James Curcio writes, “Models and narratives about this hyper-object (of climate change) map onto and draw from various disciplinary domains: climate science, social science/sociology, history, ecology, complexity and systems theory, and even critical theory and comparative literature, to name a few. By virtue of being a condition of the ecosphere, it is a driving factor in nearly every domain of human endeavor, regardless of how siloed that domain might appear.”
With “The Cascade,” and with the other four essays in James’ climate change series we’ll be publishing at the journal, I’ve been enormously impressed by breadth, depth, analytic rigor, and imagination James brings to the subject, as well as by his ability to cooly take stock of his own terror, to systematically confront a threat that even those of us who share his views often prefer to keep in soft focus.
One thing I do sometimes wonder about, though, is the trickster-like role an irruption of the Weird might play—the possibility of sudden, and perhaps equally catastrophic, shifts or reversals of direction. “Global warming” is a relatively exact terms, but, as James also suggests in this climate series, we have entered into a period of growing destabilization and chaos, and chaos has a life of its own.
I have no doubts whatsoever about climate change being real, but I do doubt that even the most sophisticated modelling can predict the exact direction this will take. We know less than we think, and we’re also prone to amnesia. If the polar ice caps melt, this could destabilize Earth’s surface, which could rearrange itself and buckle and crack, resulting in a series of massive volcanos, which would spew immeasurable amounts of ash and debris into the atmosphere.
Given the global scale of the disruptions already underway, the amount of ash and debris spewed could far exceed that of the single volcano that launched the literal, centuries-long, dark age in 536 AD, when the sun was barely visible for years, crops wouldn’t grow, plagues spread, and millions died. Much better than turning into Venus, I guess.
I remember the trend of impending ice age books in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Time of the Great Freeze (1980) by Robert Silverberg, “a science fiction novel set in the year 2650 A.D., where humanity survives underground after a new ice age has covered the Earth’s surface.” If they made a sci-fi movie from this book, they could use Derinkuyu as a film-set.
Derinkuyu was supposedly built by early Christians trying to escape persecution by the Romans. As if the Romans were too stupid to notice than an 18-level underground city was being built! I would place the building around 9,000-10,000 years earlier. “Climate change is normal.” Yes, that’s exactly what worries—well, tormewhat nts—me. We have no memory of “normal” is.
