Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake, a surreal trip to a Middle East with no true North.
Like Earth, cli-fi lives, no matter the mass extinction.
Unlike science and its fiction, our climate and cli-fi are defined by regeneration and reproduction. Cli-fi and cli-sci do not simply chronicle Earth’s exponential collapse like process ghouls. They seek to reroute and remake our bipolarized world from the ravages of mad socioeconomic and technocratic experiments.
With the particular ascendance of climate science, which analyzes Earth systems and processes, humanity has finally, perhaps too late, sifted through the increasingly horrific data of our terrorized present and dystopian future. Under mounting duress and conflict, it should be noted, as insurgents from the oil and gas industry reclaim key government positions during America’s post-Obama comedown.
Indeed, we live in not the Real World, but the real world, one where scientists who study climate and more are taking fire while issuing a call to arms to save as much publicly funded data as possible.
“There is a fine line between being paranoid and being prepared, and scientists are doing their best to be prepared,” Union of Concerned Scientists’ Michael Halpern told the Washington Post, as whitecoats hurriedly copied reams of government data onto independent servers a flurry of guerilla archiving before Obama’s regressive successors took office.
I have lived here before, the days of ice / And of course this is why I’m so concerned / And I come back to find the stars misplaced / And the smell of a world that has burned / The smell of a world that has burned / Well maybe, maybe it’s just a change of climate. — Jimi Hendrix, “Up From the Skies”
Devalued like many before them throughout human history as messengers of defeatism and doom — from Cassandra and Galileo to Michael Mann and Elon Musk — futurists locked in the present have been routinely attacked and sacrificed for telling the truth. These allegedly inconvenient truths — paraphrasing a politician once disempowered against popular will — have been, in turn, propagated as lies and fictions by short-sighted investors in an unsustainable status quo.
Some are naked sellouts propping up zombie industries and artificial solutions, while harboring undisclosed funding from extractivists and other privatizers of the public sector. Others are mere drones and ciphers, once known as voters and citizens, locked into geopolitical game theories well above their heads, as the seas rise.
This catastrophic tension results in climate science standing up and seeking separation from those propagandizing it as fiction, an inevitability most should have seen coming, given that the Western governments they work for are chiefly known as the authors of history’s greatest wars. After all, America’s annual defense budget ($600 billion and rising) is greater than the net worth of many so-called First World nations.
“We have, for too long as scientists, rested on the assumption that by providing indisputable facts and great data, we are providing enough of an attack to counter the forces against science,” Georgia Institute of Technology atmospheric scientist Kim Cobb told a San Francisco crowd attending a climate science protest during the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. “Obviously, that strategy has failed miserably.”
Like sci-fi rebels stealing maps to the Death Star in the Star Wars spinoff, Rogue One, cli-sci’s guerilla archivists and upstart scientists have read the map of the future, so to speak, and learned that abandoning the toxic capitalization of destruction for cli-fi’s dream of renewable regeneration is far more suitable for a planet seeking to achieve escape velocity from the Anthropocene. They know our sprawling, singular Real cannot truly be expressed through custom skins as thin as science fiction.
Indeed, cli-sci’s sleep of reason, to paraphrase Goya, produces impossible cli-fi monsters. Shattered lands, clearcut forests, ice shelves the size of nation-states slamming into the sea and slowly swallowing the homes of millions. Mammoth rifts stretching outward for miles and downward hundreds of feet into ice shelves that once stabilized Earth for thousands of years are exponentially fracturing humanity’s future, promising catastrophes which sci-fi often only recycles as spectacle. They may have already melted by the time you read this sentence.
These icy cli-sci nightmares are more movingly chronicled in snubbed cli-fi like Antarctic Edge: 70° South and Chasing Ice, whose Manhattan-sized glaciers calving into the Arctic couldn’t compete with death-drive sci-fi franchises like The Avengers, Batman and Superman, and more that routinely destroy and reconstruct Manhattan like clockwork. Cli-fi visions of real-time apocalypse reach beyond blockbuster wars on science and sensibility. Cosmos, Into the Inferno, Before the Flood, Merchants of Doubt, When Two Worlds Collide, The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence, Gasland, and many more wake-up calls make for spectacular horror, but they’re also seeking to forestall levels of mass extinction unseen on Earth for millions of years.
“Patagonia’s ice caps are the third largest freshwater reserve on the planet, and play a critical role in driving biodiversity and contributing to healthy oceans,” Patagonia Rising director Brian Lilla told me. “Its rivers are free-flowing, but their biggest threat has been climate change. Patagonia’s glaciers are temperate, and rapidly melting ice is triggering massive flooding. People are losing lives and moving to higher ground. Some of the river valleys we descended while filming are complete death traps, with unexpected glacial lake outburst floods. The scenery was epic, but I was glad to get out of there alive.
And it’s not just ice, but fire which also consumes cli-sci. Runaway desertification has already sparked global wars large and small, from Africa and the Middle East all the way to California, the home of Hollywood itself, which will not survive its state’s permadrought without desalinating the Pacific ocean, as the Sierra Nevada snowpack evaporates into memory. Indeed, southern California deserts themselves have been weaponized by the U.S. Border Patrol, which scatters border crossers into lethal terrain, leading to the death of tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants. The wastes of Australia and Africa are some of the deadliest sci-fi and cli-fi villains on record, one could argue, after a single viewing of the Mad Max franchise’s parched hyperviolence, but it is climate science which truly shows us what madness lies ahead if we ignore Earth’s screaming data.
Which, despite open rebellion from more and more scientists, is exactly what humanity is doing. It is no accident that scientists and politicians alike are still today parroting absurdities like, “Global warming is real,” in the halls of power and the press. They, like us, have lost contact with what were once called the better angels of our nature, while unleashing the walking dead on Earth. Our collective unwillingness to separate the catastrophic Real from hyperrealities manufactured to conceal our mutual horrors has literally led to scientists striking the term incontrovertible from the public record.
Flying across what climate science can teach us as our planet mutates, “Global Warming is (the) Real” dismantles the moral and material absolutism and terrorism of disaster capitalism. Divested and disinterested in technocracy’s mutually assured destructions, this chapter instead envisions our shared experience of achieving the once-thought impossible.