The Ministry for the Future
Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2020 6:50 pm
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my favorite Science Fiction writers. He writes "hard" science fiction -- meaning it's all within the laws of physics as we know them. No faster than light travel. No aliens with superpowers. No "magic."
The first thing I read was his Mars Trilogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy It's a story that covers generations as humans attempt to settle, exploit, and terraform Mars. It threads individual stories through scientific, economic, sociological, and political conflict.
The Ministry for the Future is his most recent novel. It's a kind of alternate future history in which the Paris Climate Accords included the creation of an Agency charged with representing the interests of non-human life and future generations of humans. It's about how people and institutions react as climate change begins to manifest itself in more dramatic ways. It ranges from banking and Modern Monetary Theory to terrorist groups assassinating those they blame, to innovative geo engineering projects. The most clever of the latter is an attempt to slow sea level rise by "pinning" Antarctic glaciers back to the underlying bedrock using pumps to drain the water layer between the rock and the glaciers.
The book opens with what appears to be the first large-scale climate catastrophe: a heat wave in India during which the wet bulb temperature exceeds 35C for a number of days. Wet bulb temperature (TW) 35C is actually a range of temperature and humidity combinations that are fatal to humans. Even in perfect circumstances for the body to cool itself -- perfect health, naked, in the shade, plenty of water to drink -- sweat cannot evaporate and the body kinda parboils itself. The only way to survive is air conditioning. In poorer parts of India, air conditioning is not universal. But even so, the use of so many air conditioners at the same time causes parts of the power grid to fail.
Robinson's books stay well within the plausible, so I began to wonder about this. I knew there were projects that certain regions of the subtropics were expected to experience these temps next century under a business as usual scenario. But I hadn't thought about two things: If TW 35C makes survival impossible, how much lower than that is a significant risk to people in real life. And, one of the predictions of global warming is more extreme swings in temperature and precipitation. So, the important question is not when we should expect areas of the earth to reach an average of TW 35C, but when will the odds of experiencing a heat/humidity wave capable of causing mass death occur?
This was one of the first google hits I found -- a page on the NOAA website. https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMI ... e-expected , which was about a paper published in Science Magazine titled The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838 It turns out that the deadly European (2003) and Russian (2010) heat waves did not exceed TW 28C. The study also states that the existing models predict the emergence of regular TW 35C or higher in the third-quarter of this century in areas in South Asia and the Middle East under a business as usual scenario. So, sooner than I remembered.
But what this study did was look at the temperature record, especially along the coasts where the water is warmest. A summary of the findings:
The first thing I read was his Mars Trilogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy It's a story that covers generations as humans attempt to settle, exploit, and terraform Mars. It threads individual stories through scientific, economic, sociological, and political conflict.
The Ministry for the Future is his most recent novel. It's a kind of alternate future history in which the Paris Climate Accords included the creation of an Agency charged with representing the interests of non-human life and future generations of humans. It's about how people and institutions react as climate change begins to manifest itself in more dramatic ways. It ranges from banking and Modern Monetary Theory to terrorist groups assassinating those they blame, to innovative geo engineering projects. The most clever of the latter is an attempt to slow sea level rise by "pinning" Antarctic glaciers back to the underlying bedrock using pumps to drain the water layer between the rock and the glaciers.
The book opens with what appears to be the first large-scale climate catastrophe: a heat wave in India during which the wet bulb temperature exceeds 35C for a number of days. Wet bulb temperature (TW) 35C is actually a range of temperature and humidity combinations that are fatal to humans. Even in perfect circumstances for the body to cool itself -- perfect health, naked, in the shade, plenty of water to drink -- sweat cannot evaporate and the body kinda parboils itself. The only way to survive is air conditioning. In poorer parts of India, air conditioning is not universal. But even so, the use of so many air conditioners at the same time causes parts of the power grid to fail.
Robinson's books stay well within the plausible, so I began to wonder about this. I knew there were projects that certain regions of the subtropics were expected to experience these temps next century under a business as usual scenario. But I hadn't thought about two things: If TW 35C makes survival impossible, how much lower than that is a significant risk to people in real life. And, one of the predictions of global warming is more extreme swings in temperature and precipitation. So, the important question is not when we should expect areas of the earth to reach an average of TW 35C, but when will the odds of experiencing a heat/humidity wave capable of causing mass death occur?
This was one of the first google hits I found -- a page on the NOAA website. https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMI ... e-expected , which was about a paper published in Science Magazine titled The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838 It turns out that the deadly European (2003) and Russian (2010) heat waves did not exceed TW 28C. The study also states that the existing models predict the emergence of regular TW 35C or higher in the third-quarter of this century in areas in South Asia and the Middle East under a business as usual scenario. So, sooner than I remembered.
But what this study did was look at the temperature record, especially along the coasts where the water is warmest. A summary of the findings:
As discussed on the NOAA webpage:Our findings indicate that reported occurrences of extreme TW have increased rapidly at weather stations and in reanalysis data over the last four decades and that parts of the subtropics are very close to the 35°C survivability limit, which has likely already been reached over both sea and land. These trends highlight the magnitude of the changes that have taken place as a result of the global warming to date. At the spatial scale of reanalysis, we project that TW will regularly exceed 35°C at land grid points with less than 2.5°C of warming since preindustrial—a level that may be reached in the next several decades (35). According to our weather station analysis, emphasizing land grid points underplays the true risks of extreme TW along coastlines, which tends to occur when marine air masses are advected even slightly onshore (14). The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36). The deadly heat events already experienced in recent decades are indicative of the continuing trend toward increasingly extreme humid heat, and our findings underline that their diverse, consequential, and growing impacts represent a major societal challenge for the coming decades.
Just a reminder that the stuff we don't know doesn't necessarily turn out to be good news. And that, if we can't get our crap together to fight a virus, we don't stand a chance with climate.The authors’ survey of weather station data from 1979-2017 identified over 7,000 past occurrences of wet-bulb temperatures above 88°F (31°C) and over 250 above 91°F (33°C) around the world, as well as two stations that reported multiple daily-maximum wet-bulb temperatures above 95°F. These extremes occurred for 1-2 hours in parts of coastal southwest North America, including southeastern California and southwestern Arizona, South Asia, and the coastal Middle East.
The southeastern United States, especially along the Gulf of Mexico, had multiple incidences of wet-bulb temperatures at or above 88°F; specifically, in east Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, Arkansas and North Carolina. Parts of India, Pakistan, northwestern Australia, the coast of the Red Sea, and areas along the Gulf of California in Mexico saw even higher extremes.