- Front Cover for Free SF Story ‘Truth’
The Science Fiction novelette ‘Truth’ will no doubt be challenging and controversial to many. It draws aside veils to luridly portray social memeplexes, and particulary the social phenomena fuelled by the concept known as ‘CAGW’ in the climate science and media spheres – ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming’, or man-made Climate Change.
My intent with this work was to offer an enjoyable means to make folks stop and think, to prompt questions, to counter the inappropriate yet massive narrative weight of ‘certainty’ surrounding CAGW, and to make visisble the social engine driving this and other similar ‘certainties’. The story isn’t all philosophy though and there’s plenty of action too 
. For those already clued into the climatosphere, mention of climate change issues appears only slowly, but fear not a lot comes later, and for confirmed sceptics please do not baulk at the first mention of the word ‘denier’, the context will become clear.
I present ‘Truth’ FREE here. Click on that rather tasteful 1950s B- movie front cover for ‘Truth’ as it appears in the right-hand side-bar (or the link under ‘Free Stories’) to receive as a PDF. The work is available under the terms of a Creative Commons (3.0) License (the variant for free distribution but no commercial use or adaptations).
Enjoy!
Andy West
P.S.
For those not familiar with the climatosphere, there’s a raging war inside there, mainly over the three Cs: ‘consensus’, ‘certainty’, and ‘catastrophe’. The tribes in this war range from the Skydragons to the Sceptical, the Luke Warmers to the Consensus, and on to the outright Alarmist advocates. By no means are all the climate scientists throughout the world (or indeed politicians and policy-makers and scientists in adjacent fields) within the Consenus. For the record, science is not done by consensus, and anyhow even a cursory look under the covers reveals that ‘The Consensus’ as it is often promoted in the media, i.e. meaning anyone worth listening to, is a narrative and not a reality.
Despite almost six years of soaking up the climatosphere, and so reasonable familiarity with the (wide!) array of science and position put forward by all the big tribes and many inbetweeners, I don’t know whether CO2 will work out to be big problem, a modest problem, or possibly not a problem at all. Considering the huge amount of scientific uncertainty, especially regarding feedbacks and natural variability, I really don’t think anyone yet has the means to know. But it is exactly this unertainty that allows a social memplex to breed. So, to compare CAGW with other social memeplexes: if the existence of God was unequivocally disproved tomorrow, there’d be no need for the huge infra-structures of religious paraphernalia. And, more interestingly, if he/she beamed down tomorrow and introduced himself/herself, there would likewise be no need for the same infra-structures. We’d all just get his/her phone number. Similarly if the case for CAGW was indeed proven (inclusive of all main mechanisms), the fact-space would be just as constrained as if it was disproven, and the whole memeplex would collapse. In the proven case, just as for historic major disasters or wars, everyone’s shoulder would be at the wheel, we’d all know what to do and all the social messaging and CC related promotion hierarchies and political positioning would evaporate overnight. As this clearly isn’t anywhere remotely close to happening, while terms like ‘believers’, ‘disbelievers’, ‘faith in the science’ (or loss thereof) and the ugly ‘deniers’ term, all abound, then I’m guessing that indeed there’s probably very little that is certain within the wicked problem of climate, least of all attribution.
