Manipulating the Weather | Interview: Dr. David Keith

In 'Termination Shock', Neal Stephenson depicts a near-future world ravaged by the greenhouse effect, with superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, heat waves, and deadly pandemics. The story centers around T.R. Schmidt, a Texas billionaire who implements a solar geoengineering scheme by seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide to cool the planet. However, this plan has uneven effects globally, benefiting some regions while threatening others. The novel follows a diverse cast of characters, including the Queen of the Netherlands and a Canadian-Indian Sikh, as they grapple with the geopolitical and social consequences of this rogue climate fix. The book raises critical questions about the potential solutions and dire risks associated with large-scale climate interventions.

The Ministry for the Future is a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson that delves into the urgent issue of climate change. Set in the near future, the story follows the establishment of a UN agency, the Ministry for the Future, whose mission is to advocate for the rights of future generations. The novel is told through multiple perspectives, including those of Mary Murphy, the head of the Ministry, and Frank May, an American aid worker who survives a devastating heat wave in India. The book explores various innovative solutions to climate change, such as the introduction of a new currency called 'carboni' to incentivize decarbonization, and it presents a hopeful yet realistic vision of how humanity might cooperate to mitigate the effects of climate change. The narrative includes a mix of fictional eyewitness accounts, non-fiction descriptions, and diverse writing styles, reflecting the complexity and urgency of the climate crisis.

In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. She meets biologists trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, engineers turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland, Australian researchers developing a 'super coral' to survive on a hotter globe, and physicists contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. Kolbert explores how human civilization's capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world and how the very interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. The book is by turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic.