The Coolness of Climate Change

Granta had come out with a volume in 2003 titled This Overheating World which had a volcanic red spine as against its usual neat white one. It had a number of accounts by people who have been affected by it or have analysed climate change. This was a little strange as normally Granta picks out socio-political themes, compiles writings as against accounts which cannot easily be classified as works of non-fiction (and can probably be found within the new forced classifications of creative non-fiction or realistic fiction). This I found a little tiresome as I look forward to complex character narratives or at least a compulsory relationship of some kind in a socio-political or at least a macro newspaper-ish setting (Titanic won 11 oscars). Sort of a mediator between the public and the private which analyses an otherwise saturated situation is simpler, relatable terms.

The reason behind the sudden change is probably the one implicit in the first essay- Maarten’t Hart’s Midsummer in April. The essay is a botanist’s brush with the rising temperature of oceans which makes him religious as he feverishly waits for the Second Coming (it ends with ‘There won’t be anybody there to listen to Mozart’). Or in other words, there is no need for representation as the urgency of the situation speaks for itself. The account is a pleasure to read as the imagery is a bit like a horror movie. However, as Bill McKibben writes in his introduction to the volume, “Global warming has still to produce an Orwell or a Huxley, a Verne or a Wells, a Nineteen Eighty- Four or a War of the Worlds, or in film any equivalent of On the Beach or Doctor Strangeglove.” His reason is that “It may be that because-fingers crossed- we have escaped our more recent fear, nuclear annihilation via the cold war-we resist being scared all over again.” The other theory doing the rounds is that Al Gore and other analysts (I don’t like admitting this but I found An Inconvenient Truth exceedingly boring- just because it’s a documentary does not mean it needs to behave like a textbook) have projected any understanding of it as a study in statistics. This brings me to what I think is the central problem with climate change- it is far too scientific an issue for evening musings and pleasurable reading and hence does not fuel the public imagination other than causing breakfast-table concern. Its useful as a conversation filler during mundane dinners and misfit parties. Its normally not something you’ll find yourself discussing when you’re drunk. But is it really so immensely inaccessible to the creative or to people who don’t ponder over such things at breakfast or don’t attend artificial dinners?

I have been studying some aspects of the topic and in all fairness it does require legal, economic, geological and various forms of serious research. However, that does not destroy the coolness of climate change. And this is where Ian McEwan has stepped in and has offered to bail us (the prematurely-old and the unimaginative) out.

Mcewan has declared that his next offering will be on climate change (I often have to turn to McEwan when I feel like cabbage). He unabashaedly declared in an interview, “The way to write about climate change is through writing about human nature.” In the upcoming book, the protagonist is a Nobel prize winning scientist who observes while eating a crisp “The trick was to set the fragment at the centre of the tongue and, after a moment's spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth.” He goes on to describe an unrealised confrontation when another gentleman starts enjoying his crisps. After snippets like this, it would be difficult for McEwan to disappoint. What is interesting is that McEwan does not discount science; he observes in another essay, “Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating, if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue). It was good science, not good intentions, that identified the ozone problem, and it led, fairly promptly, to good policy… We need not only reliable data, but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics.” Shouldering this awareness while talking about a scientist’s sexual inadequacy is exactly what we need.

It would be unfair to say that there hasn’t been a film on climate change. The Day after Tomorrow portrayed it along the lines of Independence Day . The Serious Commercial Film has also dealt with it by way of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. The Happening, however, is enough fodder for a separate column.