When author and Science Museum writer-in-residence Tony White was invited to write the libretto for a new opera about the ill-fated Shackleton expedition, he found himself on a journey of his own, encountering the very latest ideas about climate change - and some very old ones too.

When the composer Martyn Harry and John Fulljames of The Opera Group approached me to develop and write a libretto for a new opera – South – that sets out to create a live dialogue with the Frank Hurley film of Shackleton's failed 1914-1916 attempt to cross the Antarctic continent and their subsequent desperate boat journey to freedom, I was instantly intrigued.

I knew the story well. One of the many excellent books to come out of that expedition, Shackleton's Boat Journey by Endurance captain Frank Worsley, had been nightly bed-time reading for my now teenage son when he was 6 or 7! It is a gripping read and tells how, in 1916, Sir Ernest Shackleton and a small crew – including Worsley – made their desperate bid for freedom and rescue after months trapped in the ice on the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. It was a combination of extraordinary strength and courage and Worsley's ability to navigate from very occasional fleeting views of the stars that enabled them to make their epic, 800 mile voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia in a tiny boat called the James Caird.

The expedition's original goal of crossing the continent was long forgotten. They never even set foot on Antarctica before they were frozen in and their ship crushed. Now the aim was simply to survive and to find a means to rescue the other members of the crew still stranded on Elephant Island.

Expedition photographer Frank Hurley – an Australian member of the expedition – captured their struggle for survival on film, and upon their eventual return to England this footage was edited to produce a stirring silent film, South: Sir Ernest Shackleton's Glorious Epic of the Antarctic. The term 'documentary' had not yet been coined when South was made, but Hurley's film is nonetheless an extraordinary document of a truly extraordinary human experience.

However, the film does simplify the expedition's tale of survival. For example, the deaths of members of the ill-prepared supply team who had landed on the other side of the continent to lay a trail of supplies for Shackleton and his men is left out of this ultimately triumphant tale ("All saved! All well!" is how the film's caption card has it). Similarly glossed over is the tragic fact that some members of the expedition performed their astonishing feat of endurance and escaped tremendous hardship only to die in the trenches upon their return. The film's revised function as a national morale-booster at the end of a long and bloody war is evident at times, but not entirely to blame: this simplification is perhaps mainly a result of Hurley's camera being necessarily absent (or not running) during the most dramatic and daring parts of the story. Other parts of the film have unexpected resonances, too. For example, scenes taken as the men were forced to abandon the boat and are camping amongst abandoned wreckage and sorting through items that they can carry away, would be familiar to anyone who has seen TV footage of any refugee crisis of the past 20 years or more.

What made the idea even more interesting was an intuition that Frank Hurley's film might, if viewed now, have resonances with current thinking on climate change. Here might be a very pressing reason to look again at those early films of Antarctica, a continent which less than 100 years after Hurley pointed a camera at it is now so much at risk, and to explore creatively – through a dialogue between the film and a new opera – the legacies a melting Antarctica might leave for future generations.

Interestingly, as we started workshopping the project just before Christmas 2007, it seemed that Antarctica was becoming inescapable in the media. And this was not just because of announcements relating to the International Polar Year. One such incident involved the cruise ship MS Explorer which hit an iceberg and capsized whilst taking a party of tourists on a cruise that, ironically enough, was re-enacting parts of Shackleton's voyage. Luckily for these tourists a number of factors were working in their favour – not least, as Dr John Shears of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) tells me, the accident happened during a very brief window of clear, mild weather; although within five hours that had turned. Also, unlike in Shackleton's day (when it took nearly two years to get word to the outside world about the disaster that had befallen the expedition), within two hours of the Explorer hitting an iceberg, the accident was being reported on global news networks – indeed Dr Shears explained that the first the Emergency Response Team at BAS heard of the incident was when it was reported on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. A further unexpected connection with the Shackleton era was that the MS Explorer was equipped with old-style, open life boats. Dr Shears tells me that BAS vessels are all now equipped with covered life-craft that are specially designed for the region. The people rescued from the stricken Explorer were, he says, "lucky to survive."

Returning to Frank Hurley's film, though, what is clear from the film and the various books about the expedition is that Sir Ernest Shackleton was a resourceful and charismatic leader who inspired his men with his bravery. A lover of poetry, especially that of Browning – which he was fond of quoting and discussing at times of trouble – he also believed strongly in maintaining morale through activities and entertainments. On an earlier expedition with Robert Falcon Scott, Shackleton was the founding editor of a ship-board newspaper, the South Polar Times. This was a means of what would now be called 'knowledge exchange' with expedition members writing guides to using specialised scientific equipment, but was also home to poetry, art and satire, all rendered in the unique styles of the day.

Looking back through the facsmiles of the South Polar Times, I was particularly struck by a series of science fiction stories. There are one or two in almost every issue. I'd never even heard of these before, and my surprise was echoed by Professor David Walton of BAS who wryly agreed that this small branch of polar literature, "had certainly been overlooked."

In these fanciful tales they speculate upon how their deeds might be portrayed far in to the future. One such story, Leaves from an ancient papyrus is a fragmentary description of their expedition apparently put together from documents found in "Ancient London" in 2198 (projections of Britain as a wrecked civilisation abound in these stories, actually).

