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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

Heatwave in India you say? Reminds me of: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-fo...

Beginning of that book was downright terrifying.

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Heat waves are terrifying. The 2003 European heat wave killed 70,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave

I remember that one. We lost power for an entire day in Southern Spain, everyone went out to buy AC units and put too much strain on the grid. I was young so I may be remembering something wrong but that's what I was told.

Looking at that page I see Jerez hit 45.1 °C (113.2 °F). That's the closest city to where we were at the time.

So long as the humidity is low, it won’t kill 20 million people (like the book). All about that wet bulb temperature!

But, they sure ought to consider their plans for stratospheric sulfur injection.

(I never got past the middle of the book. Did it pick up?)

Recommended podcast episode:

Tau ceti podcast

Solar Geoengineering

https://podcruncher.co/play/4GTv

I think there are really bad ideas out there. Putting sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere could remove rain from large swaths of the planet or concentrate it in other regions. There is currently no way to do it, but removing CO2 again seems vastly less invasive.

Currently people work on regulating such endeavors as it would seriously be possible that some coked up Musk would spread such aerosols into the atmosphere.

This happens every time a volcano erupts. The main motivation for banning this tech is fear that it will reduce motivation for decarbonization. It is reversible. We should be testing the hell out of this technology so we can do it right when we do it. At present, there is no chance we will decarbonize in time.

I think the podcast episode makes it very clear that it is no substitute for emitting less CO2 (and eventually removing CO2 from the atmosphere). This is merely a short-term band-aid.

And, as was already mentioned, the process of putting sulfur aerosols is the same as the natural process of volcanic eruptions.

It does not. I typically like KSR's works and appreciate the "dry" technical detail he often injects, but not with MotF. The book stands entirely on it's first chapter. That first chapter is definitely worth the read, and on it's own, a phenomenal short story. The rest is a poorly stitched together series of some of the most interesting and significant events being glossed over in favor of some flat uninteresting characters failing to effect any significant change with some fanciful yet flawed story telling (ever chatted with a photon before?) that somehow manages to make a potential near-future climate catastrophe look dull while simultaneously highlighting just how truly bad it can get. In the end it is a rather optimistic take too, so it's not as if it's some Cormac McCarthy-esque gloom that wears you down, nor am I a climate change, denier. It's a topic I'm quite passionate about and was really looking forward to seeing KSR's take. Ultimately, even with the optimistic conclusion, I was disappointed in the book (with the exception of Chapter 1, which again was stellar).

The potential for a phenomenal book is certainly there. But it feels like a first draft in need of an editor reigning him in a bit. I can absolutely recommend that people read the first chapter, and disregard the rest.

Oh, I agree with you. I read an interview in which KSR said he was going to stop writing novels, and I honestly believe that’s for the best. Half the chapters in “Ministry for the Future” would have made good short stories on their own, but there’s not much stringing them together.

Philip K Dick said “A short story is about a murder, but a novel is about a murderer.” I don’t think KSR writes well enough about people to sustain novels. Certainly not his latter work, anyway.

I jumped into the comments here to post exactly what you did. Let's hope TMftF remains fiction.

Well it turned out optimistic at the end, right?

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