Aug 31, 2021 | Writing
It’s the end of August already and, loosening of restrictions notwithstanding, we’re still not out of the Covid woods. I’ve been out and about a bit of late and am happy to report that a Lateral Flow Test this lunchtime was negative, but here we are 17 months after first lockdown (and 20 months since the first identified cases in the UK) and I’m still taking the tests and wearing a mask in shops and on public transport.
The reason I’ve been out and about more has to do with the self-publishing process. Yesterday was out on a photoshoot for several author photos for use on Amazon and elsewhere. Last week I went scouting on the Royal Mile for locations and in the process, to my delight, went into a proper pub for a pint of proper ale – Stewart’s 80/- drawn through traditional Scottish tall fonts.
The photoshoot was great fun once I’d tuned out being in public and got used to the camera. The turning point came when my brain relaxed and wasn’t thinking about poses or facial expression. Also, the photographer, Tom, is very experienced, and together we came up with a lot of good stuff, I think (I’m waiting for the initial files to start selecting the best ones for post-processing.) The new thing for me to focus on is that the photos aren’t for a portrait as such: the end result will be part of a commercial package aiming at selling books. The package also includes the blurb I’ll put on Amazon about the book, some keywords in my description to let people find my book when searching, and a short author profile.
As I think I’ve written here before, one of my motivations in publishing the short story collection first is to learn the ropes of self-publishing, so that I have a better awareness of what I’m doing when it comes to the novels. So far, I can say with confidence that I’ve learned a lot. In due course I’ll write it down, either here or on another site specifically for my writing. More on the latter later – domain names have been secured but, as yet, there is no content. There is no content because I’m waiting for an author photo and also a logo.
For anyone interested, the current draft of my short bio is:
Ian Burdon lives in Scotland, north of the Pentlands, south of the Forth, where his stories have their roots and inspiration. He likes to play with the weird and mythological, exploring ethics while keeping the stories grounded. His first published story was in 2017 (‘A thoroughly modern story with Facebook ™ and SIM cards, but ancient evil has adapted to the new technology’ – SKJAM!)
His first collection, Coyote in the Corner, is out [in October]. Two novels – The Raven and The Hart, and The Magpie Rhyme – will be published in 2022.
In the meantime, my habitual anxieties about putting my stuff in front of the public were eased by a report from an editor on the first of the novels. There is a lot in the report, as you’d expect, but (compressed) she says:
Many thanks, once again, for sending this to me, I enjoyed reading it. You have a strong set of characters here, with a warm romance and intriguing mystery set in a world that plays enjoyably with the ‘real’, the philosophical, the religious and the folkloric. I think readers will enjoy the way it is rooted in actual lore and thinking, and how you’ve developed that in your own way, to create something different – I feel it all holds together very well, and fits with the style of novel that I believe you’ve aimed to write: something that is both fun and thoughtful, with a lively element of fantasy/magic that lifts the novel out of the ordinary, while remaining rooted in real-world matters and realistic human behaviour. – The storytelling is compelling, the writing is effective and very readable, and the presentation overall is fine.
I’ll take that.
Aug 18, 2021 | Global Heating
In John Wyndham’s 1953 masterpiece The Kraken Wakes, maverick scientist Prof. Alastair Bocker figures out what’s going on, specifically the impact of polar melting perpetrated by the alien invaders of the deep oceans. Bocker’s opinions are derided and dismissed until far too late. In particular, he struggles to explain the urgency of sea-level rise because the terms he uses don’t give a clear picture to the layperson of cause and effect. An average sea level rise of two and a half inches in Newlyn sounds too trivial to take seriously.
He bent a thoughtful, disapproving look on her. ‘Just what do you mean, young woman, by coming here and telling me I “messed it up”?’
‘The anti-climax. First you sounded as if you were on the point of great revelations, but then that was followed by a rather vague suggestion that somebody or something must be causing the Arctic changes – and without any specific explanation of how it could be done. And then your grand finale was that the tide is two and a half inches higher.’
