Where Are We Heading?
Speculative contemplation — or, why he wished he hadn’t asked
My 22 year old was wondering the other day, where we were heading, with regards to climate change and our particular part of the world.
I say that, they were probably wondering aloud as much as anything, but at the time I was fixating a little on the fact that, while much of the country was reporting sun to the point of record temperature breaking heatwaves, we had weeks of low grey cloud and rain — so I launched into a meandering speculation about what the country, or at very least our county, was going to look like in years to come.
Of course, the county’s near-constant rain features prominently in any forecast of this kind that I will ever come up with. There’s a reason Cumbria is so full of lakes and beautiful greenery — and that the ‘soft’ water which comes out of our taps tastes so damn good. Which is actually where my mind goes first anytime I contemplate this issue. Fresh water is eventually going to become a scarcity. If climate change progresses as we are led to believe it will, with the planet continuing to heat up, melt the ice caps, flood the land with raised sea levels…
So the yarn I spun was without doubt a work of speculative, dystopian climate fiction (clifi), but it was based on studies, data and reports, and…
