When climate fiction feels real

 

Humanity’s climate emergency no longer lurks in some distant, abstract future. It is encroaching – slowly and unevenly – into our daily lives, politics and psychology.

We are living in a time when yesterday’s dystopias are starting to feel like tomorrow’s headlines, and the Danish TV drama Families Like Ours, which I’ve just finished watching (BBC 4 and iPlayer), could hardly be timelier.

Set in a recognisably near-future world, the series imagines a country that will soon become unliveable due to rising sea levels. 

The nation is forced to evacuate in order to avoid the worst effects of climate collapse – an unsettling premise that turns the tables on our assumptions about migration, power, and privilege.

These are not just speculative ideas for me. Similar themes – a fractured country grappling with inundation, social disintegration and a creeping authoritarianism born of environmental breakdown – are explored in my own forthcoming novel.

Watching Families Like Ours, I felt as though I was viewing an alternative version of my own future world – an unsettling “what if”, unfolding not in an alien realm or distant century but just around the next political and climatic corner.

Drama of denial

What’s particularly powerful – and is also noted in The Guardian’s excellent review – is the drama’s restraint in the midst of crisis.

There are no Hollywood-style disasters, no CGI tsunamis or blazing infernos. The apocalypse arrives in the form of an official government directive urging people to evacuate for their own good.

It’s slow, procedural and quietly bureaucratic – a polite but chilling, “Leave while you still can”. It’s not the bang of destruction but the whimper of compliance.

As the review puts it: “The creeping horror comes from how normal everyone is trying to pretend it all is.”

That line haunted me because in many ways it captures the most terrifying part of our own present: the societal impulse to look away from impending disaster.

Denial – especially around the politics of human-driven climate change – is one of the most potent forces of our age. It manifests not only in outright scepticism, but in the performative optimism of politicians and social media commentators, the greenwashing of corporations and the general inertia of daily life.

We’re encouraged to adapt, to “build back better”, to install air conditioning or move to higher ground – all without seriously confronting the root causes or long-term consequences.

In my upcoming novel Flood Waters Down, I explore how denial calcifies into something darker: a form of authoritarianism cloaked in pragmatism. When people become desperate for security, they often look to ideology, to borders, to technological fixes and political scapegoats.

The regime that emerges in my novel doesn’t rise through a coup. It grows organically, incrementally, from the fertile soil of fear, apathy, and obscene wealth.

That’s the genius of Families Like Ours. It shows how easily we might slide into such a world – not with jackboots and firestorms but via polite emails, official notices and a quietly panicking population.

Climate as character

Another powerful parallel is how the environment itself becomes a kind of character – not a passive backdrop, but an active force that shapes events, relationships and identities.

For the Danish series, the land is turning against its people. It’s no longer safe or reliable, forcing individuals and families to make choices they never imagined – not just about where they live but about who they are.

In this context, Flood Waters Down uses the English Fens as a landscape transformed by flooding into a waterlogged no-man’s-land of shifting loyalties and fragile settlements.

It is at once beautiful and treacherous, steeped in memory and myth, but altered beyond recognition. My characters must navigate not just physical terrain but the moral geography of a broken society.

A question that looms large in both the TV drama and climate fiction like mine is: who gets to stay, and who is forced to go?

In Families Like Ours, the reversal of current refugee and migration narratives is pointed. Suddenly, it is affluent Europeans who must flee. The usual script is flipped, inviting viewers to reconsider the racial, economic, and geopolitical dynamics of climate migration.

By contrast, Flood Waters Down focuses on those who are left behind. Those who remain in the Fens – whether by choice, circumstance or resistance – are seen as dangerous or irrelevant by the centralised regime. The government has moved on. Sovereign individuals are given free rein, exploiting the fears of the wealthy.

The people left behind, ghosted from the national narrative, become the seedbed of something new – an insurgent hope, a counterculture rooted in resilience and memory.

Not all of them are heroes. Some are lost, vengeful, morally compromised. But they refuse to disappear. They refuse to comply with the tidy story of evacuation and erasure.

And maybe that’s what climate fiction, at its best, can offer. Not just warnings but alternatives. Not just despair but a glimpse of the radical imagination we’ll need to survive – and adapt.

Edge of reality

Stories about what the future has in store matter because they help us feel the unfolding crisis – not just understand it intellectually but inhabit it emotionally. What would you do? How would you respond? What would you cling to, and what would you let go of?

Climate fiction is not about predicting the future with accuracy. It’s about preparing ourselves with clarity and courage to meet what materialises. And it may yet prove to be one of our most powerful tools in confronting the climate emergency.

The Danish drama ends not with neat resolution but with the unsettling knowledge that something has irrevocably changed – and that our familiar categories of nation, family, identity and home may no longer apply.

Flood Waters Down concludes too not with triumph but with possibility. With characters who have chosen to fight for a different kind of future, even as the old world sinks beneath the waterline and a new, uncertain one begins to emerge.