Another, "Fragments of a manuscript found by the people of Sirius..."^_[1] is the most striking. Written by 'the last surviving Human', it describes a world in which Antarctica's central role in driving the world's oceans is disrupted by massive climate change caused by industrial exploitation (within the story, water is recast metaphorically as an 'elixir of life' that can only be produced by freezing cycles in Antarctica). This has fatal consequences, for as the scientists discover, 'ice age must be followed by tropical age'. The final note of dismay is that the warnings of the Antarctic scientists were not heeded or acted upon.

Sitting there in the quiet of the British Library's Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room, I could scarcely believe what I was reading. For one thing I hadn't realised that climate change was even thought about at the beginning of the 20^th century (although I now know that Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius published a paper in 1896 entitled "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground." [opens paper as PDF]). Furthermore, talk of ice-age being followed by tropical age reflected findings from paleobotany about warmer past climates at the poles which are probably common knowledge in the scientific community, but which I'd only just heard of as I started to read around the subject. The image of Antarctica as a hub of the world's oceans seemed also to be echoed in a radical and contemporary approach to looking at the world that has been devised not by scientists but by the artist Peter Fend.

There is a revolutionary English folk song from the 17^th century, called "The World Turned Upside Down" which gently and metaphorically proposes a series of reversals of the world order: 'If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows, And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse...' Turning the world upside down is also a necessary imaginative strategy for anyone wanting to think about Antarctica as it really is rather than as the familiar, broad, white margin along the bottom of the Mercator projection. Peter Fend's projection does exactly this. In his map, we see Antarctica at the centre of a global map that is almost unrecognisable at first glance, not least because he also dissects continental land masses according to water tables and where they outflow. Fend believes that this new way of looking at the world can, "contribute to predictions of long-term climate change based upon the re-organization of geographical information according not to land masses or hemispheres, but to ocean basins."^[2]

"The point of the map is to make clear how ocean currents function," Fend writes, when I email him to ask for more information about the projection. "The Arctic is subordinate, oceanically, to Antarctica. It is at a cul-de-sac in ocean circulation, the main gyre of which lies in the Southern Ocean, with splays out into the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans."

Eco-Labs founder Jody Boehnert suggests in a recent paper that, "Graphic design must embrace its unique ability to facilitate change by engaging with the emergent concept of ecological literacy." For design here, we could equally read, "the arts", and Fend's new world map certainly has the potential to mark a radical shift in such a growing ecological literacy.

Perhaps surprisingly, climate science and opera have something in common: their shared – though divergent – uses of the word "scenario". The meaning of which, Wikipedia tells us is, "that which is pinned to the scenery [...] In the Commedia dell'arte it was an outline of entrances, exits, and action describing the plot of a play that was literally pinned to the back of the scenery." In opera, the term scenario has come to mean an outline of scenes and characters, a synopsis, that is used to explore aspects of the work in its early stages of development.

These discoveries from the South Polar Times, and the poetic resonances they offered, seemed precisely to be the beginning building blocks of my own operatic scenario. I started to think about a warmer Antarctic continent; about Human migration in a post-climate change world, and how the sea power which enabled the UK and other great powers to explore Antarctica and map what is still sometimes referred to as the "white continent", was built on the development of capitalist economies of the Atlantic, i.e. the Slave Trade. In relation to this I was delighted to discover that John Gay used "The World Turned Upside Down" for one of the airs in his ballad opera Polly of 1729, which is set amongst slaves, transportees, Native Americans and pirates in the colonies – what is now refered to as the Black Atlantic.^[3] Hurley's refugee-like imagery also seemed to resonate with contemporary migration from for example Sub-Saharan Africa. A connection that is not as far fetched as it sounds. Today as I write, thousands of people from all walks of life and across the world, set out on boat journeys that are not so dissimilar to Shackleton's bid for freedom. These boat journeys, too, are quests for survival. Caught up in continent-wide, exploitative economies in which people become another commodity, they set off in barely sea-worthy open boats to embark on voyages that are every bit as perilous and epic as Shackleton’s.

Arnolfini in Bristol recently put together an excellent show entitled Port City^[4]. The exhibition included a major video installation by the artist Ursula Biemann [still from The Maghreb Connection pictured right]. Sahara Chronicle consists of an "undefined number of short videos documenting the present sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe [and examining] the politics of mobility and containment which lies at the heart of the current global geopolitics." Biemann describes this network as "a vibrant process of spatialization performed by the psychic dynamics of anxiety, fantasy and desire, a web made of obstinacy and vulnerability."^[5] There are unexpectedly profound connections between Frank Hurley's imagery of Shackleton et al fleeing across the ice with their open boats, and the imagery that Biemann has collected.

Fusing these ideas, in developing South, we have imagined a hot world in which a by now temperate Antarctica becomes a mythic place of refuge for people who are fleeing for their lives in open boats across the Southern Ocean, just as Shackleton once did and as people from the Sub-Sahara are doing in the Atlantic now. What kinds of stories would these 22^nd or 23^rd century refugees use to sustain themselves on their epic voyages of survival, and how might a folklore of the founding fathers of this new Antarctic continent remember the exploits of Sir Ernest Shackleton. We wondered if the Shackleton story might become part of the continent’s creation myth in the same way that stories about Columbus, the Pilgrim Fathers or a land of plenty offered refugees and transportees to America a sustaining vision of a new world offering safety, freedom and opportunity, but were also used to mask the realities of the slave trade.

