I’ll be talking about the next three decades of climate change and what this period will bring to Berkshire County residents. Why the Berkshires? Well, that is the central location for the four books in the climate fiction series The Steep Climes Quartet. Kill Well, the first book of the series, and Dear Josephine, the second, are published, and the year these books take place is 2026 and 2029, respectively. The last two books—Over Brooklyn Hills and Farm to Me—take place in 2035 and 2047, respectively.

No, there isn’t much chance for a cataclysmic apocalypse, but climate change is causing definite and unavoidable changes for all of us in this timeframe. Costs rise, weather becomes more unsettled, and the question of politics, too. The series also looks at how we, as a state, a nation, and a world, address the consequences of humans dumping greenhouse gases in ever-increasing quantities since the Industrial Revolution began, and with exploding population numbers. The chance for catastrophe will grow slowly in this series’ timeframe, but that matters little if it is your house flooded out by a deluge or if your outside activity gets more and more restricted as wet bulb heatwaves increase, or food costs keep jumping higher. Climate change is expensive, but exponentially more expense is the cost exacted by doing nothing. If we let the world slide into 3 degrees Celsius or more above pre-industrial global average temperatures, the world will be changed, and not for the better!

I’ve studied long and hard about climate change in order to give the series as plausible situations and I’ll be reading some excerpts from the first two books to illustrate aspects of the world we’re facing tomorrow and in the decades to come.

Griswold Memorial Library is located at 12 Main Rd, Colrain (Franklin County), and for a South County guy like me, a bit far afield, but I’m looking forward to the beautiful drive on secondary highways, even if that’s an extra few minutes. And Berkshire or Franklin or, for that matter, most any other location in the Northeast carries much the same forecasts.

I’ll be presenting next week, too, and rather much closer to home. On Wednesday, May 21, at 6:30 p.m., I’ll be presenting at Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, and on Friday, May 23, at 4:00 p.m., I’ll be speaking at Mason Library, in Great Barrington.