AFTERWORD: SCIENCE SCARIER THAN FICTION
RAMEZ NAAM
Mount Rainier looms over Seattle. Look south and east toward downtown from the Queen Anne neighborhood, and you can see the mountain, sixty miles away but still gigantic, as tall as any skyscraper, even from this distance, five times as wide on the horizon, its upper flanks permanently covered in white, even more impressive since it rises from nearly sea level, no other mountains around the big volcano.
I climbed it for the first time in 2000. It was the toughest, wildest, most gorgeous thing I’d done. We hiked on a long but safe snowfield up to Camp Muir at about 10,000 feet of elevation, napped for a few hours, then rose at midnight. Under the moonlight, we roped ourselves together, strapped metal-pronged crampons to our boots, pulled out our ice axes, and finished the much more dangerous part of the climb, stepping or jumping over crevasses in the ice beneath our feet, or going around them if they were too wide, until we reached the summit at 14,411 feet. I couldn’t believe I’d made it.
I’ve been back almost every year, at least to hike the Muir Snowfield up to Camp Muir. So, I can tell you from firsthand experience: It’s melting.
In 2007, crevasses—cracks in the ice, uncovered by melting of the snow above them—opened up on that long, generally safe snowfield below 10,000 feet. The rangers had never seen anything like it.
It happened again in 2012.
And again in 2014.
Rainier is a friend of mine. I know that mountain. I love that mountain. And it’s melting. Numbers tell the tale. Mount Rainier isn’t quite the tallest mountain in the lower forty-eight states, but it’s the biggest. A quarter of the glacier area of the lower forty-eight sits on its flanks. And that area shrank by around twenty-five percent in the twentieth century. It’s sure to shrink more in the twenty-first.
Soar up into space. Watch the Earth recede beneath you until we’re looking down on it like a globe. And then follow me as we zoom down south, to where the real ice is: Antarctica.
You’ve seen Game of Thrones? (Or read the books?) You know the Wall, the giant construction of ice that guards the north? Imagine standing at the base of it, and looking up. Seven hundred feet high—as tall as a skyscraper—three hundred miles wide.
That’s nothing.
The Antarctic ice sheet is an average of seven thousand feet thick. In some places, it’s fifteen thousand feet thick—three vertical miles of ice. It goes on for more than a thousand miles—not just wide but deep as well.
And it, too, is melting. Faster and faster and faster.
In 1995, the Larsen A ice shelf—ice that had clung to Antarctica for four thousand years—unexpectedly disintegrated. In 2002, the much larger Larsen B ice shelf, stable for the last 12,000 years, disintegrated over the course of a few days. Larsen B is floating ice, but it’s massive. It was an ice sheet two hundred and twenty meters thick . . . or as thick as the Wall in Game of Thrones. And it was huge—more than twelve hundred square miles in area—as large as the state of Rhode Island.
Now even the Larsen C ice sheet—ten times larger than Larsen B, larger than nine out of fifty US states—is at risk of breaking up. It could go at any time. Perhaps it will be gone by the time you read this.
Those ice shelves are floating ice. Their breakup doesn’t raise sea levels. They’re inherently more fragile than the miles-thick ice on land. But that, too, is melting. In the last year, West Antarctica lost almost two hundred billion tons of ice from land.
All of Mount Everest only weighs one hundred and sixty billion tons.
Yet the ocean is vast. All that melt has added just a fraction of an inch to sea ice in the last twenty years. Over the course of this century, if Antarctica keeps melting at its current pace, it will add just inches to the world’s sea level, out of an overall rise of three feet, or perhaps a bit more—most of that caused by thermal expansion of the oceans. At that rate, it would take thousands of years for Antarctica’s ice cap to melt entirely (and a good thing, too, as that would raise sea levels by a catastrophic two hundred feet).
But the melt won’t continue at its current pace. It’s accelerating. In another ten years, if the acceleration continues, Antarctica will be losing ice weighing two Mount Everests each year. And after that?