In climate science and the related policy arena, of course, the scenario has quite a different purpose: to explore the processes and impacts of climate change. Some of the more pessimistic scenarios suggest vast upheaval, wars and population movements; the refugee crises of the 20^th century becoming a mere dress rehearsal in comparison with such mass evacuations.

I was intrigued as to whether there might be continuities between the operatic scenario I was starting to imagine for South and some of the futures that are being imagined across climate science, so I went to meet with a number of scientists working in the field. These interviews are by no means exhaustive, but have enabled me to further contextualise my and our creative processes as we begin our own journey from scenario to libretto to opera.

The most authoritative climate change scenarios are collected together under the banner of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a policy-neutral, scientific intergovernmental body set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The IPCC was established, "to provide the decision-makers and others interested in climate change with an objective source of information about climate change. [...] Its role is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its observed and projected impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation."^[6]

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007 (IPCC 4) was recently published. This actually comprises a suite of very hefty documents that include a Synthesis Report as well as separate publications from each of the IPCC's three working groups: Working Group I Report: The Physical Science Basis; Working Group II Report: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, and; Working Group III Report: Mitigation of Climate Change. These reports and the hinterland of documents surrounding them are too vast and detailed to even begin to summarise here, though aspects of them come up in some of the conversation below and I'd recommend anyone to browse through them. Most of the sections I've read do certainly contain a "Summary for Policymakers" which – while alarming – is phrased in slightly less technical language.

The Met Office Hadley Centre is the UK's foremost centre for climate change research – and one of the largest single contributors to the science component of the IPCC process. I visited the Met Office's impressive new headquarters in Exeter to speak with Dr Mark McCarthy of the Climate Impacts team – but it was also a real thrill peer over the shoulder of the man who was compiling that day's Shipping Forecast.

McCarthy himself has a background in physics, meteorology and atmospheric physics – and has been working at the Met Office Hadley Centre for 10 years. For much of this time he's been concentrating on historical climate records with a particular focus on the role of water vapour. We discuss the Cloud Appreciation Society, but Mark reminds me that water vapour is itself a greenhouse gas and that as the globe warms up more water will evaporate into the atmosphere which in turn would be able to hold more – an example perhaps of the kinds of positive feedbacks which scientists fear will further accelerate warming processes.

McCarthy tells me that there is a huge benefit that comes from the Hadley Centre being an integral part of the Met Office. "The same fundamental physics, the same model, is used for the day to day weather forecast as for our climate simulations. So the benefits feed both ways and all of the developments that we discover through the climate research feed back in to the model that's being developed with the weather forecast and vice versa."

I ask about the kinds of models that the Met Office Hadley Centre have developed and how far into the future they project. We talk of "slab oceans", and he outlines such things as HadCM3L ("the Hadley Centre 'coupled' climate model,which incorporates interactions between atmosphere, ocean and land surfaces") and tells me that models have been run, "across several millennia to look at historical climate variability and try to replicate the long term cycles [but] most of the models now run at the Hadley Centre project about 100 years in to the future."

I'm intrigued: Why not further?

"Where that becomes problematic, is that it's difficult to know what it is telling you about future climates, because the further into the future you go, the more significant the scenarios that you're driving it with become, particularly in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We can't make any assertions about what the natural variability might do, and e.g. we don't know what volcanic activity is going to be like over the next 100 years or what solar activity changes there might be. So it's not necessarily sensible to try and push them beyond 100 years to make those climate predictions.

"But going back," he continues, "to the word 'scenario', we can't pretend to predict human behaviour or how people are going to respond to a change of climate, so there is an international effort to draw up a set of defined scenarios for the IPCC, to span different scenarios of population growth and reliance on different kinds of fuel technology. Those sets of scenarios fall in to four broad categories to provide some span of the range of possible future socio-economic pathways that we might follow. You're creating some scenario of what human beings might do and then how that affects greenhouse gas emissions and then in turn how the climate responds."

These IPCC "storylines" and "scenario families" are part of the IPCC's Special Report on Emissions Scenarios – or SRES (pronounced 'ess-rez' for short). McCarthy says that, "the IPCC review process is very extensive and there are very strong constraints on what is suitable to be refereed by the IPCC. By the time it has gone through that process it becomes the most authoritiative, agreed upon statement of the consensus of opinion in science that there is, and in that way represents a very important body of work. The downside of that process is that there can be quite a time-lag, so obviously although IPCC 4 was only published last year, there's a lot of research that's happened in the intervening time."

The implication of this is that much recent research is not included in the most recently published IPCC. In light of this, I ask Dr McCarthy how IPCC 5 might differ or develop from the current report. We start talking about the language being used in IPCC reports and how this is coded according to very careful criteria.^[7] So for example, major statements in IPCC are assigned degrees of confidence: if something is assigned a level of "very high confidence", this means that there is "at least [a] 9 out of 10 chance of [its] being correct." Similar schema apply to probabilities of outcomes, with a likelihood of "virtually certain" meaning that there is a greater than 99% "probability of occurrence."

