Washington Deluge Foretold by Global Warming Book?
Apparently it’s raining in Washington. In the opinion section of the Yahoo News, Gregg Easterbrook is asking, was the Washington Deluge Foretold by Global Warming Book?.
A spate of extraordinary precipitation does not prove climate change, any more than a long frigid spell would disprove global warming. Individual weather events can be just random fluctuation, while no PhD. climatologist can say whether the skies of a warming world would be wetter or drier. Nonetheless it’s spooky. Kim Stanley Robinson, one of our generation’s most science-literate writers, several years ago wrote a book supposing that the first clear signal of global warming would be never-ending pelting rains in the nation’s capital. At this moment there are never-ending pelting rains in the nation’s capital.
The book, Forty Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the renown Blue Mars sci-fi trilogy, was written in 2003.
…sometime in the near future, a gigantic moisture-thick “stalled front” hangs over Washington for many days. Downpours come continuously, and eventually the city floods. Robinson, who is well-versed in science literature and whose fiction is often praised in technical publications, felt that sustained downpours, not melting ice, would be the first harbinger of artificially induced climate change. And a sustained downpour — worst than the Great Storm of 1871, previously the city’s worst-ever — is ongoing in Washington at this writing.
There are many fantastic novels set on a hotter Earth. If you enjoy good sci-fi grounded in the issues of the here-and-now I also recommend Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling. If his predictions come to pass then we are in a whole world of trouble. — DS
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