The future is an unending summer
Will someone please let me out of this heat dome?
Texas is baking. That's the only language the news has to describe this heat. Like the state is an oven set to 450 and we are the muffins slowly crisping inside.
Sorry that is such a terrible metaphor but it’s not my fault, I’m not thinking well right now. I blame the sun.
Those of us who live here are all stuck in a heat dome, a bit of meteorological jargon that for some reason makes me think of that Stephen King novel I’ve never read. I hope we don’t turn on each other like I assume is what happens in the book. Extreme heat has a way of making everybody into worse versions of themselves.
The high temperature has certainly brought out my toxic trait — a tendency to yell at my inbox when there’s another email from the power company asking me to pitch in and turn my thermostat up. It’s not enough to sweat through a string of blistering 100-degree days; we must also raise up burnt offerings so our state’s deregulated and decrepit grid doesn’t collapse.
“Your help is needed” reads the subject line. Yeah well we all need help right?
It’s too hot to think of reasons you should subscribe to my newsletter. Just do it.
The thought keeps circling my mind that this June is a trial run for the future on a rapidly warming planet. Despite protestations that, yes, the summer of 1980 was hotter here in DFW, that historical perspective doesn’t make today’s air feel any cooler. We may not have bested the old extremes this year but we’ll get there. The Texas Tribune looked at data, made charts, and found the number of days on which the state’s weather stations registered a record high has exploded in the past decade.
Does the term “record-breaking heat” still hold meaning? It seems like a concept meant for a version of Texas that no longer exists. The average temperatures of the twentieth century are gone. The past no longer seems like a stable guide to the future, if it ever was.
Speaking of the future, I just reread the opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate change novel The Ministry for the Future. It’s not a book that I particularly love; it has always struck me as the kind of science fiction story that appeals to people who believe firmly in the virtues of technocracy and who peddle the idea that we’re going to innovate our way to a livable future.
But the novel has discrete moments of brilliance and the first chapter is one of those. It’s a twelve-page description of a catastrophic heat wave that, in the book’s fictional timeline, brutalizes India in about the year 2025. Robinson drops us into an unnamed town that’s suffering through the type of heat that smothers you and refuses to dissipate even when the sun goes down. But of course when the sun comes back up, it’s even worse.
The chapter is filtered through the perspective of Frank, an American aid worker, and his experience watching the sun rise is viscerally powerful:
And then the sun cracked the eastern horizon. It blazed like an atomic bomb, which of course it was. The fields and buildings underneath that brilliant chip of light went dark, then darker still as the chip flowed to the sides in a burning line that then bulged to a crescent he couldn’t look at. The heat coming from it was palpable, a slap to the face. Solar radiation heating the skin of his face, making him blink. Stinging eyes flowing, he couldn’t see much. Everything was tan and beige and a brilliant, unbearable white.
I like the way Robinson upends the familiar connotations of a sunrise — renewal, joy, beautiful shades of pink and orange — and reimagines the sun’s appearance as a harbinger of mass death, an atom bomb, a fragment of light that sears away colors and replaces them with “tan and beige and a brilliant, unbearable white.” The sun is a literal assault, “a slap to the face” and it assails all of Frank’s senses, not just his eyes. Later in the chapter, the narrator describes the way extreme heat burns away the smell of anything but heat itself. There’s nothing left to experience or think about except how hot you are and maybe desperate fever dreams of ways to make yourself less hot.
As searing as these descriptions are, the section that actually hits me hardest in the gut every time I read it is a phone call between Frank and his aid worker bosses:
He called headquarters in Delhi. “We need help,” he said to the woman who answered. “The power has gone out.”
“Power is out here too,” Preeti said. “It’s out everywhere.”
“Everywhere?”
“Most of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bengal. Parts of the west too, in Gujarat, Rajasthan…”
“What should we do?”
“Wait for help.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know.”
Frank and his bosses both know help isn’t actually coming but they cling to their belief that the world wouldn’t just let hundreds of millions of people perish in the heat. They need help. Don’t we all.
Last summer, in the middle of a blazing July, I wrote this in my journal:
The wind is hot on my skin but it hits hardest around my eyes, sweeping around my sunglasses and digging into the contours of my face and scorching my lower eyelids. My eyes water. It’s day after day of this in the unending summer.
I felt that wind again yesterday as I walked around the neighborhood. And it’s something I’ll feel again, tomorrow or next month or next summer, except maybe it’ll be even hotter then. I don’t have much faith in ministries for the future but I can offer some metaphors for the future, ones that aren’t about baking or ovens:
The future is an impassable dome strangling the earth.
The future is a power grid held together by spit and old scotch tape and prayers.
The future is a relentless wind tunnel hurling scorched air into your face during a summer that will never end.
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