When author Kim Stanley Robinson spoke here in Arcata in 2014, I asked him if he believed real action on climate would require a spectacular precipitating event--something like the superstorm that battered the US East Coast in the first of his 2004 climate trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain. His answer then was indirect, but was crystal clear in his latest novel, The Ministry For The Future, published in 2020. That book begins with a harrowing account of a heat wave in India that kills something like 20 million people in a matter of days. Everything else in the novel follows from that, as the world finally addresses the climate crisis.
A lot has happened, both to the world and to KSR since Ministry was published to great acclaim and international attention. As one result of it, Robinson was invited to participate in the latest UN climate summit in Glasgow, where he learned a good deal, including ways in which approaches to addressing the causes of climate distortion as well as the causes of some specific effects (like sea level rise) that he fictionalized are in fact being actively considered.
But he also learned that the latest climate data is even worse, and that the thirty year time frame for saving the planet posited in his novel is about three times longer than we actually have. So last summer he gave a recorded Ted Talk of 10 minutes or so and updated his ideas of how human civilization can still effectively address the causes and effects of climate distortion. (For some reason I can't get it to embed, so here's the link.)
In his retrospective look from a better 2071 posited in his talk, the 2020s are a "crux in human history." And once again, total attention to the climate crisis does not occur until there are killer heatwaves, which in this scenario occur in the summer of 2023. A combination of heat and humidity measured as "wet-bulb 35" is the point at which, over a short amount of time and absent effective air-conditioning etc., human life cannot survive. That summer (next summer) of 2023 sees wet-bulb 36 events in India, southeast Asia and the American Midwest. Everything else in this engaging and even inspiring narrative follows from this.
It's worth noting that the superstorm KSR imagined in that 2004 novel would soon match an actual superstorm on the East Coast in 2012, and even had the same name: Sandy. Also worth noting is that wet-bulb 35 has been exceeded briefly in several places already, including just outside Chicago.
Right now, in the spring (not yet summer) of 2022, there are ongoing heat waves in India, Pakistan, southeast Asia and South Africa, with temperatures exceeding 120F. A wet-bulb 36 event seems closer than ever, and it would result not in some sporadic deaths but in many, many deaths: virtually every human being without air conditioning (and high temperatures usually either fry power systems, or the demands on them cause them to crash.)
Nothing so far has dug climate catastrophe out of the collective shadow and into conscious action of the necessary scale. Not superstorms or massive summer-long fires or deep drought or wars because of drought, or any of the other manifestations of climate distortion. Not reports from the UN or promises from governments, and greenwashing from corporations. Not even an American Buddhist immolating himself in front of the Supreme Court building, or any other protest. Meanwhile, last month-- April 2022-- saw more CO2 spewed into the atmosphere than any previous month in human history.
KSR is an optimist but not a fool, and especially as a novelist he knows that concerted, concentrated, committed effort to address the causes and effects of climate distortion would never happen without conflict, pain and periodic chaos, and not everyone would buy into it at any point. But it would require huge societal changes and a significant popular impetus.
So far, we have every reason to doubt that any single event will change things quickly and thoroughly enough. After all, the official number of US Covid deaths has just passed one million, and no one seems to notice. The latest estimate of worldwide deaths as a result of the pandemic is 15 million, and who cares. A lot of deaths all at one time would be a big story, even if it happened in India or South Africa, and certainly if it happened in Illinois or Iowa, but would attention spans stretch long enough to create momentum for change? Or would we continue to obey the call to don't look up? We don't know, yet.
These current heat waves, in not even the hottest parts of the year in these places, suggest we may observe the answer to that in real time, maybe sooner than later.
