Bringing climate change in from the cold

The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland in 2010. A new novel by Harvey Stone ties destructive natural events to climate change, fossil fuel subsidies and politics. Photo courtesy Henrik Thorburn/Wikimedia Commons.

April 19, 2011

A new political thriller shifts global warming policy into the mass-market world of intrigue, action, spy satellites and suitcase nukes.

By Douglas Fischer

Daily Climate editor

Ah, the dry, stale, wonky world of climate change, where policy is opaque (UNFCCC Track II, anyone?), the science dense and the rhetoric stuck in rutted, predictable paths.

Time to call in Tex Cassidy.

He's the hero of Melting Down, a new political thriller from Harvey Stone that cloaks a discussion about climate impacts in a raucous tale of intrigue aimed - shh, don't tell anyone! - at a mass market more interested in being entertained than lectured.

The premise is straightforward, the plot anything but: Scientific reports of melting ice caps, disappearing lodgepole pine and freak winter storms haven't yet gotten the public interested in global warming. So why not a tale about rogue Russian agents, stolen nukes, crisis in the White House situation room and a hero who's a crack shot from a zooming snowmobile?

The novel opens five years into the future, with President Charley Breen fingering the bullet-proof weave of his suit jacket, watching images of the first nuclear attacks since Nagasaki and agonizing over what to tell the nation. It jumps to the Colombian jungle, where a desperate Cassidy, knee swollen, vision blurred, passport stuffed into the heel of his cowboy boot, is wildly fleeing three gun-toting thugs.

The story rips along from there - Cassidy, a burned-out former reporter safely returned from the jungle, finds himself on the run again in Minnesota, this time from federal agents sent by Breen, an old friend who needs his advice.

It flits from Greenland to Amsterdam to Murmansk, Pakistan, Miami, Moscow. Glacier National Park makes a cameo. Russians leave a trail of bodies and deceptive computer code; Cassidy wings his way to the Arctic on a last-chance mission; Breen struggles to keep his cabinet from open revolt.

Underlying the whole thing is the notion that global warming - helped along by a few strategically placed nukes, of course - is wracking the world, killing hundreds of thousands, sending monstrous floods and rising seas toward doomed populations, unleashing chaos and disorder that Breem and his cohorts must fight to contain.

It's entertainment of a high order, a potboiler missing only a lurid sex scene or two to make it complete.

Stone, a psychologist turned corporate speechwriter turned environmental consultant, touts the book as an action thriller that "embeds a great deal of science about the changing climate, as well as its impacts." And the crazy thing is that a good portion of the book's plot rests on real-world events: The Arctic holds the world's largest untapped oil and gas reserves, shrinking sea ice has made those fields accessible, and Russia has claimed the lion's share. Russia is even moving ahead with plans for a floating nuclear power plant - the heart of the country's strategy to tap Arctic energy resources in the coming decades.

Unfortunately all that embedding requires a fair bit of contortion from Stone: Hushed discussions about killer whales and polar bears interrupted by the Secret Service; a lesson in glaciology from the vantage of a military jet; Russian heavies infiltrating a talk on sea-level rise, coral die-offs and overfishing. 

At times it makes for herky-jerk reading - intense, brutal action punctuated by earnest pleas to see the links among energy-hogging appliances, oil-industry subsidies and calving Greenland glaciers.

There's a reason climate policy remains so polarizing. In embedding the science, Stone ends up connecting dots between issues dear to treehuggers and sure to irritate any who can't stand this confounded climate stuff. Melting Down comes off at such times as preachy, even out of touch: In the middle of a national emergency, would the president of the United States send the only guy he trusts off on a fact-finding mission to the Arctic to flesh out the relationship between melting glaciers and the world's fragile economies?"

Well, no. But maybe he should. Stone's whole point is that we could all do with a little more thinking along those lines. Give him props for trying to break the mold. 

'Cuz even if Tex Cassidy faces long odds, I give him better chances of making climate relevant to the masses than Ban Ki Moon, Connie Hedegaard, Todd Stern and the cast of an entirely different - and some might say far more tragic - saga.

Douglas Fischer is editor of DailyClimate.org, a nonprofit news service that covers climate change.

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