McCarthy suggests that, "What's interesting is the strength of the language that you can see growing through time. Certainly the physical science statements in the most recent reports make clear that warming of the climate system is unequivocal and so there's a very strong use of language compared to the early reports where there was still considerable debate about the size of the uncertainties and the historical temperature records and so on. To some extent there's an analogy in that the strength of some of the language in the IPCC Impacts and Adaptation report is maybe where the physical science basis language was in IPCC 3 back in 2001. As the science develops, as our confidence in the physical mechanisms and processes grows, then that will feed through and hopefully improve our understanding of the knock-on impacts."

I wonder whether a kind of frisson goes around the building when a major climate-related event happens – perhaps something that the models had not predicted.

"There are certain events that will trigger particular activity – and of course we will be asked for comment or analysis – whether from Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), where a large proportion of Met Office Hadley Centre funding comes from, or the press. So with a lot of extreme events people ask us, 'Is this climate change in action?' and the standard response has usually been that we can't attribute individual events to climate change – because extreme events happen, that's their nature and the climate varies of its own accord so you have wet summers and you'll have floods and you'll have heatwaves.

"But what we're now doing a lot more of is looking at an attribution of risk. So one example that's been used extensively is the European heatwave in 2003. There were 35,000 deaths attributed to that across Europe and it was a very significant event, and it was far and above any other extreme heat event that had ever occurred in the observed historical record going back to the mid-19^th century. So it really stood out as particularly extreme. Work was done bringing together the historical observations and the climate model work we do to look at how climate change that has occurred over the last century has affected the risk of events of that magnitude occuring, and that work came out to show that in current climate conditions an event of the magnitude of 2003 is now about twice as likely as it was before. So you can attribute about 50% of the risk of that event as having come from climate change, without having to say 'That event was climate change.'"

Given the kind of story that is emerging through our scenario for South, I'm also interested in climate change impacts in terms of population movements. So I ask Dr McCarthy how those kinds of things get factored in to the models?

He tells me that although the models don't include human movements per se, scientists can look at things like water stress ("when the demand for water exceeds the available amount during a certain period or when poor quality restricts its use"^[8]), "where we can say it's likely that this region will see an increase in water stress, based on population and water availability, while other regions may see a decrease in water stress. Another piece of research is looking at the number of people that would be likely to be at risk from coastal flooding due to sea level rise under future climate change: particularly looking at Southern Asia and the Bay of Bengal to identify where populations may be forced into mass migration as a result of exposure to those kind of events. And there's a link between the adaptability of the nation and the coincidence of extreme events. So with the risk of sea level rise coupled with storm surges, far more people are going to be exposed to those sorts of events."

It's slightly chilling reading through my notes at this point. My conversation with Mark McCarthy took place on the 24^th April 2008. It couldn't have been predicted, but only one week later Cyclone Nargis was gaining strength in exactly the area he was talking about before sweeping over Burma's Irrawaddy Delta and creating a storm surge the exact impacts of which remain unclear. Official estimates at time of writing suggest 23,335 people were killed and 37,019 are missing^[9] with a further 1.5 million 'at risk'. It's an indicator of the tragedy that can be wreaked by storm surge alone – without the added danger, yet, of dramatically rising sea levels beyond the few milimetres per year that is currently observed. Even so, a Met Office spokesperson tells me, "a warmer climate is likely to lead to an increase of intense tropical storms with associated higher wind speeds, heavier rain and storm surges."

Echoing the South Polar Times science fiction story about "tropical age" succeeding "ice age", one of the more memorable presentations at a recent conference, Polar: Fieldwork and Archive Fever at the British Library, was by Professor Robert Spicer of the Open University who spoke about how work in paleobotany is adding to knowledge about a time when climate conditions at the poles were significantly warmer than they are now. I made contact with Professor Spicer a few weeks later, and arranged a visit to his department at the OU's Milton Keynes campus. He generously gave me a couple of hours of his time, even though the following day he was leaving for a two-month fieldwork trip to India.

When I arrive, Professor Spicer canters through basic knowledge about the continent. He tells me that while other major continents broke away from the prehistoric super continent of Gondwana, Antarctica has been roughly in the same position for most of its existence over the last 2-300 million years. From the early days of Antarctic exploration at the end of the 19^th century, coal and plant fossils were found amongst the ice, and the presence of fossils of things like cycads, "really did indicate to people that the poles were once considerably warmer than they are now.

"Around 100-150 million years ago, Antarctica had a small icecap, perhaps the size of the Greenland icecap and possibly at an altitude above 2000 metres. So it would have sat on the mountains and all around it you'd have had forests. The closest analogue would be the kinds of forests you see in New Zealand today: trees belonging to the conifer group, Podocarpus and araucarias mainly, again some cycads, ferns, etc. At that time, 100m years ago, you wouldn't have had any flowering plants, though these turned up on the Antarctic peninsula around about 95-90 million years ago. So Antarctica was a large continent with a nice small ice cap in the middle, and it was clothed in these lush forests, teeming with dinosaurs, marsupials, primitive mammals etc.

