Dan Bloom , an aging newspaper man, suffered from climate anxiety after reading the report presented by the UN Climate Panel in 2006 and began looking for an expression that could make it easier for writers and filmmakers to spread knowledge about climate change. It took him some time to find him and when two years later he came on "climate fiction" after science fiction (cli fi after sci fi), no one was napping. It was not until five years later, after an interview on American public service radio - NPR, that the expression got spread. Today, it has become a widely accepted concept for, above all, literature on climate. Mostly dystopian.
Literally, two post-apocalyptic depictions are considered to be the most successful: Margaret Atwood's trilogy that began with Oryx & Crake in 2003 and Cormac McCarthy's Road from 2006. A number of thrillers have been written in the field, for example I would point out Michael Glass Ultimatum (2009) about a US president in the near future who, when he takes office, realizes how much his representatives swept the environmental issues under the rug. Also interesting is techno thriller master Michael Crichton's State of Fear (2004), it stands out from the crowd by being skeptical of science and human impact on climate. It is far from his best book, overloaded with long interpretations that should convince us of the correctness of his argument.
The Indian writer and thinker Amitav Ghosh wrote the following year in an essay collection that fiction failed to take on the task, that it seems overwhelming, that fact books have better managed to depict the world we are facing. To strengthen his theory, he mentions several fictional writers who, instead of writing fictional stories about climate change, have written fact books.
While there is much in it, there are signs that can be interpreted as the focus being shifting away from spectacular romance novels to a fiction where environmental changes are more in the margin. For example, a wave of Australian dives sweeps across the world, talking about Outback noir in much the same way it did about Scandinoir a few years ago, and in some of the most successful examples, such as Chris Hammers Scrublands and Jane Harper's Hetta and A Lost man, the constantly changing conditions of nature are constantly present; the unpredictable rain, the increased heat, the drought, the grass fires. It's talking, worrying. The crisis is no longer something that will be portrayed in a future, it is about a change now.