David Wallace-Wells wrote a book about climate change worst-case scenarios that’s been getting a lot of buzz. In this interview he discusses the book and the notion that science fiction writers sometimes fail to get future predictions right, but more frequently nail the mood.
Well, here’s the mood prediction for climate change:
. . . I think that the 21st century will be dominated by climate change in the same way that, say, the end of the 20th century was dominated by financial capitalism, or the 19th century in the West was dominated by modernity or industry—that this will be the meta-narrative of the coming decades, and there won’t be an area of human life that is untouched by it. Often people talk about climate change as a global problem, which it obviously is, but I don’t think we’ve really started to think about what that means all the way down to the level of individual life.
My basic perspective is that everything about human life on this planet will be transformed by this force. Even if we end up at a kind of best-case outcome, I think the world will be dominated by these forces in the coming decades in ways that it’s hard to imagine and we really haven’t started to think hard enough about.
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Plausible and unsettling.