Reflecting on Crichton

Michael Crichton just passed away and he deserves mention here. He wrote some attention-grabbing speculative fiction like Jurassic Park, yes, but in this blog it was his controversial views that resulted in commentary.

To wit:

• Itzkoff rails against Crichton in "Genetic Park" - January 8, 2007
  
• Follow up on Crichton - January 17, 2007
  

These are not glowing praises of Crichton by any stretch. His foray into global warming criticism got the kind of attention that I'm sure pleased the Bush administration and the oil industry. But there was a nasty side effect. Serious futurists would have been doing their own research...just like I did. Crichton's findings were typically found limited in scope with gaping holes regarding the breadth of his analytical factors. So, from a research perspective, I went from thinking Crichton was a genius to a kid doing bad science experiments.

Crichton may have missed the alarming trends of hydrates sublimating on the ocean floor and other indicators making our spike an anomaly. Humans are clearly influencing the rate at which the temperature is rising. That's always been the argument. No one denies natural trends in temperature increases but this one is clearly not natural. And Crichton contributed to the body of misinformation in his last years. It's a shame.

Closing on a lighter note, the man entertained. No doubt about it. And he had an inventive mind that was also capable of grasping scientific concepts and plugging them into wild tales. I appreciated his work and happily contributed to his fortune. He will be missed not for his scientific analysis but for his keen story telling.

Melting speculative fiction

With all of the talk lately, I wondered about melting polar ice caps in Speculative Fiction. Sure, in Hollywood we had Waterworld -- the result of earth's glacial liquefaction making Mt. Everest a tropical island. But what about other stories?

Professor R.T. Pierrehumbert published this PDF document on the subject. The most intriguing lead to a speculative fiction piece featuring a melted-ice earth he mentions is J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World. Book reviewer Victoria Strauss published this in her thoughts on the novel:

"The Drowned World posits (presciently, as it turns out) that the world has been overwhelmed by a catastrophic greenhouse effect. It differs from our own impending disaster in that it's natural rather than man-made. In Ballard's scenario, violent solar storms have depleted the outer layers of Earth's ionosphere; as these vanish, temperature and solar radiation begin to climb, melting the polar ice-caps. This enormous outflow of water carries with it tons of topsoil, damming up the oceans and entirely changing the contours of the continents, drowning some parts of the world and landlocking others. At the same time, the increased radiation produces freak mutations in Earth's flora and fauna, initiating a new biological era reminiscent of the Triassic period, in which reptiles and giant tropical plants were the dominant forms of life."

I thank Ms. Strauss for the commentary...she makes Mr. Ballard's book sound like an interesting read. One comment: she mentions "our own impending disaster" and she wrote the review back in the year 2000 -- before hurricane Katrina and prior to the international majority opinion that global warming is a valid concern. Perhaps its Ms. Strauss who's a little prescient.

So, back to speculative fiction. One might say that there's not a large body of work centered around an earth scenario where the ice caps have melted. The worlds of robotics, space exploration, alien life forms and other futuristic technologies have gotten lots of attention by writers. Perhaps they're the most inspiring subjects to date. I'll venture a guess, however, that we'll start seeing more fiction featuring an earth facing an onslaught of meteorological mayhem and H2O in places where it's scarce today. As a matter of fact, I'm personally getting some good ideas for a story. Hmmm, time to get writing.

Creating your own water world

When one reads articles like this one it conjures up thoughts of just how far the melting could go. There are plenty of historical maps that have been created to show Gaia -- the orginally clumped-together continents. Similarly, other maps show how previous ice ages have flooded current continental areas.

On this note, when a person reads about what's going on in Greenland, it feeds the imagination. What setting might we face 100 to 200 years in the future? If the melting accelerates, it may be sooner for coastal towns to go under water.

Living in Seattle a few blocks from the water's edge, this concept really gets me wondering. So, I'll take these excerpts from the article serously:

• If the Greenland ice cap melted entirely, oceans would rise by 23 feet
  
• Over the last 30 years, its melt zone has expanded by 30 percent.
  
• In the past 15 years, winter temperatures have risen about 9 degrees Fahrenheit on the cap, while spring and autumn temperatures increased about 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
  

The first quoted statistic gives me ideas as to what Seattle might look like after the sea rises 20 feet or more. The Alaska Way piers would all be gone and the Chittenden Locks would all be flooded over. Hmmm, how would this work? My imagination is creating a future water world here in the Seattle metropolis.

So, keep reading the scientific details if you want to write speculative fiction. There's plenty of change going on to feed your creative process. More news is coming every day...unfortunately for the solid ground.

Odd blog

Typically, I try to focus on fiction and the future. Once in a while though, I feel compelled to step outside the fiction mold and share my non-fiction insights...

I've studied scientific journals for years and I can safely say this blog has a really flawed argument. So, those of us that read about developments impacting the future, in my case to write insightful speculative fiction, expect other writers to do their homework.

Here are some key items that this hack is ignoring:

-- frozen methane chunks (or hydrates) on the seafloor that have survived the last ice ages are now sublimating -- only now are they being affected by our man-made impacts on ocean composition.
-- Taking only one factor, fluctuating temperatures via ice age trends, is bad science and an extremely limited view.
-- Other factors: fluctuating ozone layer, levels of forest layer, etc. all play into the long term equation of viable global weather stability.

The blog representing this bad science sure sounds like someone's pitiful effort to persuade less educated people to discard global warming as a concern. Or, in this case, even rally against it using economic arguments -- sound like a business man out to achieve something?

As a person who has read scientific journals since the early 80's, I've been tracking all of these trends and can give everyone much better advice. The earth is changing in many ways due mostly to mankind's impact. You should care... the wealth of multi-dimensional scientific factors supports it. If you want to be sure, study it deeply. There is a lot of information out there. Just keep in mind, studying ice ages or fractions of temperature changes will not give you the full picture.

Think about the next couple of generations...they do need you to see through the smokescreens. Think twice about what you read, even this blog, and do your own research. I'm confident you'll find my message well informed.

Wining about the future

No, it's not a misspelled title...this post is about the impact of global warming on grape growing and wine making. Not a typical subject for a speculative fiction blog, I know. But still a fitting one.

Check out this article and it will get you thinking. I know it got my brain ticking when I read it. Then I thought: "what else could possibly get changed with global warming?"

In my book, Darwin's Orphans, I don't spell out any circumstances that we face due to global warming. Being an eternal optimist, I give humanity credit for solving our nasty fossil fuel burning habit over the next decade or so. In the book, the "Brooklyn Project" is given credit for this solution. It's a dedicated high-energy think tank that's tasked with quickly developing the solution to efficient production of hydrogen -- thus providing the solution to fossil fuel elimination. (There are a few other helpers too: coastal power generators harness the power of the sea as well.)

Now that I read this article on the changing face of our wine regions, I think that my next work of fiction should feature a world where changes have taken place due to our complacence. We've got a problem for sure and, of course, all we want to do is argue about it as we continue to melt and burn up.

For the sake of my beloved wine, I hope that our better angels prevail. But, I fear, they'll need to win soon.