April

Back in 2015 I wrote the following story outline which never went anywhere (I do a lot of this):

Not with a bang

A comic tale of a truly man made apocalypse.

Outline.

Mankind finally develops the means to control CO2 levels on Earth with fusion driven power and a new electrostatic technology that literally unbinds the Carbon and Oxygen molecule that makes Carbon Dioxide …

In 2021, the United Nations proudly announces its forthcoming ‘World Climate Day’ which will save the Earth from man made global warming. After five long years of testing and building the necessary technology, the system is switched on … combustion becomes a crime, punishable by life in prison.

Despite an outcry from a minority of the scientific community, the Secretary General switches the system on to public acclamation and world wide celebration.

In the first year, the levels of CO2 drop below 390ppm. In 2032, the level drops by another 30ppm to 360ppm. By 2033, the level is 310ppm and dropping. 2034 and the level reaches an all time low of 265ppm and the experiment is hailed as a great success, despite no significant reduction in the rise of global temperatures. In 2037 the atmospheric CO2 level dropped an astonishing 50ppm in fourteen months. In 2038, with expanding deserts and massive dieback of temperate zone forests, some scientists state that the project has achieved it’s objectives, and at this point may have gone too far. The UN convenes a climate advisory council to discuss whether the system should be switched off.

By 2041 the level of atmospheric CO2 drops below 150ppm and despite several large volcanic eruptions, keeps falling. Crops begin to fail all over the world as there is no longer enough carbon dioxide to support photosynthesis. The climate wars start in sub-Saharan Africa as millions of starving people try to destroy the massive arrays of carbon dioxide reduction machines. In south east Asia, two whole islands in the Philippines are evacuated to prevent the poor and starving rioting and destroying the massive carbon sequestration machines. Massive algal blooms cover almost half the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans forming mats tens of metres thick which disrupt shipping. Finally the carbon sequestration machines are switched off, but the drop in world wide CO2 continues. Starvation ensues and all remaining foodstuffs are sequestered.

Now the UK carbon zealots, driven insane by bad scientific models, want to dim the sun and remove CO2 from the environment. Even putting balloons loaded with sulphur dioxide (what about acid rain?) into the atmosphere. They don’t seem to understand that carbon dioxide is neither a pollutant nor a poison, but an essential part of the biosphere. CO2 is life.

Without enough CO2 the world dies. Humanity dies. For what? There is no empirical proof that CO2 controls the weather or climate. As for the ‘all scientists say’ argument, that is based on the Cook et al study 2015 which was such a statistical fudge that it is a wonder it ever got published.

I might be tempted to say that you could not make this up. Obviously I was wrong about that.

Am enjoying the current run of sunny weather. This is good news healthwise as I am working outdoors, building and fixing, topping up my vitamin D levels and working up a sweat. Whilst my hands are busy, my subconscious is currently going over all the ‘Stars’ storylines. Which is a lot of ground to cover before the Irish rain returns this weekend coming and I am once more indoors behind the keyboard.

Not that I think that it is going to be a wet year. My money is on a dryer year, here in the west of Ireland. Not before time. We had two very wet years after all the water vapour punched into the atmosphere by the 2021 Hunga Tonga eruption.

A dry year is fine by me as I love being outdoors whenever possible. There are many tasks to be completed on our small acreage. Fence lines to be moved, clearing up the last of the mess that damned storm left us with at the end of January. Setting up bee traps, building new hives for next year to replace my obliterated colonies. Fixing famine era boundary walls.

The drains are running clear, not backing up like they were. Seeds have been planted, soil moved. New borders in to bring a few more splashes of colour during the Summer. While it sounds like I’m not writing, the opposite is true. Technology to be revisited in the light of new knowledge, storylines adjusted. Notes made. Plots to be checked. Continuity checked. It all has to be done in advance, Working with my hands helps relax me into the right frame of mind to focus on laying down anything from 2-5000 words a day.

5000 words a day sounds like a massive workload, and it is. I’ve managed it once before. With a 1000 words a day scrappage rate, where I had to delete around a 1000 words out of the previous days work for going off on a tangent, glaring plot holes and unusable narrative threads. Last time I had that focus, I managed an average of just over 3,559 word of usable narrative a day over 14 consecutive days.

The only other time I have ever managed close to that kind of work rate, the atmosphere was just right, although I had to take a good long run up at it. A sixty two thousand word novel in just under thirty days. On a manual typewriter. Hodder and Stoughton, a London publisher, showed some interest, but only if I could make it a series, which I couldn’t. So that went nowhere.

But that’s the price of writing fiction.