A climate novel imagined a heat wave killing 20 million people—scientists say an ‘extreme of extremes’ is no longer fiction

In the opening scene of American writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” a heat wave combined with a breakdown of the electrical grid in India kills 20 million people.

The devastation causes the world’s nations to unite to combat climate change.

Scientists have long warned that the world will experience more intense extreme weather events like heat waves, storms, floods and droughts.

But what once seemed like the realm of fiction is now discussed as a possibility, even an inevitability.

Warning about an “extreme of extremes” or the “Other Big One,” a play off the California reference of a big future earthquake, can be fraught.

After all, nobody can say for sure when a weather catastrophe may happen.

But in the last few years, the planetary ingredients needed for a massive disturbance have been building.

And alarm is growing.

“The risk is that people just think you are exaggerating,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the California Institute for Water Resources.

“It’s the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ problem.

Sometimes wolves are real.

If it’s outside the door, wouldn’t you want to know?” The risks have been known, and building, for over 150 years In the 1850s, while living in Seneca Falls, New York, amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote did a series of experiments that put different substances, including carbon dioxide and moist air, inside glass cylinders and left them in the sun.

What she found was extraordinary: cylinders with carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is released when coal, gas or oil is burned, heated up faster and took longer to cool after the sun went down.

Fast-forward: Today, Earth is being heated by massive amounts of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere, leading to a gradual rise in average global temperature.