Climate, Positivism and the Free Market
An unnamed historian living in the Second People's Republic of China in 2399 seeks to understand why the advanced industrial societies failed to prevent catastrophic climate change, despite having both adequate scientific knowledge and the technical means to avert the crisis. The historian draws on records from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards, and describes the growing awareness of climate change in the late twentieth century, the extreme weather events of the early twenty-first century, the subsequent disintegration of the Western Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets and the following events which came to be called the Great Collapse. Two ideologies had gripped the western world and stopped it from taking the action needed to prevent its downfall. The historian is the fictitious narrator of The Collapse of Western Civilisation (Oreskes and Conway, 2014) and the inhibiting ideologies are positivism and market fundamentalism. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with...