Fear of Black Consciousness by Lewis R. Gordon

Yet these efforts were not enough to avoid a Second Pulse at the end of the 21st century, driven first by melting at the Aurora Basin in East Antarctica but then cascading around the world’s ice sheets, leading to a further 40 feet of sea-level rise.Ĭurrent science suggests the speed of sea-level rise in Robinson’s future is implausible. Electricity generation shifted to renewables container ships were replaced with fleets of wind-powered clippers lighter-than-air airships replaced airplanes. The First Pulse and the food crisis of the 2070s served as focusing events, leading the world to take greenhouse gas reductions more seriously. In Robinson’s future, the First Pulse of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet collapse in the 2050s led to 10 feet of global sea-level rise in the course of a decade. His novel explores how civilization might nonetheless muddle through to remake this reshaped world. In his new work of climate fiction, “New York 2140,” author Kim Stanley Robinson supposes that climate scientists like me will be surprised by how quickly the world’s ice sheets will shrink and sea levels will rise.

One focus of my research is on sea-level change, both in the past and in the future. The world also suffers from a creative deficit in imagining the human response to climate change – a deficit that fiction is well-suited to help alleviate. This article was originally published on The Conversation.Įarth’s climate system is replete with potential surprises, and the climate science community tends to be conservative when projecting future changes.

Fear of Black Consciousness by Lewis R. Gordon