"From around about 50 million years ago, we start to see the development of ice caps on the scale we're familiar with, and over the last million years the ice has tended to wax and wane over periods measured in a cycle of about 100,000 years. This waxing and waning is related to things like the Earth's orbit, the amount of energy received from the sun. Looking around the world we can see that 100 million years ago sea levels rose and fell something like 5-10 metres on 100,000 year-type timescales, and the only way you can drive that is by changing the amount of ice that 's perched on land in ice caps, and the only place where there was enough ice to drive that was in the interior of Antarctica.

"This story, in rough terms, was known a long time ago, but initially because you found things like cycads, people jumped to the conclusion that this meant you were dealing with tropical climates. However, when we started looking in detail at these fossil cycads what we found was that their leaves were deciduous."

As we talk, Professor Spicer retrieves a large slab of pinkish stone from one of the many cabinets that line his office. Preserved in the rock is a mat of fallen cycad leaves and stalks bearing the familiar leaf scars of deciduous trees. The rock itself is a naturally fired clay: "These clays were laid down on the margins of rivers and in lakes on a flood plain, a big delta north of the Brooks Range in Alaska, and they're associated with ancient peat swamps. Peat turns to coal and lightning strikes can start that burning and it bakes the clay so you end up with this natural red brick colour. It's like a natural terracotta, and because it bakes hard – unlike most clays which fall apart – this stuff hangs together."

He raps the stone with his knuckle: "Listen to that ring. It's like a tile – but formed entirely naturally. And it carries with it a message from 95 million years ago. But if you want to know what an extreme greenhouse is like, without any significant ice-caps, you do have to go back into deep time."

Spicer goes on to tell me that he and a colleague have a paper in Issues 1-2, Volume 267 of Earth and Planetary Science Letters. This paper focuses on findings from the continental interior of Siberia, in a study that compared climate modelling simulations for the Late Cretaceous period (100-70 million years ago) with indicators of climate that are actually found in the rocks. He explains how this is done.

"When we look at plant architecture in the fossil record, these are engineering solutions to partiular environmental constraints. The architecture of a leaf is a compromise solution, trading off light interception with the costs of building the tissues in the first place, against the way in which the plant exchanges gases, sheds water, etc. All those factors go to determine what a leaf looks like – with the resulting leaf being the most economical solution. So when you look at these leaves, what you end up doing is decoding that architecture in terms of climate."

Spicer and his colleagues use an analysis technique known as the Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Programe or CLAMP for short, which involves analysing leaf character states ("in multidimensional hyperspace') in order to then plot them on a "calibrated climate vector". Put simply, where a fossilised leaf ends up along the vector tells you what the ancient climate was like. The burden of this recent article is that the fossil records, analysed in this way, challenge climate modelling programmes, or as Spicer et al put it in the article abstract:

Geological evidence from the Late Cretaceous continental interior of the Vilui Basin, Siberia suggests a far wetter, warmer, and more equable annual climate than General Circulation Models (GCMs) can reproduce. [This could] have important implications for the prediction of future climates and would suggest that we may currently be underestimating future climate change in such regions.^[10]

As he tells me, "It doesn't matter what you tell the computer models in terms of atmospheric composition, orbital parameters, continental geography or all this kind of stuff. If you look at where the modern vegetation grows that is most like the fossils it's northern Florida, but if you look at the climate that is most like the models are saying it was it's contemporary Southern Siberia around Lake Baikal."

I'm curious as to why this mismatch might be occurring.

"Perhaps because the models have their ancestry in weather forecasting and operate at quite coarse grid scales, which means that there are number of shortcuts in the models which describe the [planetary] physics as we understand it today (since the phyiscs are tuned to give a very good representation of what tomorrows weather is going to be). And yet when we ask the models to tell us what the weather is going to be like in 20, 50, 100 years time, we're intrinsically asking the model to do something different than what the weather is going to be tomorrow. And there-in lies the problem. It may well be that we don't understand the physics of a warm world. One area where it's been suggested that there is an issue is the way that the hydrological cycle works (evaporation, transportation of heat, precipitation and so on). In a warm world you get more evaporation, you get more movement of heat from one place to another in storm systems and so on. Maybe we don't understand the physics of that to the extent that we should. So what this means is that all our projections for the future warming are likely to underestimate the degree of change.

"The scary thing," Spicer continues, "is that we tried to quantify the uncertainties in our methodologies, from using the fossil record and the geology, and we tried to quantify the uncertainties in the models, and the two sets of uncertainties are nowhere near overlapping. So it's a genuine data model mismatch. And here we are using those models to design adaptation and mitigation strategies on a global scale. My modelling colleague who wrote the paper with me would take a slightly different stance and say the geological data ought to be questioned, and I would say yes, but you have to overcome what we call consilience, that is that a larger number of different geological indicators are all singing the same song. Some are biological and some are not biological, and when that happens you should listen to what the song says."

Since it was researching an opera that brought me here, I suggest to Professor Spicer that this is a great metaphor. "Well, yes," he says. "The Earth is singing us a song about how the past was, and we should listen to it."

