*Of the various people who sometimes dabble in sci-fi, historians are actually pretty good at it. Lots better than scientists, for instance.
Historians, Dabbling in Science Fiction, Evoke a Climate Collapse
April 4, 2013, 2:13 pm
By Paul Voosen
"Prepare yourselves, dear readers: The United States of North America is coming.
"Writing in the newest issue of Dædalus, two historians of science, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, have taken on a quixotic task: imagining a future historian looking back at our time, in an effort to tease out how we failed to avert a climate-caused collapse. Or, as they put it, how it came to be that “a second Dark Age” fell “on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.” (The full version of the article is online here.)
"Known for their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which examined the role of industry in casting doubts on the findings of scientists on cigarettes, climate change, and other topics, Oreskes, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, and Conway, based in Pasadena, Calif., imagine a bleak, and not always plausible, future. Let’s just say they wouldn’t qualify for Neal Stephenson’s quest for more positive science fiction.
"In their future historian’s account, when things go wrong, they go wrong with a bang. Natural gas from shale deposits wholly undermines renewable power, and then politicians–beholden to fossil-fuel interests–enact laws banning solar and wind power. Laws then follow that lead “to the conviction and imprisonment of more than three hundred scientists for ‘endangering the safety and well-being of the general public with unduly alarming threats.’”
"By 2041 (under a scenario in which warming happens faster than most scientists today expect), a heat wave cripples the world’s harvest, causing famine and disease. The United States and Canada form the United States of North America to ensure “northward population relocation.”
"In a twist, those disasters prompt the world to begin geoengineering, pumping reflective particles into the stratosphere to block the sun’s rays. But that attempt shuts down the Indian monsoon and falls apart in acrimony. The scenario deteriorates quickly from there. All the summer Arctic ice is gone; the permafrost thaws. Then, in the ultimate blow, the West Antarctic ice sheet dissolves into the ocean, causing a spike in sea-level rise and the displacement of 1.5 billion people, followed by a “Second Black Death.” Some 70 percent of the human population is eventually wiped out.
"The imagined historian is not reluctant to cast blame, faulting people living in active and passive denial of the ties between warming and extreme weather, and then faulting scientists for becoming “entangled in arcane arguments about the ‘attribution’ of singular [weather] events.”
"The failure of the United Nations’ 2009 climate summit, in Copenhagen, is blamed entirely on the leak of e-mails stolen from climate scientists; there’s no mention, say, of Congress’s inability to pass climate legislation or of the worldwide recession then deflating GDP and carbon emissions.
"The scholar returns to criticizing scientists, going on a long digression about how they are beholden to “Fisherian statistics” while comparing them to monks:
"'We have come to understand the 95 percent confidence limit as a social convention rooted in scientists’ desire to demonstrate their disciplinary severity. Just as religious orders of prior centuries had demonstrated moral rigor through extreme practices of asceticism in dress, lodging, behavior, and food–in essence, practices of physical self-denial–so, too, did natural scientists of the twentieth century attempt to demonstrate their intellectual rigor through intellectual self-denial.'
"At the root of society’s failures, though, are two ideological villains: positivism and market fundamentalism. The historian saves much ire for the latter, going on about neoliberalism at length and citing the many market failures exposed by environmental problems...."
