An Italian Lovecraftian this week points out that Lovecraft and Barlow did alarmist ‘global warming’ fiction first, with their tale “Till A’ the Seas” (January 1935, for the Californian Summer 1935 issue). The Earth is slipping imperceptibly closer to the Sun, in their fictional future-scenario, and heating up accordingly.

The Italian author observes that… “When this story was written, fears of this kind were certainly much less present in society”. Sort-of, I’d add. While it’s true that the “fears” were not then both widespread and hysterical, there was concern that verged on alarmist. A quick scoot around the Web shows such worries were then quite prominent in the press, and such reports presumably prompted the tale. A few examples (sans CO2) will suffice…

L.A. Times summary of the year

An agency wire-report from Switzerland, reported as far afield as Australia.

British Met Office reportedly anticipating half of England being wiped off the map by flooding.

Thus, when I say they did “alarmist” fiction first, I mean they did fiction that was published in a timely manner and amplified the popular alarmist press coverage.

One can now see that this was the 1920s/30s flipside of a widespread Victorian / Edwardian false consensus of a gradual and unavoidable cooling. Here is H.G. Wells on the topic in 1931, remembering the way that this belief hobbled the optimism of the late Victorians and early Edwardians, and indeed the world…

… the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the “inevitable” freezing up of the world — and of life and mankind with it. There was no escape it seemed. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less. They impressed this upon us with the full weight of their authority, while now Sir James Jeans in his smiling [book] Universe Around Us waves us on to millions of millions of years. Given as much as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, and the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour of regret that one was born so soon.

This is from his 1931 preface to a new edition of his famous book The Time Machine (1895). Wells refers to the idea that the Sun only had a limited store of material to burn, and must inevitably cool as it would use this material up before another million years had gone by — and with its depletion the Earth was also forever cooling and would relatively soon become inhospitable to life. Here is the younger Wells of 1894 in a leading London paper, noting the consensus of his day…

On the supposition, accepted by all scientific men, that the earth is undergoing a steady process of cooling …” (“Another Basis for Life”, Saturday Review, 22nd December 1894).

Just as many Tentaclii readers will have lived in times which saw scientists flip (in our case between the 1970s panic about a new Ice Age, and the current greenhouse warming), it appears Lovecraft and his generation lived through a similar flip.

27-minute Horrorbabble reading of “Till A’ the Seas” audiobook, free on YouTube.