The climate alarmist movement is completely dominated today by applied postmodernism, a warped, unscientific philosophy that threatens us all. Originating in the 1960s, postmodernism rejects the fundamentals of the Enlightenment. Rather than basing its arguments on reason, verifiable science, and empirical data, as did the thinkers who created classical liberalism on which the modern world is based, postmodernist thought is based on feelings, story-telling, and gender identity. That observational data does not support the climate scare does not matter to activists and their political and media allies. It is all about a good story to get people excited and clamoring for action.

Consequently, it is not surprising that a new fictional genre, climate fiction, or cli-fi, as some people call it, has taken off in the past ten years. A 2016 review listed 50 novels specifically dealing with disastrous human-caused climate change, and today there are many more, most of which are science fiction portrayals of dystopian futures to come if we did not reject fossil fuels and embrace wind, solar, and other supposedly green, renewable energy sources. The fact that, as we discussed in our article last week, “Wind and Solar are the Most Environmentally Destructive Energy Sources,” these energy sources are anything but green and have no chance of supplying our energy needs makes no difference. Again, it is all about feelings and story-telling.

Various studies (see here and here, for example) have shown that the story-telling approach increases readers’ concerns about climate change and helps boost the climate alarmist movement and their overarching objective to “deconstruct” the technologies and institutions we rely on for our survival. Writing for the BBC, climate activist and science writer, Diego Arguedas Ortiz explained:

“This is where fiction comes in: it brings the abstract data closer to home by focusing on the faces and stories in these futures. Show readers a detailed and textured account of a climate-changed future says [science fiction writer Kim Stanley] Robinson, and they have an easier time imagining it. It feels real: characters in these novels worry about the welfare of their children, meddle in extra-marital affairs, and grapple with train schedules, just as readers would on their daily lives.”

Indeed, Dr. Shelley S. Streeby, a Professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, has even written a book on the topic, Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism. The BBC article quotes Streeby as saying: 

“Science fiction gets people thinking in a way that another report on climate change doesn’t. It helps people feel about what might be coming, but also about the present.”

Only rarely have fiction writers taken a climate-realism approach in their novels, however. The one which immediately comes to mind is the late Michael Crichton’s techno-thriller State of Fear, published in 2004. The fact that the book was aggressively attacked by climate alarmist scientists showed that they understood the impact of popular culture on the public mind. They apparently wanted to scare any future novelists away from taking a similar approach. Generally speaking, it seems to have worked, and we have few if any novelists with the courage to repeat Crichton’s experiment.

Until now, that is.

Following in Crichton’s footsteps, author Sally Fernandez has woven a hair-raising murder mystery into an accurate explanation of what we really know for sure about the planet’s present and future climate. Her novel Climatized describes a cabal aimed at eliminating “deniers,” not by the destruction of their reputations, as is so often today’s modus operandi, but by outright, though cleverly disguised, murders.  

The book’s heroine is newly-minted private eye Maxine Ford, previously high up in U.S. intelligence. She teams up with a special aid to the President of the United States and a missing scientist who has thus far managed to escape the efforts to eliminate him. Collectively running but a few steps ahead of shadowy killers, they piece the plot together while dropping fact after fact of real climate science presented by the likes of the late Dennis Avery and the late Dr. Fred Singer.  

In fact, half of the characters in the book are real people we all recognize, such as Fred and Dennis, whom Fernandez quotes continuously in trying to make sure she has the science right, and indeed she does. She begins with intriguing descriptions of the deaths of two scientists and a politician involved in a major Senate hearing on Climate Change. Ms. Ford gets her first real case at the behest of the politician’s widow, who is sure her husband’s death was not a suicide as reported in the press.

Ford begins by investigating each death, managing to place in each investigation technical questions whose answers clearly define the truth about the falsity, if not an absurdity, of the man-caused global warming premise. Each fact in each discussion or interrogation builds upon the next, as would an excellent high school teacher explaining physics to his or her class. 

At the same time, we are watching two sides of a chess game as the evil puppeteers pull ever more strings to disrupt all efforts to expose what has been more than two decades of a hoax that has placed vast sums of money into the hands of an army of leftist crony capitalists.

Ford traces the cabal back to the Earth Summit of 1992, where Maurice Strong, a Canadian billionaire who got rich on oil before promoting “sustainability,” attempted to ensure others could not prosper. Al Gore was his lieutenant who assumed command of Strong’s Agenda 21 plan after his death. Though not a treaty, the plan was signed by 178 countries at the summit and eventually introduced as Executive Order 12852 by President Clinton under the advice of then Vice President Gore.

One interrogation in Climatized uncovered the fact that the 2010 Climate Exchange set up to trade carbon credits netted Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers hundreds of millions of dollars by investing in over 40 companies that benefitted from the folly of cap and trade.

The work of the two murdered scientists crossed paths with the infamous Climate Research Unit where, in both real life and in Fernandez’s book, Dr. Phil Jones was caught falsifying climate data, and Dr. Michael Mann is shown to have apparently eliminated data in order to construct his hockey stick sham; all of which Fernandez’s characters explain with both precision and simplicity. While the average reader may not get as big a kick as the senior author of this article did, due to his friendship with so many of the real scientists, the casual manner of Fernandez’s recital of Avery’s work is wonderful. To quote Fernandez:

“Dennis Avery had compelling scientific evidence that the Sun played a key role in climate change along with cloud formations and shifts in the ocean, concluding that reducing fossil fuel use would have no discernible effect on rising temperatures.”  

It will likely come as a surprise to readers that the mathematical models that claim to show increasing temperatures due to man’s activities do not consider that the Sun plays any significant role.

What Max Ford’s conversations do not explain about global warming, she gets from publications such as The Wall Street Journal. There, she quotes extensively from articles such as Bret Stephens’ stating that global warming is a cottage industry whose survival is dependent on being believed through mindless repetition of things nearly true with recurring dramatic crises requiring drastic solutions.

One of the delights of this truly “historical novel” is its short chapters that enable the reader to take a breath and decompress from the action. At the same time, Fernandez develops her characters exceptionally well and makes it difficult for male readers not to develop a crush on heroine Max Ford. This is a wonderfully educational and exciting read. 

Sally Fernandez has hit upon a way to communicate with a much wider audience demographic on the anthropogenic global warming issue than we could ever reach with our technical conference presentations. Consequently, it’s only a matter of time before climate alarmists attack Fernandez with the same ferocity they did Crichton. This, she should take as a compliment. As World War II Lancaster bomber pilot Sandy Mutch explained, 

“On bombing raids over Europe, we could tell we were closing in on the target when we started to get the most flak.” 

That occurred because critical German assets were usually surrounded by anti-aircraft guns that filled the sky with AAA fire. And, instead of being deterred by this resistance, it told Bomber Command precisely where the next wave of aircraft should concentrate their attack.

Fernandez is clearly right over the target with Climatized. If feelings and story-telling rule the day, then let’s fight fire with fire and encourage other novelists to follow Sally Fernandez’s courageous example. 

Sally Fernandez will be Dr. Lehr and Tom Harris’ guest on The Other Side of the Story this Saturday and Sunday at 11 AM ET, with an encore at 8 PM. Listen on iHeart Radio, our world-class media player, or our free apps on Apple, Android, or Alexa. Each episode goes to major podcast networks early in the week and can be heard on-demand anywhere in the world.