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Credit Illustration by Jordin Isip

When extraordinary hurricanes and floods battered parts of the United States and Caribbean this month, Paolo Bacigalupi’s readers started sending him news clips. In “Ship Breaker,” which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, Mr. Bacigalupi, a science fiction writer, had invented a monster “Category 6” hurricane.

Now, his readers were asking: Is this what you were talking about?

Climate change presents a peculiar challenge to novelists; it often seems to simmer without a singular moment of crisis. So fiction writers like Mr. Bacigalupi hurtle current science into drought-ravaged, flooded, starved, sunken and sandy futures. Climate-themed fiction, like most science fiction, is extension, not invention.

But as scientists’ projections about the effects of climate change have increasingly become reality, some works of apocalyptic fiction have begun to seem all too plausible. We chose seven climate-themed stories and asked the experts: How likely are they to come true?

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    Climate Effect: Water Wars
    ‘The Water Knife’
    by Paolo Bacigalupi

    In his fifth climate-related book, published in 2015, Mr. Bacigalupi asks: What would happen if drought became the “new normal” in the American Southwest? His answer: Refugees, apocalyptic cults and drug dealers roam a land where water is controlled by thugs.

    “What if our underlying prosperity is ripped out from underneath us?” Mr. Bacigalupi said. “If you put those questions in people’s mind, it changes how they look at their daily life.”

    Leon Szeptycki, an attorney and professor specializing in water rights at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, described the book as fictional extension. “Climate change will cause a lot of social and economic disruption in the American Southwest, but not at the level the author envisions,” he said.

    Eighty to 90 percent of water in the Southwest is used for agriculture, so rural communities would be hit first by shortages, Mr. Szeptycki said. “Available water will shift to cities,” he said. “There will be less water, less food, fewer jobs.”

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    Climate Effect: Desertification
    ‘Gold Fame Citrus’
    by Claire Vaye Watkins

    Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2016 novel, her first, imagines drought differently. Sand has swallowed California; now it’s known as the Amargosa Dune Sea. Nothing grows in the lawless desert, but a wandering dowser claims that new species — a diurnal owl, carnivorous plants and albino hummingbirds — have emerged through a “super-speed evolutionary time warp.”

    “Absolutely, climate change can accelerate evolution,” said Jeffrey Townsend, a professor of evolutionary biology at Yale. Humans have set off many evolutionary changes, like when insects have adapted to pesticides or when the peppered moth lost its spots to more closely resemble industrial soot. Plants becoming meat eaters would be more of a stretch, Dr. Townsend said.

    The novel is “not an unreasonable fictional depiction” of drought, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system science at Stanford. California already has a “new climate,” he added. Anthropogenic warming has increased the state’s drought risk, but permanent rainlessness remains unlikely.

    “That’s probably where the scientific literature and the novel diverge,” Dr. Diffenbaugh said. “Humans are able to probe these issues in ways that are different through the lens of fiction.”

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    Climate Effect: Species Extinction
    ‘Flight Behavior’
    by Barbara Kingsolver

    The central character in Barbara Kingsolver’s 2015 novel doesn’t believe in climate change until she has a “vision of glory” — a colony of monarch butterflies from Mexico appears in southern Appalachia, disoriented by warming temperatures.

    “I think it could happen, but pretty far into the distant future when global warming really has an effect further north,” said Lincoln Brower, a research professor of biology at Sweet Briar College, whom Ms. Kingsolver consulted while writing the book.

    Dr. Brower, who has been studying the death of monarch butterflies for six decades, said their numbers were already “way down” because of a combination of pesticide use, logging and the impacts of climate change. But he guessed it would take about half a century before temperatures in Appalachia rose enough to accommodate the butterflies during their winter migration.

    “It’s hard to know what’s going to happen,” Dr. Brower said, “but I don’t think it will be good.”

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    Climate Effect: Disrupted Food Chain
    ‘The History of Bees’
    by Maja Lunde

    China, 2098: Tao is up a tree, hand-pollinating its blossoms with a tiny brush. The bees are long since gone. Maja Lunde’s first book, published in 2017, chronicles three generations as they exploit, try to save and eventually mimic bees, whose extinction has become a familiar device in climate-themed fiction.

