The book Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson was called "nonfiction science fiction" by a reviewer, and we thought the term was rather interesting. What happens if we start thinking of models of climate and environment as interactive works of nonfiction? This way of thinking can be found in the work of Dr. Katherine Buse, who has argued that climate models are a form of media, just like books, TV, and video games.
In storytelling, when we tell a true story, we call it "nonfiction." Because ecological models draw upon real world data to tell stories about possible futures, we might call them works of "interactive nonfiction science fiction." Thinking of climate models in this way helps ensure that insights from researchers in the humanities and social sciences don't go overlooked during the creation of climate and ecological models and modeling frameworks. This can help improve model accuracy and legibility, and ensure that important questions about ethics aren't forgotten.
What kind of medium is the ecological model, anyway?
Scenarios in Ecological Modeling. One important feature of ecological models is that they often are organized into multiple scenarios, or different versions of the future in which variations of human decisions and/or external events create different projected outcomes. The practice of using scenarios in climate modeling began two years after the 1st IPCC Assessment Report (in 1990), with the launch of the IS92 Scenarios in 1992. Since then, scenarios frameworks have continued to evolve and be refined. Using scenarios when modeling climate and ecological is helpful for many reasons: It highlights the reality that humans have quite a bit of agency regarding what happens next, while also offering a sense of the range of possibilities. Scenarios can help us feel like things aren't quite so locked in, opening space for collective action and sound decision-making. Care must also be taken to ensure that forms of reification aren't accidentally congealed into scenarios frameworks. This is where researchers in the humanities and social sciences can play an especially important role in the development of climate models, as their training allows them to catch issues early on.
Dealing with uncertainly. All forms of environmental modeling have a level of uncertainly. Uncertainty is inherent and unavoidable in modeling complex systems. For example, long-range weather models can't precisely predict when and where a storm is going to form further out than a couple of weeks, but they can offer us a sense of the likelihood of a storm forming in a given season in a region, under a given set of conditions. Modeling isn't a crystal ball. Yet, modeling can help us track and make sense of patterns.
Some patterns can be tracked, and this helps us gain a sense of what will likely happen if those patterns continue. For example, sometimes we see that a species is disappearing at a steady rate, or a specific molecule is increasing in the atmosphere at a pace we can measure. Likewise, we can also track things like how much energy is being used and how much of the grid has transitioned to renewable energy. We can even track how different social practices can create conditions in which certain types of polluting behavior are statically more or less likely to occur. By tracking patterns like these, researchers can gain a sense of what future conditions could look like, depending on what we, as a species, do next.
Towards useable futures. The process of developing BasedMIP assessment tools is one of finding common ground between disciplines while building data-driven tools that can be used to guide storytelling that explores different visions of what the future could be. Once these media are complete, users will be able to draw upon them to develop data-backed scenarios of their own, making it easy to use a hands-on approach to explore what different futures might look like for climate and a number of Earth's other systems.