AustLit

'What if there is more than two degrees of global warming? What if the Gulf Stream stops? What if we encounter abrupt climate change? What if there is sufficient sea level rise to make certain states and countries, such as the Polynesian island of Tuvalu, uninhabitable? The tenor of contemporary climate change discourse is best captured by the trope “what if …?” Such questions have provided the basis for decades of United Nations negotiation aimed at avoiding the worst-case scenarios, or indeed “solving” climate change itself. These debates are informed by the scoping reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which project outcomes forward from a range of possible scenarios. And, in a broader cultural context, plotting these “what if” scenarios has been a dominant vision of climate change among writers, film-makers, and other artists, perhaps most famously captured in the fictional blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, which asks: “what if” ocean circulation patterns become disrupted and usher in severe climatic change?' (Introduction)