The Ministry for the Future

With the recent unprecedented(*1) heat wave in the PNW and Western Canadabeing credited with perhaps 500 deaths, I was wondering if anyone else had read Kim Stanley Robinson's latest (2020) sci-fi novel "The Ministry for the Future", which begins in the very near future (2023?) with an even more devastating heat wave in India that kills about 20 million, and continues from there over the next several decades as world society attempts to stop or ameliorate the effects of AGCC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

Many of Robinson's more recent novels have also dealt with various aspects of AGCC and what we might have to do to deal with/adapt to it, e.g. "New York 2140" where sea level rise has turned NYC into a super-Venice, "2312" and his "Science in the Capital" Trilogy, not to mention his 1990s "Mars Trilogy" which involved the terraforming of Mars, including large-scale atmospheric modification.

Many of Robinson's social/political ideas are repeated in "Ministry," so if you've read some of his earlier works (I've read all the above plus a few others) those sections can be repetitive, but it's still worth the read.

As it happens I saw a re-broadcast of an April GZERO episode on my local PBS station a day or two back, titled
"Emission Impossible: Radical Climate Solutions"

https://nhpbs.org/schedule/summary.aspx?progId=GzeroWorldwithIanBremmer352

Guest: Elizabeth Kolbert - Pulitzer Prize-winning climate journalist. As the climate continues to warm, more and more nations are looking to extreme measures to slow down the trend. Many of the solutions, which sound a lot like science fiction, address a similar question: Can we fix the world the same way we broke it?

Click to expand...

Both the presenter and his guest(*2) had read Robinson's book and briefly discussed some of the geo-engineering actions in it, especially India's seeding the stratosphere with sulfate particles(*3) to cool the Earth for a few years (about "2 Pinatubo's worth") in an attempt to prevent a second such heat wave, and how difficult it would be for any country to do anything on that scale unilaterally today.

Anyway, I thought I'd toss it out there if anyone was interested.


*1https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_heat_wave

*2https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Kolbert

*3https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection

Geoengineering is a scary concept. Notwithstanding all the certainty professed by proponents of AGCC, our understanding of how the climate works is still at a very primitive level. It's a "wicked problem", as Judith Curry would say.

To imagine that we understand the climate well enough to engineer braking (or reversing) of AGCC is breathtaking hubris.

Yup, much unknown, and Robinson has characters raise those points in the book. But in the book the Indian government essentially says "'Screw you', you don't have 20 million dead with the likelihood of a repeat if we don't try something", and goes ahead.

In the GZERO episode, Kolbert points out the possibility of such a unilateral action by a country leading to sanctions or war. Robinson also mentioned it.

BTW, has anyone seen wet-bulb temps for the highs in the PNW & Canada during the record heat? It seems possible that they may have exceeded the 35C/95 deg. F. wet-bulb limit of human tolerance in some places given the death toll, but I've been unable to find any numbers so far. Lots of articles on the heat wave refer to it, without citing any specific examples in this case.