Pessimism, Optimism, Human Inertia, and Anthropogenic Climate Change

Abstract

Kim Stanley Robinson has addressed the topic of climate change in both his science fiction novels and in talks given at such places as Google headquarters. In the Science in The Capital trilogy he presented various ideas for averting abrupt climate change, but actually spent more pages providing the perspectives of a sociobiologist about human behavior. I was puzzled by that when I read those works and his selection of such an individual as his protagonist. It is useful to observe, however, that there aren't really any antagonists in the novel. Perhaps that is part of the point, then. Recent large-scale studies of climate change, the politics around it, and the need to move to a different economic model for the world here at the end of growth all address an increasingly inescapable conclusion: the problem is not one of means but one of recognition, acceptance, and will to act. Barbara Kingsolver suggests much the same idea but from a very different vantage point in her recent novel, Flight Behavior.