Well, even the rate of acceleration is speeding up. The arc is bending faster and faster downward. But how fast will it go? Will we someday be losing ten Everests’ worth of ice from Antarctica each year? One hundred?
How fast can ice destabilize?
Here’s the thing, despite all our tools, our satellite observations, our hypersensitive gravity sensors that can measure ice mass, our supercomputer models of the ice and the water and the wind: We just don’t know for sure. Events keep happening faster than we predict them.
This planet can still surprise us.
Zoom back up, then north, until we reach the other end of the Earth: The Arctic. The North Pole.
The Arctic is the opposite of the Antarctic. It’s not just north vs. south; where Antarctica is a vast piece of land covered in miles-thick ice, then surrounded by ocean, the Arctic is the inverse. It’s a polar ocean, covered by a floating layer of ice just a few feet thick, and bounded all around by land—Russia, Canada, Alaska.
In 2007, the IPCC, the international body that reports on climate change, predicted that the Arctic ice cap wouldn’t completely melt for more than a century—sometime around 2150 or so.
But they were wrong.
The Arctic ice shrinks each summer as conditions warm, then regrows in winter. At its summer minimum, it’s now hitting areas less than half of those it saw in the 1980s. And the ice is also thinner, more fragile. It’s often just two or three feet thick in summer now, where often it was five or six feet thick. So, the total volume is down even more—down to a fifth of what it was in the 1980s.
It now looks like we’ll see our first ice-free Arctic summer a century ahead of schedule. We may see it even sooner than that: perhaps by 2030.Some models even show an ice-free summer day in the Arctic by 2020.
The melt of floating ice doesn’t raise sea levels. But as the Arctic thaws, it’ll kick off more warming for the rest of the world. Ice is bright white. It reflects up to 90 percent of the sunlight that hits it back into space. Arctic water is dark and absorbs almost 90 percent. The melting Arctic becomes darker. The planet becomes darker and starts to warm faster. How much faster? If all the Arctic sea ice were gone in the sunniest months of May and June and July, the planet might warm twice as fast, just from the extra sunlight absorbed by those dark waters.
Now, we’re a long way from that. The first ice-free day will be late in September when the sun is low on the horizon. But bit by bit, that ice-free period will get longer and stretch out further in the year, until one day it will be a year-round polar ocean (as in the story “Mitigation” by Tobias S. Buckell and Karl Schroeder).
Then there’s the methane, a greenhouse gas that captures a hundred times more heat than CO2. The permafrost all around the Arctic is dense with vegetation. As the whole area warms—speeded by heat being captured in those seas—the permafrost thaws. Vegetation that rots under the soil releases its carbon as methane. There’s a trillion tons of it in Arctic soil. Enough that a tenth of it going up would triple our rate of warming for the next twenty years. And there’s an estimated six trillion tons of methane captured in icy slush at the Arctic sea floor. The last time all of that was in the atmosphere, fifty-eight million years ago, tropical trees and crocodile-like reptiles thrived on Antarctica.
So, that’s your worst-case scenario. An explosive release of methane from a rapidly thawing world, bringing forward a rapid surge of warming, far faster than we’ve expected, accelerating superstorms and crop losses, melting ice faster, speeding the thermal expansions of the ocean, bringing both the mega-rains of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain and the decades-long mega-droughts like the ones that feature in Paolo Bacigalupi’s and Nancy Kress’s stories in this collection.
It wouldn’t be Waterworld. But it wouldn’t be pretty.
Is that going to happen?
Oh, probably not. The methane slush at the bottom of the Arctic has been stable for millions of years. It even survived a period eight thousand or so years ago that might have seen ice-free summers. And the thawing permafrost in Canada and Siberia probably won’t go all at once—it’ll probably stretch out over decades, spreading out and muting its effect.
