July 15, 2012, by Brigitte Nerlich

Unseasonable weather; unseasonable climate? Facts, fictions and fantasies

I have just come back from a place in Dorset that my husband’s family has visited every summer for the last forty years or so and that I have visited for the last twenty. I sometimes needed to take and wear an anorak. This has changed and I have been wearing it more often over the last five years or so, but never as much as this year. Whether this very casually observed ‘trend’ indicates general changes in weather patterns, I leave to others to decide. So much for the anecdotal part of this blog….

Extreme weather on the news

When we came back from holiday on Saturday (14 July), I glanced at a few newspapers, magazines and twitter attachments. There was a lot of talk about extreme (weird, volatile, freak, on steroids etc.) weather (droughts, floods, wildfires) and arguments for and against local changes in weather patterns being linked to global changes in climate patterns (The Guardian, here and here and here. New Scientist here, CNN here, China Daily here, and many more). I even read about a new science called “probabilistic event attribution”.

Unseasonable weather

There was also a lot of talk about ‘unseasonable’ weather (in the US it was unseasonably warm and dry, in the UK unseasonably cold and wet etc). In the British context this meant complaining not so much about the fact that the weather was changeable, which is entirely predictable and the standard conversational gambit here in the UK, but that, currently, it is too predictable, meaning it has been raining off and on since around April. As a leader in The Times expressed it (14 July, p. 2): “The British climate is supposed to be unpredictable. At the moment, it is anything but. If sustained sunshine is too much to ask for, most of us would settle for a little bit of fickle.” So, if we can’t even predict the unpredictable any longer, what are we to do?

Seasons

This made me think about ‘seasons’ and what it would mean if we could now longer rely on seasons to plan our lives (and holidays and what to wear on holiday, and, more seriously, what impact this would have on climate mitigation, adaptation, food security, insurance cover, risk management, war and peace [subscription required], etc.). Again, I want to leave the discussion of whether weather/climate has become or is going to be chaotic in the formal sense of the term to others. However, what if it was already chaotic or was becoming chaotic and therefore entirely unpredictable, especially in terms of seasonal changes? What would the implications be?

When seasons seize to function

Now, one way to investigate ‘what if’ scenarios around seasons, un-seasons or non-seasons would be to write or read sci-fi stories, climate change novels or even what has been called cli-fi novels. Such stories allow authors and readers to engage with issues and problems related to changes in climate on fictional planets or on planet earth. It seems that in classic sci-fi tales, as one forum member, noted: “the planets depicted … are often single climate planets.

  • The forest moon of Endor
  • The desert planet of Dune
  • The desert planet of Tatooine
  • The desert planet of Vulcan
  • The outer planets in Firefly all appeared to be mostly desert (suspiciously like California desert).
  • The inner planets in Firefly were all temperate or tropical.
  • The icy Breen homeworld
  • The icy Andorian homeworld
  • The icy Frost Giant planet”

This is interesting, as I was looking, in a sense, not for stories about mono-climatic planets but  planets with multiple chaotic climates. There are also some speculations about a world with no seasons, mostly linked to the earth’s tilt. And there are of course novels exploring the implications climatic changes, beginning, it seems with two novels by J. G. Ballard published in the 1960s entitled The Drought and The Drowned World respectively. A whole list of climate change novels has been compiled by Gordon van Gelder, and a good summary of plots and tropes (which are still mostly the drought-ridden or drowned world) used in climate change novels can be found here. There are of course also climate change films or movies, such as The Day After Tomorrow, and even climate change games.

Climate chaos in fiction

When looking at these summaries, I began to wonder whether there really are fictional tales of whatever medium or genre that explore alien planets or our planet where seasons are not only irrevocable changed or absent but have become unstable, chaotic and unpredictable, that is to say, not so much post-catastrophic or post-apocalyptic novels, but rather novels dealing with the jitters of climatic conditions before a potential tipping point. I have the impression that there may be a bit of an imagination deficit here, unless readers can put me right! Or do writers of fictions find it difficult to write about the entirely unpredictable?

Game of Thrones

Despite these caveats, one can find some explorations of chaotic climate, for example in the popular Game of Thrones. As Wikipedia points out: “Game of Thrones is an American medieval fantasy television series created for HBO by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. It is an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin‘s series of fantasy novels, the first of which is titled A Game of Thrones.” The sentence ‘winter is coming’, related to the title of the first series, has become an internet meme. George Dvorsky at io9 has explored “5 Scientific Explanations for Game of Thrones’ Messed-Up Seasons”, which range from a wobbly planetary tilt to oceans, currents and wind and a combination of all factors. The ‘current’ most often evoked during this rainy British summer is the jet stream. So what about a novel dealing with changes in the jet stream that we could enjoy reading on a long rainy day?

Dune

In the meantime, I have been told by various teenagers that I really should read Dune, although the sheer size of the novel somehow deters me (and I have to admit that I am not an avid sci-fi reader). Dune, says Wikipedia, “is a 1965 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. … Dune is frequently cited as the world’s best-selling science fiction novel and was the start of the Dune saga.”

Dune certainly seems to contain a thought-provoking message on climate and climate variability that’s worth thinking about again after almost half a century has gone by since Herbert published his novel. Here is a quote from the third book “Children of Dune”: “Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern. Lonely, finite humans may observe climactic provinces, fluctuations of annual weather and, occasionally may observe such things as ‘This year is a colder year then I’ve ever known.’ Such things are sensible. But humans are seldom alerted to the shifting average through a great span of years. And it is precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to survive on any planet. They must learn climate.” So, perhaps, when the rain starts up again, I might give it a try and read at least the first book.

Photo: Weather-front over Poole (Dorset)

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Posted in Climate ChangeClimate PoliticsFood SecurityScience FictionScience PolicyUncertainty