Climate change has become one of the most discussed and polarizing topics of the last decade. its mentioning conjures up images of polar bears on solitary, thin pieces of ice, a globe on fire, the 2° Celsius warning, and arguments with friends and family (and maybe a president or two). Even though it is one of the most urgent issues facing the world, it is equally characterized by inaction and denial. As it stands, with current government policies and personal actions, we are set for a temperature increase between 3.1 and 3.7° Celsius from pre-industry levels by the year 2100. The world has already warmed by an average of 1.1° Celsius as of 2018. That’s very bad if we want to stay under the 2° Celsius limit to greatly reduce the potential impacts.

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Climate change, if it continues, will result in a severe range of impacts affecting our environment, economy, and public health. Impacts will include an increase in both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (e.g. floods, droughts, tropical storms and hurricanes, and heatwaves), sea-level rise, and disruption of food production and water systems. As such, it is important to understand the severity of these impacts and the urgency with which we have to act to avoid such impacts. To do so, I wrote a story.

 

Important for communicating an issue like climate change is communicating the science behind it. Scientific communication, in this case, climate change communication, is the practice of informing the general public of scientific research without the mess of technical jargon inherent in scientific reports. Most commonly, climate change communication occurs via news articles (e.g. New York Times Science, National Geographic), but there has been a significant increase in the use of creative mediums to undertake climate change communication.  Nowadays, science is communicated via podcasts, music, art, movies, and literature. That’s where I come in. I created this project as a way to explore the issue of climate change via a short story.

 

Now, the idea of using a short story to communicate climate change issues is nothing new or revolutionary. There is even a subgenre used to classify stories like these, climate fiction. Even though climate change is anything but fiction. The idea is to tell fictional stories within a scenario where climate change affects the characters, the setting, and the story on a profound level. During my research preparing for this project, I noticed many of these stories mainly focused on the common impacts of climate change such as the warming and/or sea-level rise (both of which are important issues of course). However, I wanted my story to incorporate issues that may be less talked about such as ocean acidification, increased drought frequency and intensity, decreased food production, and increased hurricane intensity. Another aspect that bothered me from many of the stories I found was how many incorporated dystopian elements that I felt made the stories feel more like a fantasy than a picture of how climate change may affect us in the future. For my story, I wanted to take a realist approach.

 

The purpose of my story is that it tells a realistic depiction of a future where we continued living as we do today and, as such, the future has been greatly impacted by many of the problems I highlighted previously. For the purposes of the story, the year 2065 was chosen since confidence in scientific predictions for climate change is very high. The story introduces a setting and characters that have been profoundly affected by climate change. For this project, I wanted to present a future that could very much be possible if we don't take any action.