Climate change will probably keep coming the way it has been, bit by bit, the weather growing more intense, droughts growing more frequent and longer in the west, flood rains growing harder elsewhere, seas growing more acidic, stressing corals. But those changes will probably happen over decades, over generations, over time that we at least have a chance of adapting to, rather than in the snap of a year or three.
Probably.
Then again, the planet does like to surprise us. As in Nicole Feldringer’s story, “Outliers,” it’s the extreme events that matter just as much as the central prediction. The outliers are what get you. Indeed, history shows that the climate is far less stable than we like to think. At the end of the last ice age—the Younger Dryas—temperatures slowly crept higher for hundreds of years, then shot up by nine degrees Fahrenheit in the span of just a decade and a half.
Nine degrees. That’s the difference between a summer high of one hundred and a summer high of one-oh-nine. And that wasn’t a one-time spike. That was the new normal.
Nine degrees would be a very unwelcome surprise indeed. That’s the kind of outlier that our planet is capable of.
I don’t raise these possibilities to depress you, dear reader. I am, in fact, one of the more optimistic people on the topic of climate change that I know. I believe we’ll turn the corner on this challenge, as gigantic as it is, just like we turned the corner on ozone depletion, on acid rain, and on a host of other things.
But we won’t do that passively. We’ll do it because we’re highly motivated. What I love most about this collection of stories is that it brings to life real possibilities of the future. It turns the future into something you can see through the eyes of people you empathize with. That’s what motivates us: People. Their stories.
And the stories here almost universally show people fighting. That’s what we do. Whether it’s at the intensely human scale of women and men fighting for their livelihood—a theme that shows up over and over again—or the planetary-scale fight to survive with every tool in our arsenal: iron-seeding the seas to take up carbon, reflective aerosols in the sky to reflect sunlight over the Arctic, giant engineering efforts to stabilize ice sheets or rebuild the Arctic ice cap—we fight to survive.
Many of the most science-fictional tools to fight climate change are untested, are almost impossible to truly test at planetary scale—we only have one planet, after all. We’re better off cutting our emissions so we don’t need them. But one way or another, when our back is up against the wall, we humans rally. We innovate. We face realities we previously ignored. And we hustle like we never did before.
We fight.
There are scars on our planet. There are scars in the natural world—species lost, half our forests cut down, soil degraded, oceans acidified. We’re going to take deeper scars before this is over. We’re going to lose more species, acidify the oceans more, do damage that it will take millions of years—if not longer—to unwind. Exactly how much damage will we do? How deep will those scars run? We don’t know yet. But we will turn the ship. Just like the characters in this collection, we’re fighters.
I’d never want to bet against that.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RAMEZ NAAM wrote about climate, energy, and how to overcome our challenges in his nonfiction book The Infinite Resource. He’s also the author of the award-winning Nexus trilogy (Nexus, Crux, and Apex) of science fiction novels. He lives in Seattle.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Publisher/Editor: Joe Monti, for acquiring the book (and suggesting I do it in the first place!), and to managing editor Bridget Madsen, designer Michael McCartney, production manager Elizabeth Blake-Linn, and the rest of the team at Saga Press.
Agent: Seth Fishman for being awesome and supportive (writers: you’d be lucky to have Seth in your corner).
Mentors: Gordon Van Gelder and Ellen Datlow, for being great mentors and friends.
Colleagues: Ben Bova, Eric Choi, Ed Finn, Kathryn Cramer, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gabrielle Gantz, Jordan Bass, Vaughne Hansen, Emily Hockaday, Trevor Quachri, Sean Williams, and Suzanna Porter.
Family: My amazing wife, Christie; my mom, Marianne; and my sister, Becky, for all their love and support. Also, of course, my stepdaughter, Grace, to whom this book is dedicated.
Writers: Everyone who had stories included in this anthology, and in all of my other projects.
Readers: Everyone who bought this book, or any of my other anthologies, and who make it possible to do books like this.
Climate Scientists: Thanks most of all to all of the scientists working to help halt and/or reverse the effects of climate change. I really hope we can save this planet; it’s where I keep all my stuff.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych, consisting of The End Is Nigh, The End Is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated nine times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.