    “It’s a crazy idea, and it’s being done,” said Jeremy Kerr, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Ottawa, describing the hand-pollinators of Hanyuan County in China’s Sichuan Province.

    Pollinators like bees (and birds, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, beetles, bats and mosquitoes) are crucial to the food chain because they move pollen between fruit, vegetables and nuts. Plants that depend on pollination are 35 percent of global crop production. While Colony Collapse Disorder — previously believed to pose a major threat to all bees — has declined substantially in recent years, Dr. Kerr said it was conceivable that five or six “keystone” species, which pollinate crops like canola, tomatoes, blueberries and strawberries, could be lost, in part because of global warming.

    But hand-pollination? “The question of whether you could do something like that on a planetary scale,” Dr. Kerr said, “Holy moly, if that’s where we got to, I think other things would probably kill us first.”

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    Climate Effect: Refugees
    ‘Borne’
    by Jeff VanderMeer

    In Jeff VanderMeer’s 2017 novel, rising waters force a child named Rachel to flee her island home, so she moves “from camp to camp, country to country,” hoping that she “could outrun the unraveling of the world.” Later, in a nameless ruined city, the 28-year-old Rachel befriends an amorphous creature, Borne, who smells like brine and reminds her of the sea animals of her childhood.

    Extreme weather events uproot 21.5 million people each year, according to the United Nations refugee agency, and climate change is expected to increase that number. But there is no internationally accepted legal status for people who have been displaced by the impacts of climate change.

    “What would be fair,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, “would be for each of the major emitting countries to accept a portion of the world’s climate-displaced people proportional to its historic contribution” of greenhouse gases.

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    Climate Effect: Drowned Cities
    ‘New York: 2140’
    by Kim Stanley Robinson

    Veering from the dystopian futures common to climate-themed fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 book is what the author calls a “comedy of coping,” set in a Venetian-like half-submerged New York City. Seas have risen 50 feet, making Lower Manhattan a low-rent “intertidal” zone; water washes up to 46th Street every 12 hours. New Yorkers commute not by subway, but by vaporetto.

    While multi-meter sea level rise in New York City is realistic, the time scale is not, said Benjamin Horton, a professor at Rutgers who focuses on sea level change. He said that current modeling predicted extreme flooding of New York City by around 2300, but that the city would likely protect itself from rising waters with sea walls and other infrastructure.

    Mr. Robinson said he had chosen the year 2140 to balance scientific predictions with a plot that could incorporate a transformed economic system.

    “Climate change is basically a capitalist catastrophe,” he said. “We have to create post-capitalism to deal with climate change.”

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    Climate Effect: Adaptation
    ‘The Machine Stops’
    by E. M. Forster

    Forster’s eerily prescient novella imagines a world where life on earth’s surface — besides ferns and “a little grass” — has become impossible. Humans live underground, where they communicate via glowing blue-lit plates and eat, drink and sleep to the rhythm of the eternally humming “Machine.”

    Written in 1909 — just over a decade after the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggested anthropogenic emissions could change the climate — “The Machine Stops” prophetically described something like the internet. But it was far off in imagining how we would adapt to climate change, said Jonathan Foley, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences.

    “The idea that we could have self-sufficient civilization underground basically requires we replace the sun,” Dr. Foley said. “And any technology that’s capable of doing that — whether it be fusion, or some kind of magical technology — would have to be so powerful that I’d ask: Why didn’t we solve the climate problem first?”

    Dr. Foley said the novel’s ideas weren’t that far from the science-fiction-like discussions he heard coming from Silicon Valley, where vertical gardens, orbiting microwave transmitters or machines that harvest carbon are touted as silver bullets for climate change. “The actual solutions are far simpler,” he said. “But they’re not as sexy. Like, hey: What if we threw less food away, or we ate less meat?”

    Dr. Foley said that if he ever wrote a novel, it would be one in which “we all do the slow, hard muddling work of just pitching in, but no hero rides in on a spaceship to save us all.” It would be a terrible novel, he admitted. “No one would buy it, and Hollywood wouldn’t make a movie, but it’s the one I want, and it would surely save the world.”