major problem: both carbon dioxide and methane trap outgoing longwave radiation, much like the glass roof of a greenhouse does (hence the name “greenhouse” effect). Longwave radiation is what heats our atmosphere and that of a greenhouse, leading to “global warming”. Global warming pumps more energy into the global oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns, which are responsible for our weather patterns, thereby creating more extreme weather events—much like pumping your legs on a swing causes you to rise to ever greater extremes at both ends of the arc. Because of the complexity of global circulation patterns, the changes are not the same everywhere in the world; although the overall temperature will increase, it may increase greatly in some areas and decrease in other areas. Rainfall and snow patterns will also change, and not always in the same direction as the temperature change. This creates a complexity that even most climatologists don’t fully grasp.

There are other complications to consider. We’re currently well into the warm period between the repeated cycles of glaciation and warming that have affected Earth’s climate for as long as our planet has had an atmosphere. Global warming is a natural and expected trend as the cold glacial period recedes. So there are two processes going on here: natural warming that would occur even if we humans weren’t around, and anthropogenic warming caused by humans. I haven’t seen any rigorous analysis of the relative contributions of nature and humans to the overall change, but that’s not really all that important. Despite a high degree of variation in the data, which is only to be expected for any system as complex as climate, the evidence is unassailable: our planet is growing warmer, and potentially doing so at a historically unprecedented rate due to anthropogenic impacts. Over the years, I’ve edited many climate-related papers that have appeared in prestigious international journals. The long-term studies are most interesting, because they provide evidence based on both extrapolations with a heavy theoretical basis (e.g., changes in isotope ratios and tree-ring widths) and directly observed and entirely non-theoretical data (e.g., thousand-year records of when ice melted in a particular Japanese lake and of the dates when plants flowered in many areas of the world). The overall weight of the evidence is unassailable: many lines of evidence converge on a single conclusion, namely that global warming is a fact. Whether or not we humans are the primary factor responsible for this trend, it’s a fact we need to face.

My personal opinion, based on the weight of the evidence, is that we’ve already passed the tipping point, and there’s not much we can do other than to stop pouring fuel on the flames and start preparing for the consequences. Bottom line: We’re working ourselves into a seriously nasty situation, whatever its cause, and we’ll have to deal with this “inconvenient fact” whether or not we believe that we’re responsible for the phenomenon. Sticking one’s head in the sand doesn’t work for us any better than it does for cartoon ostriches: the problem doesn’t go away just because we’re not looking at it. Sadly, we humans are masters of the art of ignoring problems and hoping they’ll go away until things get bad enough that ignorance no longer works, and desperate measures are required. We’re about to find ourselves in that situation, in spades.

Enter the anthology “Welcome to the Greenhouse”, edited by F&SF’s Gordon van Gelder. Science fiction authors have a long and proud history of considering the effects of science on individual humans and society, whether in the form of creating rigorous thought experiments like those performed by theoretical physicists or simply creating interesting settings for a story. The good stories (and from this I exclude 100% of anything you’ve seen in a movie theater and 99% of anything you’ve seen on TV) have often done a remarkable job of predicting things that scientists confirmed or engineers made real decades later. In coming weeks, I’ll be reviewing the stories in this anthology to see what some of the leading lights in our field have to say about the issue of global warming.

Some of you may know that I’ve been reviewing fiction in Asimov’s SF magazine and F&SF for more than a year. If not, click here to see my various reviews. The criteria I use in reviewing fiction are somewhat complex. First, I want to dig into what an author’s doing behind the scenes to create a compelling story. That’s useful for anyone who wants to write fiction and for anyone who just wants a deeper appreciation of the story. Second, I want to assess whether they’ve succeeded, both in their own terms (telling the kind of story they seem to want to tell) and in my terms (whether I enjoyed the story). That’s a balancing act between their needs and mine, and to the extent this is possible, I try to be objective enough to tip the balance towards the author’s goals. Third, I want to explore any really interesting philosophical or scientific issues they’ve raised. Fourth, I try to pay attention to whether the author got the basic science right. As a recovering scientist, that’s not a trivial issue for me, and it determines whether I consider a tale successful science fiction or science-oriented fantasy or just an outright failure. In the context of “Welcome to the Greenhouse”, I’ve added a fifth criterion: does the author have anything interesting to say about the problems we’ll likely face and how we solve them?

The context now set, I’ll proceed to the reviews.

Aldiss: Benkoelen

Benkoelen is a small, rocky island off the coast of Sumatra, increasingly difficult to reach due to the rising sea levels and intense waves created by global warming. We meet the island through the arrival of Coyne, son of western and Asian parents, who has arrived bearing a message for his sister, who runs a sanctuary for endangered great apes (chimps and orangutans) on the island: Coyne’s former lover, who owns the island and has funded the sanctuary, is withdrawing her funding and will close down the sanctuary.

Unfortunately, that’s all there is to “Benkoelen”: this is a vignette, and a shallow one at that, not a story. We learn little of the characters, they do not change in any significant way during the course of the story, and there is no conflict that is initiated or resolved. The result reads like a good first draft of what will eventually become a chapter in a novel or section midway through a novella. The theme of this anthology (global warming) is entirely irrelevant to the story, since the tale would not need to change in any significant way if Aldiss removed all mention of global warming.

Aldiss is a pro, so he does some things well despite the aforementioned drawbacks. Coyne, for instance, emerges in the space of a few short pages as a self-involved and mercenary character who is entirely heedless of others (after a clumsy attempt at comfort, he entirely dismisses his sister’s pain over the death of one of her beloved orangs). He seems misanthropic and pessimistic about humanity’s chances, and there are hints of a certain sense of British “stiff upper lip” combined with the decadence of an extremely rich society fiddling while Rome burns. But the dialogue struck me as clumsy and the descriptions perfunctory. On the whole, “Benkoelen” is a disappointing choice for inclusion in this volume and a particularly disappointing choice for lead position, where an uninspired tale like this one might scare away potential readers. Aldiss can do much better, and should have. Fortunately, the next story is a great improvement.

Carlson: Damned When You Do

From the first sentences, we know Carlson will be addressing us in high “tall tale” mode en route to delivering a tidy little parable about good deeds: “It was not a virgin birth, I can tell you that much. The boy never could fly or catch bullets with his teeth, and those people who say he was 20 feet tall are full of it.” But the boy can walk (and roll) on water, a talent that comes in useful.

Albert Timothy Shofield is born a literal bouncing baby boy, emerging from his mother in the midst of an earthquake that destroys the hospital, hitting the ground rolling, and never again stopping, apart from a brief interlude when he becomes trapped in a box canyon and the world literally trembles until he’s freed. Albert’s immediately off on his journey into the world, rolling along and gathering his moss, and he won’t see his parents again until he’s nearly 8 years old, by which time he’s become something of a prodigy, having learned dozens of languages and more about science and other “ologies” than most veteran scientists ever learn in a full career. And somehow, he has the power to change the Earth’s rotation, change its climate, and remove greenhouse gases from the air while also possessing the knowledge of how to do so, even at the tender age of a few months. Scientists learn that he’s now the one orbiting the sun, a very solipsist saviour indeed, and that he’s the perpetually rolling stone who’s walking while the Earth is revolving beneath his feet, “like a man on a spherical treadmill”.

Along the long, strange road that Albert travels, people care for him until he’s old enough to care for himself, and he brings out both the best and the worst in people. For every person who feeds him, nurtures him, and thanks him, someone else tries to turn this into a media circus or persuade his parents to accept corporate sponsorships. Albert generally turns his powers of persuasion to good ends, such as convincing those who have been secretly sitting on “green” technologies while they profit from dirty coal and oil into releasing these technologies to help save the world. Yet despite his godlike powers, Albert has his limits; when he confronts the Kim dictatorship of North Korea in an effort to force them to change, plunging the country into perpetual darkness without endangering neighboring lands (clearly impossible, but go with it for the sake of the story), he meets his match. Instead of giving in, Kim sends his minions out into the world bearing vials of plague and killing millions before the nuclear powers bomb him (and, sadly, his people) back into the stone age. Albert, traumatized by this consequence, manipulates the world enough to stop the fallout from killing everyone downwind, then withdraws to the world’s oceans to ponder his sins and seek absolution.

When he returns, he uses his skills to try turning the world into a garden paradise, and he’s largely succeeding. But along the way, he’s caught some of those plagues, and he’s clearly dying. Worse, he is increasingly villified by growing numbers of people for the mistakes he’s made along the way. And in the fine tradition of “damned if [when] you do”, there’s no winning these kinds of games: no matter how hard you strive to make the world a better place, and no matter how brilliant you are at doing it, you’ll inevitably screw up something, and even when you don’t, some people will demonize you for even trying. The story’s told by Albert’s father Jack, who recounts the tale in a folksy, straightforward, unaffected tone that easily escapes parody through its sincerity. It’s probably going way too far to accuse Carlson of creating a hagiography of Albert Gore (you know, the guy responsible for “An Inconvenient Truth”), but there’s little doubt our protagonist’s given name is no accident and that Carlson is having a ton of fun riffing on the recent beatification of Saint Albert.

Tall tales don’t garner much respect, particularly when they seem to be as over the top as this one is, but in failing to take them seriously, we may be forgetting how the best satires make us stop between chuckles and think. Jack makes it clear that he, like everyone else, knew what he was doing through his old, irresponsible behavior, but kept doing it anyway because the immediate gains were simply too convenient to pass up. That’s the kind of message you can’t deliver without preaching unacceptably in any other medium than the tall tale, and it’s an unsubtle reminder that most of us are secretly hoping for some messiah to come and save the world so that we won’t have to. In that sense, “Damned When You Do” makes a clear point that would be difficult to achieve in any other way, certainly not without the author being damned for what he’d done.