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ALSO EDITED BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
The Apocalypse Triptych, Vol. 1: The End Is Nigh
The Apocalypse Triptych, Vol. 2: The End Is Now
The Apocalypse Triptych, Vol. 3: The End Has Come
Armored
Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015
Brave New Worlds
By Blood We Live
Dead Man’s Hand
Epic: Legends Of Fantasy
Federations
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects
Lightspeed Magazine
Lightspeed: Year One
The Living Dead
The Living Dead 2
The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination
Nightmare Magazine
Operation Arcana
Other Worlds Than These
Oz Reimagined
Press Start to Play
Robot Uprisings
Seeds of Change
Under the Moons of Mars
Wastelands
Wastelands 2
The Way of the Wizard
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination,
and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. • Compilation © 2015 by John Joseph Adams • Foreword © 2015 by Windup Stories, Inc. Adapted from interviews with The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Coode Street podcasts. • Introduction © 2015 by John Joseph Adams. • “Shooting the Apocalypse” © 2014 by Windup Stories, Inc. Originally published in The End Is Nigh. • “The Myth of Rain” © 2015 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in Lightspeed. • “Outer Rims” © 2011 by Toiya Kristen Finley. Originally published in Daily Science Fiction. • “Kheldyu” © 2014 by Karl Schroeder. Originally published in Reach for Infinity. • “The Snows of Yesteryear” © 2014 by Jean-Louis Trudel. Originally published in Carbide Tipped Pens. • “The Rainy Season” © 2012 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Mitigated Futures. • “A Hundred Hundred Daisies” © 2011 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. • “The Netherlands Lives With Water” © 2009 by Jim Shepard. Originally published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. • “The Precedent” © 2010 by Sean McMullen. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. • “Hot Sky” © 1990 by Agberg, Ltd. Originally published in Playboy. • “That Creeping Sensation” © 2011 by Alan Dean Foster. Originally published in Welcome to the Greenhouse. • “Truth and Consequences” © 2004, 2005, 2007 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Excerpted from the novels Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting. • “Entanglement” © 2014 by Vandana Singh. Originally published in Hieroglyph. • “Staying Afloat” © 2013 by Angela Penrose. Originally published in Fiction River: How to Save the World. • “Eighth Wonder” © 2009 by Chris Bachelder. Originally published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. • “Eagle” © 2011 by Gregory Benford. Originally published in Welcome to the Greenhouse. • “Outliers” © 2015 by Nicole Feldringer. Originally published in Press Start to Play. • “Quiet Town” © 2015 by Jason Gurley. Originally published in Lightspeed. • “The Day It All Ended” © 2014 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in Hieroglyph. • “The Smog Society” © 2015 by Chen Qiufan (translated by Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu). Originally published in Lightspeed. • “Racing the Tide” © 2014 by Craig DeLancey. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact. • “Mutant Stag at Horn Creek” © 2012 by Sarah K. Castle. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact. • “Hot Rods” © 2015 by Cat Sparks. Originally published in Lightspeed. • “The Tamarisk Hunter” © 2006 by Windup Stories, Inc. Originally published in High Country News. • “Mitigation” © 2008 by Tobias S. Buckell & Karl Schroeder. Originally published in Fast Forward 2. • “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” © 2009 by O. W. Toad, Ltd. Originally published in the Guardian. • Afterword: Science Scarier Than Fiction © 2015 by Ramez Naam. • Jacket Photograph © 2015 by Getty Images/Mike Hill • All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. • Saga Press is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc. • For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected]. • The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. • Also available in a Saga Press paperback edition. • The text for this book is set in Minion. • First Saga Press hardcover edition September 2015 • CIP data is available from the Library of Congress. • ISBN 978-1-4814-5307-3 (hardcover) • ISBN 978-1-4814-5030-0 (pbk) • ISBN 978-1-4814-5031-7 (eBook)
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