I'm possibly over-extending the metaphor when I ask whether this data mismatch between climate models and analysis of the fossil record might suggest that we're listening to the song at the wrong speed?

"Or maybe they're singing in a different language! But the physics of the models are the physics of how today works, whereas, the Earth is saying, 'This is how it used to be.' And there is a discordance between the two narratives. Part of our jobs as geologists and modellers is to try and bring those two songs in tune. At the moment they are not, but if we don't bring them in tune it spells disaster for us all because we are not going to adopt the right strategies for managing climate change on a planetary scale. One reason that the poles are so important is that whenever the planet has changed its temperature in the past, it's at the poles where you get the most change happening. They warm up and cool down far more than the equator so they give you a much more sensitive record of what change has happened."

So they're a crucible for further change?

"Or a kind of amplifier. Maybe the poles sing louder. It's certainly a clearer message. A clearer record of climate change is available from the poles than from anywhere else."

Is this a cause for worry?

"It's grounds for concern. If you read the IPCC reports and bear in mind that because of the political process that goes into the IPCC, in particular the fact that in order to get ratified you've got to get governments around the world agreeing with the outcome, and the wording is chosen so that everybody can sign up to it. Well that immediately gives you the lowest common denominator in terms of signal."

This is starting to sound familiar.

"And when," Spicer continues, "that is coupled with the fact that the models that are underpinning the IPCC's projections are themselves inherently conservative, you end up with a story that is the best possible view of the future you could imagine."

As Professor Spicer says this I can't help thinking of Voltaire's Candide, who is beset by catastrophe at every turn, but for whom, "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."

"The reality," Spicer continues, "is likely to involve more rapid and extreme change than we currently anticipate. For example, the latest IPCC report didn't include the last 5 years of melt-rate!" The kinds of climate change impacts outlined in IPCC 4 are certainly worrying enough, so hearing that it might actually represent a "best-case scenario" is troubling.

Dr John Shears of the British Antarctic survey confirms that they, too, are looking at the past to help them understand the future. Just one example would be examining gas bubbles from ice cores that are collected across Antarctica. This frozen record tells BAS scientists that current CO2 levels are "way in excess" of anything in the past 4-500,000 years. "And if," Dr Shears goes on, "the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted, it would raise global sea levels by 6 metres."

There's some fascinating material on the BAS website about a recent expedition to the Pine Island Glacier, one of the most remote parts of the Western Antarctic, and which "moves more ice into the sea each year than any other individual drainage basin in the world." Pine Island is also where: "Satellite measurements indicate the glacier thinned by [roughly] 1.5 m per yr and accelerated by [roughly] 10% during the 1990s. The speed has continued to increase by approximately 30% in the last decade."^[11]

Echoing Bob Spicer's comments about the poles as amplifiers of change, Dr Shears tells me that Antarctica really is "the canary in the coal mine," that the continent will be "impacted [by climate change] far more quickly" than other parts of the world. Another factor is the danger of invasive non-native species being brought to places like the Antarctic Peninsula, which itself is the "fastest warming" place on the planet, with a mean temperature rise of 3 degrees C over the past 50 years (and a seasonal mean rise of 8 degrees C in the winter months). Not only is there now more bare ground on the Antarctic Peninsula, but human visitation to the region has increased from something like 4,000 people per year 10 years ago, to 49,000 per year today, with the majority being tourists who visit on cruise ships like the Explorer. With probably less than 1,000 people currently based in all the international research stations across the whole peninsula, the idea that 2,500 people might visit on just one cruise ship is something, Dr Shears suggests, that "Shackleton couldn't have dreamt of." There's also a risk of species being introduced inadvertantly, whether from spores or seeds, or from ships expelling ballast water from their holds into waters that are themselves also now warmer than they once were.

Once again, but this time in light of the vulnerability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the five year time lag involved in preparing, refereeing and publishing the IPCC reports is a source of anxiety. BAS feed in to the IPCC process: one of their experts David Vaughn is a lead author for the chapter focusing on the Polar Regions, while a further dozen staff are expert contributors to the process. However emerging data about climate impacts on the West Antarctic (and the Greenland Ice Sheet) wasn't included in 2007's IPCC 4 because there wasn't enough robust data during the review period.

Does this mean, I ask Dr Shears, that IPCC 4 underestimates the severity of the risk to the Antarctic?

"Yes, because that report was based on data from five years previously, and things have moved considerably since then, with what we now know from remote satellite sensing etc. So IPCC 4 is underestimative. The next round has to take more account of current knowledge about Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet."

As I pull these notes together I remember the tail-end of my conversation with Professor Robert Spicer at the Open University. Before I left the campus, we looked through the astonishing collection of fossils that Professor Spicer and his colleagues have amassed during the course of their research: fossils of Ginkgo and Metaseqouia, and some platanoid leaves that are very like the leaves of the familiar London plane trees – all of which came from regions that are now frozen but which once were warm temperate. Thinking back to the opera scenario that's brought me here, and how we've borrowed a date two-hundred years hence from those South Polar Times sci-fi stories, a question is nagging at me.

"Listen," I say, "I know that we've just pulled this date of 2198 from an old science-fiction story about a post-climate change future, but in reality how many thousands or tens of thousands of years might it be before we see significant melting of the Antarctic ice?"

Spicer's answer is more disturbing that I'd anticipated: "No, not even thousands, but hundreds of years."

Dr Peter Convey, of the Biological Sciences division at BAS seems initally to be a little more sanguine, preferring to talk about "response to variability" than "climate change". He explains: "The world is variable anyway, so if you want to understand change in the future, you have to look at how things are responding to change now, and to understand how change has happened in the past." He describes visible changes, glacier retreats, the Antarcic Peninsula becoming greener. This doesn't necessarily mean that new, non-native plants are being introduced, but that existing plants and some that were there before are definitely expanding. "It's a pretty simple terrestrial eco-system," he tells me, "and not very diverse, the current flora consisting of lichens, mainly, one type of grass and one tiny rockery plant. So we can explore the effects of a whole raft of changes on this simple system."

He draws analogies with changes that we might all see in our own gardens: impacts from the introduction of new species, from pollution, from changes in land use, but notes that because Antarctica is so isolated and without these, as he calls them, "confounding influences," it's much clearer to see how the simple Antarctic eco-system, and therefore, other ecosystems, might respond to change.

Since starting to research my own (operatic) scenario, and this article, my understanding of how really dramatic, climate change-driven impacts might be occurring in Antarctica has already shifted down from timescales of thousands of years, to Professor Spicer's "hundreds of years." But when I ask Dr Convey about timescales his reply shocks me: "Dramatic things are happening now, with further significant change happening certainly on a decadal or century timescale." Though he does add that a return of trees to Antarctica is, "a long way away yet." But, hang on: decadal? That's tens of years: our lifetime, in other words.

When Jody Boehnert of Eco-Labs spoke at the Interact conference (on the subject of artists' placements in interdisciplinary research or business contexts) she suggested that climate change, and the ever-narrowing window of opportunity for even beginning to really address it, was surely the most pressing need for innovative approaches and for interdisciplinary thought and action: including for example a deepening of the kinds of work that artists have been undertaking with scientists and in business, technology etc. Looking back through these notes again, I'm struck that it's been work by artists such as Peter Fend or Ursula Biemann – even those South Polar Times sci-fi stories – that have really been the catalysts in the development of my libretto. Also that speaking directly to scientists who are involved in climate research paints a far more urgent picture of the scale and immediacy of the problems facing us than something like IPCC 4. More than that though, these art works and stories have really had the power to communicate more and in a far more sophisticated way than any government information film about recycling, or switching off your lights.

Before IPCC 4 was published, as Dr Mark McCarthy noted, doubts (disingenuous or not) around whether climate change was even real were still being widely reflected, not least in a more hesitant language than is now the case. But however conservative it might be in comparison to what scientists have been telling me in recent days and weeks, IPCC 4 does state unequivocally that – like it or not – climate change is happening. So perhaps what's needed additionally now, post-IPCC 4, is a deepening of this kind of engagement to look at the longer term impacts of climate change (which we should now be thinking of as happening in periods measurable in decades!) as well as saying, "Yes, it is happening, look!" That's not to say that the value of cultural ventures such as Cape Farewell would be diminished: the Cape Farewell model of artists accompanying scientists to the Arctic in order to witness and then 'raise awareness' of climate change through exhibitions, media and educational activities seems to go from strength to strength. While the BAS Artists and Writers programme embeds artists and their practice into the culture of the Antarctic research stations (in a nice echo of the old South Polar Times, perhaps) and is a good example of the kind of longer term dialogue between artistic and scientific research that might be possible.

IPCC 4 should have been a really dramatic document, but perhaps also the urgency of its messages and what it tells us about our future are in danger of being obscured when they are couched in language such as this:

All four storylines and scenario families describe future worlds that are generally more affluent [my italics] compared to the current situation. They range from very rapid economic growth and technological change to high levels of environmental protection, from low to high global populations, and from high to low GHG emissions. What is perhaps even more important is that all the storylines describe dynamic changes and transitions in generally different directions. Although they do not include additional climate initiatives, none of them are policy free. As time progresses, the storylines diverge from each other in many of their characteristic features. In this way they allow us to span the relevant range of GHG emissions and different combinations of their main sources.^[12]

For one thing, the bit about all the IPCC SRES scenarios being set in a world that's more affluent than the current situation immediately locates them in the realm of fiction. Though actually I do know what a storyline is, and maybe it's just because I'm a writer and it's got me thinking about Candide, but maybe writing can contribute something, too.

Given that a process like the IPCC generates so much text, much of which is necessarily technical but all of which is intended to be performative (in the broader sense i.e. speech that consitutes an act, in this case a call to action), but the bulk of which remains actually pretty much impervious to a general readership, this could well constrain its effectiveness; its ability to perform. I'm reminded of a call that emerged during a recent Arts Council-funded Art and Law seminar that I attended at King's College Cambridge.^[13] There, a participant was suggesting that more writers should be involved or "attached" in the fields of law and legislation – creative writers, that is, poets, novelists etc – in order to open up the sometimes internally-facing and jargon-heavy languages that have currency in those arenas, and to make people think about the use of language a little more carefully. Maybe that call could also be extended and become a plea to bring more artists and writers in to direct contact with the scientific and policy processes that result in unintentionally hermetic international documents like the IPCC's. After all, if you wanted to appoint people to tell stories, a panel of international government scientists would not necessarily be your first port of call.

But maybe this is now starting to happen. This autumn, University College London Environment Institute have appointed Martin John Callanan and Richard Hamblyn respectively as artist and writer in residence, 'as a means of enhancing understanding and fostering collective action.'

Elsewhere, the novelist Giles Foden was recently awarded an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at University of London (Royal Holloway) to undertake practice-led research into the climate of London, exploring ways to write fiction about the contemporary city through climate. Another more mainstream example might be seen in Mark Lynas' latest book, the gripping, non-fiction work Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet^[14]. Here, Lynas explores the impacts of warming on a degree-by-degree basis, using material drawn exclusively from published scientific data such as is contained in IPCC. But in Six Degrees this becomes a kind of popular science thriller, complete with an embossed cover (the semiotics of popular publishing) on which Big Ben is engulfed by a tsunami. Lynas uses a structure that allows him to survey vast amounts of material and cut through the inadvertantly reassuring and conservative language of policy speak, but the way the book is structured offers him and us a means to look beyond the bare fact that climate change is happening. The apparent success of the book also demonstrates that people might actually want – as well as need – to read this.

I'm grateful to the RSA for commissioning this piece because the various conversations that it has enabled have certainly contextualised for me aspects of the operatic scenario that we've been devising; the libretto that I'm writing. The scenario for South has been born from a poetic collision of Frank Hurley's wonderful film with such things as the contemporary artworks of Ursula Biemann and Peter Fend, and from thinking about the historical Black Atlantic. In the new post-climate change global economies and trade routes that we have imagined, South Georgia – resting place of Sir Ernest Shackleton – might remain a staging post for Antarctic voyages, but perhaps also become a transit camp for refugees taking the southern Atlantic route to the longed-for safety of a new continent that has become part of human myth-making and which represents finally, not danger, but sanctuary. Underpinning all of this was that vision of a warm Antarctic that came from those Shackleton-era, South Polar Times science-fiction stories. These conversations with scientists have revealed to me that the scenario of a radically warmer Antarctic might not be so far wide of the mark. Which is pretty scary.

But what's also crystallised something for me, which again reflects back on or reinforces our own process with the opera, is this idea from Peter Convey of BAS who down on the Antarctic Peninsula is looking to the future by looking at, "how things are responding to change now."

I'm wondering what might that mean in wider terms, or for the kinds of deeper cultural approaches to climate change that might now be necessary? If we want to borrow this idea from Peter Convey and try to understand the future by looking at "how things are responding to change now", then what kind of "things" might we talking about?

Perhaps to go beyond the polar bear clichés, one needs to shift the direction of the gaze. If you substitute that word "things" with a word like "people," then the process of enquiry and engagement becomes very different indeed: Understanding the impacts of climate change by looking at how people or societies are responding to change now. Or even how we are responding to change now. With this small shift one can understand for example that contemporary Sub-Saharan migration and European attitudes and policy towards it, becomes a climate change story. And this is a question that could be applied on all scales, from the personal sphere to economics to the geo-political.

I'm also thinking back to the conversation with Mark McCarthy at the Met Office Hadley Centre, about how the extreme European heatwave of 2003 substantially altered the balance of risk. Presumably the Cyclone Nargis disaster has had a similar effect on probabilities. Even if it weren't directly attributable to climate change, it is exactly the kind of scenario that Dr McCarthy told me scientists had been worrying about.

However, applying Peter Convey's approach, whether or not something is caused by climate change is the wrong question to be asking. The question is: how are we responding to the changes that are happening all around us right now.

Some of these changes might be tiny and almost imperceptible. Others, such as the "credit crunch" and the imminent global recession, or rising food or fuel prices, will make more of a day to day impact, particularly on populations that are already vulnerable or at risk (i.e. the majority of people in the world). Yet other changes, tragically, are immense and strike suddenly. Cyclone Nargis, like Hurricane Katrina before it, brought death and devastation to a large geographical area and vast numbers of people. And like Katrina it seems to have been greeted with political inertia. By these kinds of reckoning we are not yet responding to change very well at all.

Tony White has been writer in residence at the Science Museum, London for summer 2008, and is the author of novels including Foxy-T (Faber and Faber, 2003), and the non-fiction work Another Fool in the Balkans (Cadogan, 2006). Tony has edited and published the artists' book imprint Piece of Paper Press since 1994, been literary editor for the Idler magazine and was part of Arts Council England's former Interdisciplinary Arts Department where amongst other things he executive produced the Pioneers in Art and Science  DVD series and worked on development of the joint Arts Council/AHRC Arts and Science Research Fellowships (co-guest editing a special supplement on the programme for Leonardo Journal).

In 2007 Tony White received a Grants for the Arts award from Arts Council England towards completing a work of fiction in progress and exploring creative writing in interdisciplinary and research contexts. Tony is currently writer in residence at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), supported by the Leverhulme Trust through their artists in residence programme.