...A novel feature of the geoengineering debate is that many people first heard about it in a novel. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his earlier years an award-winning writer of science fiction, may have thought more fully about geoengineering than anyone else. His early classic work—a trilogy about the settlement of Mars, each volume of which won the Hugo Award as the year's best sci-fi—hinges on a debate about whether, and how much, to "terraform" the red planet by changing its atmosphere to more closely resemble Earth's. The debate is long—never-ending, really. As often happens, compromise keeps working in the direction of doing something, not leaving it alone, and the Martian atmosphere gradually thickens, allowing more and more settlement. But Robinson (in real life an ardent hiker, whose most recent book is a nonfiction account of the High Sierra, the prototypical wilderness) makes sure to leave some parts of Mars alone.
In recent years, Robinson has turned away from starships, space elevators, and distant planets to focus on the single most important challenge of our time—and one that surprisingly few fiction writers have really taken on. But he's brought some of the tools of his intergalactic musings to bear on our challenge, geoengineering included. In "The Ministry for the Future," his best-selling 2020 novel, he opens with an almost unbearable account of a heat wave in India, one where the humidity stays so high that human bodies can't sweat enough to cool down, and millions die. "All the children were dead. All the old people were dead," he wrote. "People murmured what should have been screams of grief." In the aftermath, the Indian government decides that it will geoengineer the atmosphere. There is an angry exchange with the U.N. about India's "Air Force doing a Pinatubo" and, after a while, Delhi stops experimenting with sulphur and allows a thousand other ideas to gradually blunt the impact of planetary warming.
But there's no denying the author's prescience: this spring saw the most dire pre-monsoon heat wave in Indian history; only a slightly lower humidity prevented a real-life reprise of the mass death in the book. It will take such an event to trigger something as powerful as geoengineering, Robinson said, when we talked this summer. Countries and individuals probably won't be spurred to preëmptively geoengineer the atmosphere "by the sense of a coming crisis," he told me, "nor by sea level rise or habitat loss or anything else that is an indirect effect of rising global temperatures. It will be the direct consequence—deaths by way of extreme heat wave—that will do it." He pointed out that, as we spoke, China was undergoing a heat wave even more anomalous than the one in South Asia, and, as a result, had deployed fleets of planes to seed clouds with silver iodide in hopes of inducing rain—not a huge step from sending those same fleets into the stratosphere with sulphur. I think Robinson's analysis is likely correct; there will come a point when the sheer impossible horror of what we're doing to the planet, and what we have already done, may make geoengineering seem irresistible... Bill McKibben
In recent years, Robinson has turned away from starships, space elevators, and distant planets to focus on the single most important challenge of our time—and one that surprisingly few fiction writers have really taken on. But he's brought some of the tools of his intergalactic musings to bear on our challenge, geoengineering included. In "The Ministry for the Future," his best-selling 2020 novel, he opens with an almost unbearable account of a heat wave in India, one where the humidity stays so high that human bodies can't sweat enough to cool down, and millions die. "All the children were dead. All the old people were dead," he wrote. "People murmured what should have been screams of grief." In the aftermath, the Indian government decides that it will geoengineer the atmosphere. There is an angry exchange with the U.N. about India's "Air Force doing a Pinatubo" and, after a while, Delhi stops experimenting with sulphur and allows a thousand other ideas to gradually blunt the impact of planetary warming.
But there's no denying the author's prescience: this spring saw the most dire pre-monsoon heat wave in Indian history; only a slightly lower humidity prevented a real-life reprise of the mass death in the book. It will take such an event to trigger something as powerful as geoengineering, Robinson said, when we talked this summer. Countries and individuals probably won't be spurred to preëmptively geoengineer the atmosphere "by the sense of a coming crisis," he told me, "nor by sea level rise or habitat loss or anything else that is an indirect effect of rising global temperatures. It will be the direct consequence—deaths by way of extreme heat wave—that will do it." He pointed out that, as we spoke, China was undergoing a heat wave even more anomalous than the one in South Asia, and, as a result, had deployed fleets of planes to seed clouds with silver iodide in hopes of inducing rain—not a huge step from sending those same fleets into the stratosphere with sulphur. I think Robinson's analysis is likely correct; there will come a point when the sheer impossible horror of what we're doing to the planet, and what we have already done, may make geoengineering seem irresistible... Bill McKibben
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