Am reading JG Ballard's The Drowned World at the moment, which has turned out to be a deeply prophetic read, particularly after the floods in Cumbria that have happened in the last few days, the latest in what feels like an annual event in England, as well as the omniprescent advertising for disaster movies like 2012 (something that I touched on with a previous post about Ballard here). You could argue that the flooding has nothing to do with global warming, but somehow it feels like their continued existence cannot be attributed simply to normal weather. But it's also eerily accurate in matching the description of what James Lovelock has predicted will happen to the Earth in The Revenge of Gaia, as well as other predictions of future global warming, particularly with this excerpt that mentions a future migration to the North and South poles - exactly what scientists, in fact, have predicted:

"All over the world, mean temperatures rose by a few degrees each year. The majority of tropical areas rapidly became uninhabitable, entire populations migrating north or south from temperatures of a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty degrees...during the next thirty years the pole-ward migration of populations continued...only within the former Arctic and Antarctic Circles was life tolerable."

Ballard wrote the book in 1962, which shows just how prescient he could be. Did he know something that we didn't?