The climate emergency is already here. The question is: what stories will we tell about it – and what kind of world will we shape in its wake?

Space junk pollution

 

Thousands of satellites that burn up in Earth’s atmosphere are leaving more than just streaks of light in the sky.

A groundbreaking study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres has revealed that dying satellites – those burning up on re-entry after completing their missions in orbit – are releasing pollutants that could have alarming consequences for both the climate and ozone layer.

As satellite megaconstellations grow exponentially, the problem is no longer confined to a niche realm of astrophysics. It’s rapidly becoming a global environmental issue.

Today, there are more than 9,000 satellites orbiting Earth and by 2040 that number is predicted to swell to over 60,000. The driving force behind this growth is the rapid deployment of government and commercial satellite constellations, primarily for broadband internet coverage by companies such as SpaceX and Amazon.

But, as the saying goes, what goes up must come down – and when these satellites complete their missions after relatively short lifetimes, they are routinely deorbited to burn up in the atmosphere.

While this may seem like a tidy solution, it’s anything but clean. The study, led by atmospheric scientist Jamie Shutler and colleagues, finds that re-entering satellites release thousands of tonnes of metal particles into the stratosphere every year.

Chief among these is aluminum oxide (Al₂O₃), a substance with the potential to alter temperature patterns and disrupt delicate atmospheric chemistry.

The authors estimate that by 2040 as many as 10,000 metric tonnes of aluminum oxide could be entering the upper atmosphere annually. This figure represents a staggering increase compared to today’s levels and signals a future where human-made atmospheric contamination could rival or exceed that of natural processes like volcanic eruptions.

Aluminum oxide is no benign byproduct. According to the study, its presence can cause localised heating of up to 1.5C in the middle and upper atmosphere.

“These temperature changes could disrupt wind patterns and other critical dynamics of the stratosphere,” the authors warn.

Perhaps more disturbingly, these disruptions could delay the recovery of the ozone layer – a thin but vital shield that protects life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation.

In an unusually short three paragraph article on its website The Guardian, in summarising the findings, quotes Shutler as saying: “This is a new, emerging chemical pathway that is completely anthropogenic. We are fundamentally changing the chemistry of the atmosphere in a way that has not been considered before.”

The satellite industry has long viewed atmospheric re-entry as a convenient and eco-friendly solution to space junk. But as this study makes clear, the process may be quietly shifting the baseline of Earth’s climate systems.

Particles produced during re-entry are not merely disbursed and forgotten. Instead, they form persistent aerosols that can act as radiative agents – essentially reflecting or trapping heat – while also playing a role in catalysing chemical reactions that destroy ozone.

Aluminum is not the only concern. The study also highlights the release of other metals such as titanium, iron, copper, and lithium – all of which have their own complex chemical interactions and unknown long-term impacts.

The exact consequences of this metallised upper atmosphere are still being modelled, but early signs point to a troubling new front in humanity’s planetary impact.

Researchers also note the increasing role of some rocket launches, particularly from private companies, which contribute additional pollutants like black carbon. Such compounds rise into the stratosphere, where they can remain for years, compounding the problem.

A 2022 study by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned that soot from rockets alone could increase stratospheric temperatures and disrupt polar vortexes. The new satellite re-entry data adds another layer to this growing concern.

Ironically, many of the satellites responsible for these emissions are part of systems designed to monitor and combat climate change. In attempting to connect the world and collect vital environmental data, we may be undermining the very systems that sustain life on Earth.

The implications of the study are sobering. The scientific community and regulatory bodies have, until now, paid scant attention to the effects of mass satellite re-entry. That’s likely to change. As one of the study’s co-authors bluntly put it: “We’re geoengineering the stratosphere without realising it.”

So, what now? The researchers call for urgent reforms to how we manage satellite end-of-life processes.

Alternatives could include designing spacecraft with minimal pollutant output on re-entry, retrieving and disposing of satellites differently, or even developing reusable systems that don’t require destructive descent at all.

These options will require international cooperation and new frameworks for space governance – something the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has only recently begun to explore.

Earth’s climate crisis has taught us at least one painful lesson: seemingly invisible emissions, once dismissed or underestimated, can have catastrophic consequences. Now, with space becoming the next industrial frontier, we must apply that lesson to the skies above.

Satellites may be our eyes in the heavens, but their burning remains are falling into our future. The time to act is now, while we still have the tools to prevent a new kind of environmental crisis.

As the paper’s authors conclude: “The cumulative effect of satellite re-entries must be taken seriously as part of Earth’s changing atmospheric budget.”

If we fail to heed this warning, the sky itself may become the next casualty of human excess.

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Article references:

Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres - Investigating the Potential AtmosphericAccumulation and Radiative Impact of the Coming Increase in Satellite ReentryFrequency 

The Guardian - Dying satellites can drive climate change and ozone depletion