The first part of Kim Stanley robinsons’s ministry of the future has a really chilling narrative of a wet bulb event in India over a couple days. Absolutely terrifying and has stuck with me. Resting the bookings meh, but that section is excellent for playing out and making real the horrors of something like this.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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I immediately started thinking about that and started crying and had to explain to my partner that im okay i just got really fucked up thinking about wet bulb events, again
Yeah I was shocked at how much that section stuck with me. It’s one of those things that takes the idea from a compartmentalized and distant fear to a very understandable reality, and you realize something like this is gonna happen in the near future and it’s horrifying.
Children of Kali, I've seen what you've done for others... 
Book would have been much better had the author fired Chekhov's Ecoterrorist, but just sent him on a hike in the second act instead
Yeah I’m always conflicted recommending it because I don’t think it’s a good book, felt kinda like “here are 10 interesting ideas about how to approach the climate crisis” and now I have to weave them into a narrative. But I do want to take week long airship tours to see wildlife at some point…
Chapter 1 used to be freely available, but on a web search now, all I find are 5 year old links that redirect to the publisher homepage
I feel like that section should be excerpted and collected as a useful communication piece… it doesn’t really rely on the rest of the book, and, alongside some other pieces of media I’ve read/seen, (egan’s perihelion summer the part where main char goes to Perth to try and get his family | weirdly: the lost bus movie; not wonderful, but visualizes a real climate catastrophe in a very intimate and accessible way) function as a very grounding-in-reality sense of the horror contained in climate catastrophe.
Or just put another away, all of these narratives left me feeling queasy; they helped me understand that I, or people I know and care about, may experience something like this. Instead of it being a compartmentalized dread about future events that await us, these kinds of outcomes are here now, and the experiences of those affected by them will be devastating.
Edit: one more piece of media—the episode from the apple ‘adaptations’ series that takes place in Mumbai (maybe ep 3 or 4) where you follow the two guys driving cargo across the country at night and sleeping in insulated sleeping bags in the morning.
Lethal wetbulb events scare the shit out of me.
It doesn't matter if you lay perfectly still in the shade in front of a fan while perfectly hydrated, you still die of heat stroke. Your sweat stops being able to cool you enough to live, there's literally nothing you can do without either ice or air conditioning.
These weather events aren't happening yet, but they're really close now. A little more heat, a little more humidity, millions die.
A lethal wetbulb event combined with a power outage would kill an entire city.
This guy on YouTube has been doing videos for years on cheap ways to stay cool, cool off below ambient temperature, etc.
I haven't seen him say it, but I think he must be doing this because of the same fear. He's doing great work that could save many lives.
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There might be microclimates, also water from underground might be cool enough to use but yeah...
Probably will have to see reservoirs of water stored underground to use as cooling, or dig underground shelters to use the stable cool temps
Also redundant power supplies, or else water can't be pumped and shelters turn into human ovens.
Probably best if the power isn't even electrical, just powered mechanically with wind and hydro.
Imagine sitting in the pitch dark in a concrete room that has been baking in the sun for 12 hours, with no ceiling fan, while the ambient temperature inside is still hovering near 40°C at midnight. You don't sleep; you just pass out from exhaustion.
the nearest i came to that was sometimes hitting 35C (95F) in a downtown concrete block illegal apartment with no A/C. i worked outdoors, physical labor in the heat during the day and at least had a big box fan running by my head on full blast (so loud) when i would lay down for the evening.
"You don't sleep; you just pass out from exhaustion." <- took me right back to that mattress on the floor.
i would try to lay as still as possible, exhausted, eyes closed. entering these weird twilight states of something like dreaming. the only comfortable part of the day would be the pre-dawn, where the temp had finally dropped below 80 and it was time to get up for work again. i was young and in pretty solid shape those days, and it was permitted to be stoned at work most of the time, so that's what i did. i could not do that shit again and i'm pretty sure it broke my brain.
i eventually moved around 13 degrees in latitude further from the equator and into some highlands. some have implied i have over-corrected, but i can always get under more blankets and put on more clothes and find shit to burn. when it's too hot, you just get naked and lose your mind.
i remember a few years ago when the temperature reached 35 in the middle of the summer and i thought that was pretty wild.
the last few years it's been 38 for weeks straight in the summer.
this year it reached 38 in late may 
my god, that sounds fucking awful and that's what is coming for billions more of us
Northern India is absolutely cooked.
I don't think it was ever not "cooked" but it's particularly cooked now. All the concrete doesnt help. Developing countries need to invest large amounts of resources into greening the concrete jungles.
Developing countries need to invest large amounts of resources into greening the concrete jungles.
Is that even feasible? What trees are gonna live through regular 45+ temperatures?
the heatwaves don't last long long, usually multiple weeks at most. Indian cities aren't deserts tho (mostly) , even the concrete parts have occasional stray trees. Issue is all the cities weren't well planned. There's three types of neighborhoods in Indian cities, the well planned fancy regions where the better off and rich live (plenty of tree cover), the haphazardly built semi-planned neighborhoods and the densest slums where the poor live.
You can see the various parts from satellite/street view. Here's the coords:
Type 1: 28.57, 77.23
Type 2: 28.532, 77.215
Type 3: 28.538, 77.228
I’ve only experienced that temperature in low humidity. It’s pretty awful. I can’t imagine that with humidity as well.
It's high humidity where I live and when it reaches over 30C, it's unbearable, but AC is pretty common here. 40s and high humidity is hellish.
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