FOR many of us, the record-breaking heat and accompanying wildfires that plagued the UK, continental Europe and were evidence of climate breakdown in the raw – a direct consequence of global warming supercharged by the that have been vomited into the atmosphere by human activities over the past couple of centuries.

To others, ignorant of the facts or refusing to accept them, it was just another heatwave. In the UK, John Hayes, chair of a group of Tory MPs known – without any irony at all – as the Common Sense Group, . Deputy prime minister Dominic Raab .

Such views aren’t confined to Tory politicians, but are also held by large numbers of the UK public, a fact that is unsurprising given the dearth of government-endorsed information about what is happening to the climate and what we should be doing about it.

In the past, people in the UK have been told to “” to get them wearing seat belts, or to “” during the covid-19 pandemic, but on the climate emergency – the greatest threat civilisation has ever faced – nothing. At a time when the world’s climate is falling apart, it is nonsensical for those charged with keeping the UK and its inhabitants safe and well to stay silent. Never has the need for a public information campaign been so great, not only to educate people about the true nature of the climate breakdown threat, but also to flag what they can do to mitigate its impact.

To do its job, such a campaign must provide information in digestible form and be hard-hitting enough to galvanise action and trigger behavioural change: posters on buses and the London Underground showing how temperatures are ramping up, graphic images of the aftermath of wildfires and floods, and mock-ups of lines of UK climate refugees trudging through London streets.

Campaigns should never be preachy or patronise, but it is acceptable to cajole, inspire, even shame – “what did you do in the climate war, daddy?” – to get the required response. They certainly don’t need to be dull or worthy. Who, of a certain age in the UK, can forget “” – the playful slogan of the extreme drought of the long, hot summer of 1976.

Launching a campaign that instils understanding of the climate crisis and provokes individual and collective action is a no-brainer. But there is a problem. Governments the world over remain in thrall to an economic system in which short-term profit is all. There is no point calling for people to fly less, while cutting passenger levies and expanding airports, or extolling the benefits of heat pumps, solar panels and better insulation, while subsidising fossil fuel firms.

To reach net zero as soon as possible, and to begin to adapt to the climate changes that are already “baked in” – ever more blistering summers, increasingly destructive wildfires and floods – we desperately need populations to be on board. This only makes sense, however, if governments do their bit too. No successful public information campaign has ever been built on the premise of “do as I say, not as I do”, so yes, let’s have the graphic TV images of what climate breakdown looks like, the radio shorts exhorting us to fly only if we have to, the billboards spurring us to eat less meat, and to walk and cycle more.

But at the same time, we need to see government crusades towards fewer airports, not more, cash shovelled in the direction of renewables, not fossil fuels, and the wholesale climate-proofing of homes. One endeavour without the others just won’t cut it.

Bill McGuire is author of : An inhabitant’s guide

SCIENTIFIC papers, however well-written, rarely carry the emotional weight of a good story. Stories have been the prime means of imparting knowledge and warnings throughout human history. Even in today’s data-rich world, they hold a visceral clout that no amount of graphs, charts or figures can replace.

As a volcanology and climate researcher, I have spent more than 30 years communicating the calamitous future that could lie in wait should we fail to take action on climate change. But it wasn’t until I published my first novel, Skyseed, in 2020 that I realised the power of storytelling to get across the urgency of the situation.

This use of narrative as a means to galvanise action on climate change has become increasingly common, and the rapidly growing body of work on the subject is now recognised as its own literary genre. Climate fiction, or cli-fi (a term coined in 2007 by ), has been around for a while.

However, as global warming and extreme weather have become a part of everyday life, and the appetite for action has grown, cli-fi has truly come of age. From the genre’s relatively slow start in the mid 2000s, the shelves of bookshops are now beginning to sag under the weight of new speculative climate tales, aimed at both adult and young adult readers.

As the genre gained ground, overenthusiastic fans and critics have reached back into literary deep time to corral any number of classics into the cli-fi fold. Notable examples include The Drought and The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard, and Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole, a cautionary tale published in 1889 on the perils of geoengineering.

For me, though, this broadening of the genre is misguided. It dilutes a growing body of work that is, and should remain, very much of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

“Cli-fi immerses its readers in futures that, without urgent action, will face our children and their children”

That is because there is an important difference between earlier tales of climate turmoil and more contemporary works. While older stories describe environmental outcomes we are now coming to expect with climate change, they don’t necessarily link human activities to environmental collapse. That is very much the point of cli-fi. Without exception, today’s writers make this connection abundantly clear and raise important questions about what we should do next.

As such, modern cli-fi is fiction with a purpose: to immerse its readers in futures that, without urgent action, will face our children and their children. By bringing these horrific scenarios to life, it seeks to spur us into action, encouraging us to do our bit to ensure that they never come to pass. Climate fiction is nothing less than a call to arms.