Bocker continued to regard her. ‘Well, so it is. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Two and a half inches is a colossal amount of water when it’s spread over a hundred and forty-one million square miles. If you reckon it up in tons – ’
‘I never do reckon water in tons – and that’s part of the point. To ordinary people two and a half inches just means a very slightly higher mark on a post. After your build-up it sounded so tiddly that everyone feels annoyed with you for alarming them – those that don’t just laugh, and say: “Ha! ha! These professors!”’
The same, in many respects, is true of the IPCC Report: the information is presented in dry, technically accurate language with charts and graphs, but what it doesn’t do is give clear explanations of what life would be like under the scenarios it describes. With this in mind, I wrote to an institute working in this field asking for some pointers to where a layperson-friendly outline of real-world scenarios might be found. They replied this morning, pointing me back to the IPCC report saying ‘it’s all in there.’
Bocker Lives!
Aug 17, 2021 | Global Heating
Tell me again, I need to know
The forests had trees, the meadows were green
The oceans were blue, and birds really flew
Can you swear that was true? (Tom Paxton)
In a casual WhatsApp comment the other day, I wrote that I felt another blog post on the subject of global heating was bubbling, but it’s too big a subject. Of course, a blog post is meaningless scribbling in the face of what’s coming, but it at least records my thoughts in a diary-like format in case anyone should ever read this in time to come (assuming that there isn’t a great digital crash that will wipe it all out).
That said, it obviously is too big a subject for a single blog post, so it will probably become a running theme. Also, the impacts of global heating are part of the general background to my current writing-in-progress, which is set around 2050, so I’m trying to do the research to make that at least plausible – and that research will likely feed through to here too.
At the outset I have to say that I take it as axiomatic that nothing of significance will happen to mitigate global heating (short of a massive volcanic eruption, but that will be a temporary blip). We are currently on course for an average rise of 1.5° by 2030 or so, and the only question is how bad it’s going to get after that. ‘How bad’ is, of course, the key question, but it’s worth saying that, after eighteen months of pandemic, we ought to have a more visceral understanding of feedback loops, tipping points and the impact of exponential change. Also, not much picked up on, is that the IPCC discarded (for now) the really scary models because they thought the degree of climate sensitivity those models suggested was currently unsupported by historical evidence.
***
I wrote here a year ago that
I am not given generally to catastrophism. History is full of people predicting the end of the world and finding themselves still here, embarrassed, the day after. And I’m not going there.
But.
Not only are we in an interstitial state regarding the way our daily lives are led (and still between phases of the current pandemic which is by no means over), we are also coming out of the two and a half centuries of industrialisation behaving in a way that means we will not reverse, or even mitigate, the damage we’ve done to the climate.
Predictive Failure
In any event, even without catastrophising, it’s bad enough. As I write, we have monstrous fires in Siberia, record temperatures in the Mediterranean with fires in Turkey and Greece, and we’ll soon be getting round to this year’s catastrophic fires in the southern hemisphere. We’ve had major floods in Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. Looking to the US, I would say the west coast and Pacific North-West are already on course to be uninhabitable at current population levels within twenty years, partly because of the direct effect of the heat and fires, and partly because of the water shortages that are already happening and certain to increase (the balance of probabilities globally is, broadly, that areas that are already dry will get drier while areas that are already wet will get wetter).
And that’s all before the impacts of sea-level rise, which is on course to become obvious after 2030. Anyway, I jotted down some headline areas to think about/worry about on a scrap of paper and came up with:
- Water rights
- Refugees
- International travel
- Transport
- Infrastructure,
- Food
- Energy
- Supply Chain/Logistics
- Nationalism/Border skirmishes
- Wealth inequalities
- Housing
A sobering list, and some of them are already causing problems. In the big picture, there isn’t a lot we can do about them as individuals because the required changes to mitigate the problem are global and systemic – it’s an exceptionally complex, large-scale systems issue, in fact. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything, but it seems to me that what we can do as a country is to seek to mitigate what’s coming, and this requires some big decisions and preparations – the UK has, for example, outsourced the bulk of its food production, and a lot of what remains is vulnerable to intense weather events.
I have no expectation of anything of significance happening in the USA, which will have its own internal problems to deal with soon enough as the west coast becomes near-uninhabitable and the east coast floods (and the midwest had extreme flooding in 2019, and severe floods in 2020 and 2021). The UK will bluster until it’s too late, then try to find a foreigner to blame. The EU will issue lots of fine words but do the square root of fuck all. In the big picture, we are reliant on China to drive at least some positive change.
Aug 10, 2021 | apocalypse, Dark Star Crashes, Dead Water, Global Heating
…Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?
Several times, while I kept my Covid-19 diary here, I wrote that the pandemic was small fry compared to climate change. A month ago, more or less, I wrote:
Covid continues, and builds momentum, while politicians flounder in their own ineptitude, but it is the change in climate that’s the big picture, a process of change that I think is now irreversible. I keep up to date with news and views on climate change in the popular science press, and I know the view continues to be expressed that there’s still time to change course. But all the things that are said to be essential to do rely for their implementation on co-ordinated, decisive action by politicians and on the majority of humans ‘doing the right thing’.
The thing is, I have no faith that politicians in particular or humans in general will do anything at all of significance. Short of some volcanic cataclysm, the future is here and it’s already too late. The Moon is getting in on the act, too, sleekit wee bastard that it is.
What else is there to do but to sit here writing dystopian fiction?
The tendency towards catastrophism is, on the whole, something to be avoided, because it becomes so dominant an interpretive framework as to distort deeper awareness of the world about us. But, given the new IPCC report published yesterday, the urge to catastrophise is strong today. And for good reason. I found myself this morning drinking green tea and scanning the key points of the IPCC Report (New Scientist Summary here) while listening to an 8 1/2 Spotify playlist I put together of different versions of Dark Star: it formed the perfect accompaniment, particularly the earlier, primal versions. A link to the playlist is down below for the (very) few of you who might be interested.
More useful, and more difficult, than catastrophising is figuring out consequences and mitigations. Some examples:
(1) We live in a house built in 1933. While the Scottish weather is variable, a shift to extremes of heat and wetness is likely to be problematic. Most of July was very pleasant here, but the last few days have seen heavy, and at times torrential, rain. Heavy rain isn’t uncommon in Edinburgh at Festival time any more than it is at Wimbledon. Occasional floods aren’t unknown either, and a lot of money was spent on flood defences after the Water of Leith burst its banks several years ago. What has changed is frequency: we’ve had floods at the foot of our hill every year for the past three. This is partly because of sudden quantities of water falling in a short time but also because the old drains can’t cope with the amount of water coming off the hill. And with no natural drainage, the road and shops become a giant concrete culvert.
Our back garden is much more prone to saturation than previously, and I think changes in the water table are implicated in that (and in the dampness of the soil in the void beneath our floorboards). Will this lead to structural problems with the house? I don’t know.
(2) One of our daughters lives in the USA and, of course, we like to see her in person rather than over a video call. However, that, currently, means flying and the airline industry is going to have to change quickly and dramatically, particularly in its reliance on fossil fuels. I know alternative engines are being in tested, but scaling up to retrofit every fleet? That’s quite a task. So how easy will it be to get a flight? And will we be able to afford it? Or perhaps ocean liners will come back into fashion, with all their problems. And I’m not sure I’d fancy being at sea in the North Atlantic in years to come anyway, because—
(3) The UK relies on the gulfstream (the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC to its friends) for its climate, and it is also part of the broader global system. It has been threatened with disruption for years, but now looks to be on the brink. What will that mean? I don’t know, but I doubt it will be good.
(4) Fire, flood, drought and plague lead to conflict, population movement, resource shortages and more disease. Where will all the displaced people go? And how will they be fed and watered?
There’s more, of course, such as global logistics and food supplies, but that’s off the top of my head.
All of the causes for (relative) optimism rely on concerted political will, and I don’t expect that to happen until it is much too late. Oddly, the response to the pandemic, at least in the West, suggests a positive in that, on the whole, populations responded to the bigger picture, notwithstanding the dingbats who make the news headlines. A more permanent shift to working from home may well bring benefits, too. (I’m still sceptical that, worldwide, there will be sufficient change, though). The bad news is that an appropriate response by governments to climate change will require an awful lot more than mask mandates. Expect to see more protests which, given point 4 above, may well turn nasty.
No doubt I’ll write more about this here when I think it through some more. Until then, back to dystopian fiction and dark stars crashing it is.
Recent Comments