The day before Donald Trump s inauguration, Wired reported on a story that could be misconstrued as a thrilling work of eco-fiction. Anticipating the new presidents ambivalence towards climate change, scientists raced to back up their research, fearing that years worth of online evidence and solutions could be erased or otherwise marred.

The pressure was on. Trumps team had at this point confirmed that some data would be taken down from the Environmental Protection Agencys website. So, data was pitted against rhetoric, fact against alternative fact.

Of course, as sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out last week in a letter to The Oregonian , alternative facts are different from fiction. A lie is a non-fact deliberately told as fact, she wrote. Santa Claus is a fiction. Hes harmless. Lies are seldom completely harmless, and often very dangerous.

Fiction, on the other hand, can entertain, inform, and speculate. In the case of science fiction, it can provide human context for facts and data, supporting it rather than refuting it. Possible solutions to urgent issues such as climate change can be explored. Though speculative fiction authors including Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Barbara Kingsolver have flocked to the topic in recent years, climate change has been addressed in fiction for decades, dating back to J.G. Ballards imagined natural disasters.

In response to the removal of climate change references from the White Houses website, we asked a range of science fiction authors some of them new to the genre, others prolific editors of anthologies to discuss speculative or fictional solutions to how climate change is discussed (and in some cases ignored) today. Their answers, which range from imagined scenarios to heartfelt pleas, are below: