A new sci-fi history looks back on climate change from the year 2393.

This April 28, 2010 file photo, shows the Colstrip Steam Electric Station, a coal-fired power plant in Colstrip, Mont. Colstrip figures to be a target in recently released draft rules from the Environmental Protection Agency that call for reducing Montana emissions 21 percent from recent levels by 2030. (AP)

Here’s a story to chill your bones. It is the year 2393, almost 400 years from now. And a Chinese historian is looking back on our century, the 21st century, and trying to explain how the world saw climate change coming and did nothing. How we denied and delayed as an unbelievable price tag of suffering and destruction gathered around us. How that suffering finally came – with flood and heat and mass migration and chaos. How Western civilization collapsed . This hour On Point: a horror story from the future about climate change and the rest of our lives.

-- Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Co-author, with Erik Conway, of "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From The Future" and "Merchants of Doubt." (@NaomiOreskes)

From Tom's Reading List

Mother Jones: How Western Civilization Ended, Circa 2014 -- "You don't know it yet. There's no way that you could. But 400 years from now, a historian will write that the time in which you're now living is the 'Penumbral Age' of human history—meaning, the period when a dark shadow began to fall over us all."

The Guardian: Researchers tackle link between climate change and public health — "'People tend to look at climate change as just temperatures getting a little hotter and that being something they can manage,' said Bruce Armstrong, emeritus professor at the University of Sydney’s school of public health 'They don’t seriously see the impacts that will flow from a small increase in the average temperature where the net effect will be enormous."

NPR Books: Has Climate Change Created A New Literary Genre? — "'The Odds Against Tomorrow' is the latest in what seems to be an emerging literary genre. Over the past decade, more and more writers have begun to set their novels and short stories in worlds, not unlike our own, where the Earth's systems are noticeably off-kilter. The genre has come to be called climate fiction — 'cli-fi,' for short."