Among the most unsettling stories are those, such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s New York 2140, that paint pictures of life in a future world that, as in the pandemic, is superficially normal, yet in a climate-changed world is, in so many ways, scarily different. My cli-fi contribution, Skyseed, is an eco-thriller about a clandestine climate experiment that goes disastrously wrong. The message is that tinkering with an already failing climate is a very bad idea.

Yet the genre isn’t all wall-to-wall doom and gloom. Cli-fi is a broad church, so, alongside the horrors of , there is the dark humour of Karl Taro Greenfeld’s The Subprimes and the political focus of Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy.

Others provide tough stories shot through with seeds of hope, notably Robinson’s recent The Ministry for the Future, which invokes an organisation that advocates for future generations and the protection of all life on Earth, and , Sam Miller’s addictive, post-climate collapse tale about a floating city within the Arctic circle.

I also recommend , a story of ordinary folk against the background of a flooded East Anglia in the UK, and , set in a desiccated California, where the corporate vultures are beginning to circle.

As our lives begin to collide head-on with the climate emergency, let’s hope that cli-fi remains in the world of fiction and, thanks to the action of present-day generations, never comes to represent the reality of the world around us.

TWO hundred years ago, a simmering tropical volcano tore itself apart in spectacular fashion. Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, erupted in a colossal blast that led to the deaths of more than 70,000 people in the region. So large was the eruption that its reach extended far beyond South-East Asia, loading the stratosphere with 200 million tonnes of sulphate particles that dimmed the sun and brought about a dramatic cooling with widespread ramifications half a world away.

The extended climate disruption saw 1816 dubbed the “year without a summer”. There was a wholesale failure of harvests in eastern North America and across Europe, contributing to what economic historian John Post has called . Famine, bread riots, insurrection and disease stalked many nations, while governments sought to cope with the consequences of a distant geophysical phenomenon they didn’t understand.

Much of the world was taken by surprise and was utterly unprepared for the impact of the eruption. Would we be similarly caught out should another Tambora occur tomorrow?

We still so often seem shocked when geophysical threats become a reality. Floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the rest form a normal part of the way the world works, but time and again, societies are ill-prepared.

“We still so often seem shocked when geophysical threats become a reality. Societies are ill-prepared”

This troubling lack of readiness was best demonstrated by the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, a geological event that probably affected more people than any other in modern times. as ash soared far and wide played havoc with the travel plans of 10 million people and left airlines €1.3 billion out of pocket.

The consternation of governments and the aviation industry when faced with a moderate eruption of a European volcano says everything about our apparent inability to foresee events that aren’t that unusual. After all, eruptions in Iceland aren’t uncommon and we only have to go back to 1947 for the last time a large Icelandic ash cloud made an unwelcome appearance in European airspace. Not long at all really, but long enough for the threat to have been disregarded and left off the UK National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies.

The fact that Icelandic eruptions were added to the 2012 version of the register and flagged as one of the highest priority risks facing the country says a lot about the manner in which governments and their agencies tend to relate to potential geophysical threats without recent precedent. First ignore them; then inflate them.

Unlike the societies of the early 19th century, we are very much alive to the fact that major volcanic blasts can have a severe impact on climate. Yet we tend to understate volcanic threats beyond those in our own backyard. With eruptions capable of causing significant global cooling occurring perhaps as frequently as every few hundred years, this is something that could come back to bite us.

It would be wrong to give the impression that the post-hoc manner in which the UK Risk Register recognises geophysical threats is unique. This is an issue for many countries and reflects a general approach that is symptomatic of the way societies think about the potential harm from relatively infrequent, but high impact, natural events. Broadly speaking, people cross their fingers and hope they won’t happen on their watch.

Nowhere has this been better demonstrated than in Indonesia, where the critical tsunami threat was and others prior to the disaster on 26 December 2004. With no Indian Ocean warning system, the tsunami that struck took the lives of citizens from 57 countries and transformed our view of geophysical hazards. For a time it focused attention on rare phenomena capable of having regional or global impacts.

One result of this was the establishment of a Natural Hazard Working Group in the UK in 2005 by then prime minister Tony Blair, of which I was a member.

The key recommendation of our report to the government was to set up an , with the job of identifying, cataloguing and better characterising those geophysical risks with the potential to have a high impact, both on a regional and global scale.

This would address gaps in knowledge, facilitate discussion, debate and the pooling of information, and provide a known channel through which scientists could advise decision-makers on potential future threats. The proposal was drawn, with some enthusiasm, into the machinery of the United Nations, from which it has disappointingly, although perhaps not surprisingly, yet to emerge.

Initiatives such as the , supported by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the University of Bristol-hosted go some way towards increasing our knowledge and understanding of some geological risks. But there remains an urgent need for a unique, overarching body to address all large-scale geophysical threats, that would also constitute an authoritative, go-to hub for decision-makers.

Forewarned is forearmed. If we want to be geared up and ready when the next Tambora blows, we need to put in place the sort of framework that will facilitate a step-change in the level of awareness and understanding of our planet’s top-end geophysical threats.

This article appeared in print under the headline “When Earth bites back”