Putting the life back in science fiction

Happy 2016 everyone!

Here’s what I hope will happen in 2016: COP21 will take force; entrepreneurs worldwide will realize there are fortunes to be made in shifting the world towards sustainability; Big Oil companies will be indicted and sued over their knowledge of climate change and actively suppressing public action on that knowledge, and we’ll finally get on with trying to adapt.

Why not be optimistic?

Actually, I’ll be really interested in seeing what happens to the COP21 agreement in the US over this presidential campaign year.  If it disappears without a trace, that will be bad.

One tedious 2016 problem is that the mainstream American media will undoubtedly focus the vast majority of their attention on the 2016 campaigns, and for good reason: thanks to the Citizen’s United ruling, there’s a huge amount of potential ad revenue out there for them to suck up.  Perhaps I’m pessimistic, but I can’t see them getting away from the inane “politics as a horse race” for the next 11 months.  We’ll have to watch the second-line and international media to see what the Obama administration, states like California, and the megacorps do (or don’t do) to implement COP21 or otherwise deal with climate change.  Hopefully, the rest of the world will be less caught up in the Trump/Clinton supermarathon, and rather more interested in deep decarbonization.

In other news, I suspect the weather will get more chaotic, and a lot of people will suffer.  My take on the changing weather is that it’s sort of like the random wandering monster encounter tables from the Old Dungeons and Dragons.  This dates me horribly, but remember those tables, where you rolled a d20 to see whether orcs or a gelatinous mass turned up?  (My apologies if someone thinks those two are political references.)

What global weirding of the weather is doing is shifting the probabilities in the weather encounter table.  Things like cold, dry weather are getting less common.  Hot weather is getting more common, as are wet weather and hot, wet weather.  The thing is that the encounter table hasn’t yet changed, just the probabilities for each event.  Thus, the denialists can claim that the storms of last week are just “normal Texas weather” or similar, while climate alarmists like me can say it’s global weirding, and we both look right to our friends.  A shift in the probabilities isn’t a shift in averages, at least at first.

Still, extreme climate change would turn most of the Mississippi River basin tropical, more like the current Amazon.  When you look what the current storms are doing to the area, you can kind of see how it might get there, with increased floods in the winter and possibly in the summer (depending on hurricane tracks) and increased heat in the summer.  It’s not a pleasant vision.

But still, I’m a pessimist, so tonight I’m pessimistic about my pessimism.  Maybe we’ll see some positive action in 2016.  I’d like nothing better than to publish a book called Pleasantly Disappointed in 2025, and talk about how all my predictions in Hot Earth Dreams were wrong.

What are your predictions for 2016?