I’m sure some of you have seen the international headlines or the new UN climate warnings about the heat dome over India right now. The IMD (our weather department) has issued red alerts across my region (the northwest/central belt). Yesterday, a town near me recorded 48.2°C.

I want to explain what 48 degrees actually feels like when you live in a developing country, because it is terrifying.

You can’t just “stay inside and run the AC.” The power grid simply cannot handle the load of millions of people trying to cool down, so we are dealing with rolling blackouts. 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 taps are running dry because the heat evaporates local reservoirs and water usage spikes. People who have to work outside-street vendors, construction workers, delivery drivers -are collapsing. Even the water coming out of the cold tap during the day is hot enough to literally brew tea.

It feels like we are living on the absolute razor’s edge of what the human body can endure, and it’s only May.

For those of you living in other countries, or even cooler parts of India-what is the weather like for you right now? I genuinely just want to hear about someone being cold, or feeling rain, just so I can remember what it’s like.

This is a post I saw today from r/india and I thought I’d share here. It really broke my heart. Absolutely horrifying.

https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1tq4exk/it_hit_482c_118f_in_my_state_in_india_today_the/

  • hotspur [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    42·
    5 天前

    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.

      • hotspur [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        14·
        4 天前

        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.

      • hotspur [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        4 天前

        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…

      • hotspur [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        11·
        4 天前

        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.