SF doesn't play by the same rules, and some of it (like Dune) is political fiction, which doesn't get any coverage at all in other genres.
What seems to make novels stand out is psychological insight. A lot of literature fakes insight by having characters that agonise melodramatically over their lives.
Dune scores off the scale on insight, with less of that ersatz psycho-angst and plenty of the real thing.
I've always blamed the rise of naïve limits-to-growth thinking (note qualifier) -- it promises that the future will be forced to look like the past. This strikes me as a flight from likely reality, as a failure of imagination and as a failure of intellectual and moral courage.
How convenient, how comforting, if the future were to plunge from our exponential flight into the unknown and settle back into the ancient groove of rural poverty. How sad that contemplating an imaginary technological fizzle is considered foresighted and courageous. ----
Apropos of this, and straying from a response to your comment, I'd like to restate an unanswered general challenge that I posted on Booman regarding a popular idea of how the future might be simplified:
Could you, or anyone, please direct me to a credible scenario in which climate change leads to a real collapse? By "collapse," I mean a situation in which the developed world can't produce Tylenol and batteries [which had been mentioned above], not "merely" one in which most of the world is hell and the rest is disrupted and loses a big chunk of GDP. By "scenario", I mean a sketch of a process that includes both challenges and responses. A credible scenario should take account of the potential for brutal political and military responses to human threats, escalated as needed to defend land, food, resources, and infrastructure. A credible scenario should should assume that the Earth keeps a climate not greatly worse than the worst IPCC scenario. If a collapse could happen, then it's worth thinking seriously about the process and the result. If not, then it's worth thinking seriously about horrible outcomes in a more realistic range.
A credible scenario should take account of the potential for brutal political and military responses to human threats, escalated as needed to defend land, food, resources, and infrastructure. A credible scenario should should assume that the Earth keeps a climate not greatly worse than the worst IPCC scenario.
If a collapse could happen, then it's worth thinking seriously about the process and the result. If not, then it's worth thinking seriously about horrible outcomes in a more realistic range.
The added benefit is that it happened before. When Rome collapsed, most of the antique technology was lost (lost in practical use, even if some parts of the know-how could survive in books hidden somewhere). This loss was not instantaneous but a process. Granted, what came after wasn't what existed before, but it was definitely more resembling prior forms of rural poverty than the collapsed civilisation. I'd say the Maya collapse and some of the Chinese inter-dynastic periods also fit the bill. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Anti-science jihads: If science stopped, technological development and adaptation to change would slow, not reverse. To the extent that technology itself were undercut, the nations that allowed the attacks would become militarily irrelevant, and would be dominated by the rest.
The collapse of Rome was an essentially political and cultural process. It didn't lead to the collapse of China or India, and likewise, political collapses in China didn't collapse India or Europe. There are multiple centres of technological civilisation today, making the global system of civilisation resistant to local collapses.
I still don't see a credible scenario for what I would call a real collapse (as distinct from something that would collapse suburbia, and thus be widely seen as the veritable End of the World). Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
Your second comment belies a 20th-century mindset about war. But just the US failure in Iraq or the Israeli failure in Lebanon show that technological superiority doesn't convert into military victory. Meanwhile, while military technology might be maintained for some time (though definitely not when a major military power falls apart into multiple statelents), civilian can get lost. This happened in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
I don't think your analogy between the multiple civilisations of the antique and the multiple technological centres today holds. Those ancient civilisations were essentially self-contained both economically and technologically. None of the centres today are, we are in the age of globalisation. ('National economy' is a fiction, I'd argue it always was, but especially now.) The collapse of supply chains I meant were the global supply chains. I think the right analogy for eventually surviving technological centres would be say the post-5th-century Byzantine Empire. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I have no doubt that it is possible for a region to survive the scenarios you seem to be allowing, especially by geographical isolation and use of brutal policy. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
in which climate change leads to a real collapse
In any of these scenerios, production of tylenol would stop. The Fates are kind.
Good news, right? Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
There's faith!
But no, humans are not triggering global warming through main force--quite impossible--but by triggering cascades of events.
And no, no one knows where the cascades stop. It is safe to say the Earth will not get as warm as Venus. It is even safe to say single-celled organisms will survive. Beyond that, I haven't heard an argument that was anything other than wish-fullfillment.
By the way, # 3 IS the Permian, under the most recent hypothesis.
Right now, scenerio # 1 is within reach.
Meanwhile, for small change in climate, I think Miguel and Dodo have covered the basic idea. And, as they point out, it is not like it hasn't happened before. Indeed, a dirty secret of archaeology is that civilizations always collapse, seemingly from causes that are self-engendered. I think we are seeing that now.
What do I think is most likely?
Civilization collapses, spectacularly. Humans survive in smaller numbers, under more arduous conditions.
How arduous? Undecided at this time. Which is why what we do now is so important. The Fates are kind.
...It is safe to say the Earth will not get as warm as Venus. It is even safe to say single-celled organisms will survive. Beyond that, I haven't heard an argument that was anything other than wish-fullfillment.
An argument that says that, absent some specific argument to the contrary, it is implausible that small perturbations will produce effects far larger than the effects of numerous small perturbations in the past doesn't strike me as wish fulfillment.
When the proposed effects are far larger than those resulting from past perturbations that are themselves far larger, this line of argument looks even less like wish fulfillment. Note that "implausible" doesn't mean "known with certainty to be impossible".
Regarding large plants, #3, and the Permian/Triassic extinction, I perhaps got carried away when I read that amphibians survived. Regarding the plausibility of our bumping the Earth into a repeat performance, the currently popular theories of what happened all involve huge cosmic or geological causes (The Great Dying). None of these involves the climate just getting bumped off track a bit.
Regarding "civilizations always collapse", it's a good thing that the world has several, even if they do clash.
Regarding the question, "How arduous?", if the primary expected problem is higher temperatures, and people know an inexpensive way to cool the Earth, what would you expect to see happen? I think it's more than likely that the problems caused be greenhouse gases in mid-century, however large they may be, won't be those of high temperature per se.
If this is true, then scenarios that assume otherwise will misdirect our efforts. Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
...the worst events that [Global Warming] could plausibly trigger are moderate.
So you're saying you can predict a Chaotic System?
To be useful the prediction has to be able to guide action otherwise it's pointless. If your control variable(s) become state variable(s), for example, you may be within model parameters, as far as variable value assignment, but the modeled has escape the model. And that is IF the differential equations are solvable; a big IF as the majority of 'em ain't.
No amplitude is unlimited, of course, as the dynamic system will self-destruct under continuous positive feedback, when one hooks the emitter to the base of a transistor, or becomes non-dynamic under continuous negative feedback.
