Sixty Days and Counting. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ brought the figures in with him to the meeting of Diane’s strategic group scheduled for that afternoon, and listened to the others make their presentations. They were interesting talks, if daunting. They took his mind off Caroline, one had to say that. At least most of the time.

      At the end of the talks, Diane described her sense of the situation. For her, there was a lot that was good news. First, Phil Chase was certain to be more supportive of NSF, and of science in general, than his predecessor had been. Second, the salting of the North Atlantic appeared to be having the effect they had hoped for: the Gulf Stream was now running at nearly its previous strength up into the Norwegian and Greenland Seas, following its earlier path in a manner that seemed to indicate the renewed pattern was, for now, fairly robust. They were still collecting data on the deeper part of the thermohaline circulation, which ran southward underneath the northerly flow of the Gulf Stream. If the southward undercurrent was running strong, they might be okay there.

      ‘There’s so much surface pressure northward,’ Kenzo said. ‘Maybe all we’ll have to do from now on is to monitor the salinity and the currents. We might be able to intervene early enough in any stall process that we wouldn’t need as much salt as we applied last fall. Maybe a certain percentage of the retiring oil fleet could be mothballed, in case we needed a salt fleet to go up there again and make another application.’

      ‘It would take a change in thinking,’ Diane said. ‘Up until now, people have only wanted to pay for disasters after they’ve happened, to make sure the pay-out was really necessary.’

      Kenzo said, ‘But now the true costs of that strategy are becoming clear.’

      ‘When it’s too late,’ Edgardo added, his usual refrain.

      Diane wrinkled her nose at Edgardo, as she often did, and made her usual rejoinder; they had no choice but to proceed from where they were now. ‘So, let’s follow up on that one. It would have to be a kind of insurance model, or a hedge fund. Maybe the re-insurance industry will be trying to impose something like that on the rest of the economy anyway. We’ll talk to them.’

      She moved on to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet situation. One of Kenzo’s oceanographer colleagues gave them a presentation on the latest, showing with maps and satellite photos the tabular superbergs that had detached and slipped off their underwater perch and floated away.

      Diane said, ‘I’d like some really good 3-D graphics on this, to show the new President and Congress, and the public too.’

      ‘All very well,’ Edgardo said, ‘but what can we do about it, aside from telling people it’s coming?’

      Not much; or nothing. Even if they somehow managed to lower the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and therefore the air temperatures, the already rising ocean temperatures would be slow to follow. There was a continuity effect.

      So they couldn’t stop the WAIS from detaching.

      They couldn’t lower the rising sea level that resulted.

      And they couldn’t de-acidify the ocean.

      This last was a particularly troubling problem. The CO2 they had introduced into the atmosphere had been partially taken up by the ocean; the absorption rate now was about three billion tons of carbon a year into the ocean, and one estimate of the total uptake since the industrial revolution was 400 billion tons. As a result, the ocean had become measurably more acid, going from 8.2 to 8.1 on the pH scale, which was a logarithmic scale, so that the 0.1 shift meant thirty percent more hydrogen atoms in the water. It was felt that certain species of phytoplankton would have their very thin calcium shells in effect eaten away. They would die, a number of species would go extinct, and these very species constituted a big fraction of the bottom of the ocean’s food chain.

      But de-acidifying the ocean was not an option. There were fairly arcane chemistry reasons why it was easier for seawater to become more acidic than to become more basic. A Royal Society paper had calculated, for the sake of estimating the scale of the problem, that if they mined and crushed exposed limestone and marble in the British Isles, ‘features such as the White Cliffs of Dover would be rapidly consumed,’ because it would take sixty square kilometers of limestone mined a hundred meters deep, every year, just to hold the status quo. All at a huge carbon cost for the excavations, of course, exacerbating the very problem they were trying to solve, But this was just a thought experiment anyway. It wouldn’t work; it was an unmitigatable problem.

      And that afternoon, as they went down Diane’s list together, they saw that almost all of the climate and environmental changes they were seeing, or could see coming, were not susceptible to mitigation. Their big success of the fall, the restarting of the thermohaline cycle, had been an anomaly in that sense. The Gulf Stream had rested so closely to a tipping point in its action that humans had, by an application at the largest industrial scale they commanded, managed to tip that balance – at least temporarily. And as a result (maybe) the last month on the East Coast had been markedly warmer than the previous December had been. Perhaps they had even escaped the Youngest Dryas. So now, in one of those quick leaps that humans were prone to make (although science was not), people were talking about the climate problem as if it were something that they could terraform their way out of, or even had solved already!

      It wasn’t true. Most of their remaining problems were so big that they had too much heft and momentum for people to find any way to slow them, much less reverse them.

      So, at the end of this meeting, Edgardo shook his head. ‘Well, this is grim! There is not much we can do! We would need much more energy than we command right now. And it would have to be clean energy at that.’

      Diane agreed. ‘Clean power is our only way out. That means solar power, I’d say. Maybe wind, although it would take an awful lot of pylons. Maybe nuclear, just one last generation to tide us over. Maybe ocean power too, if we could properly tap into currents or tides or waves. To me – when I look at factors like technical developmental readiness, and manufacturing capability, and current costs, and dangers and damage – I’d say our best chance lies in a really hard push on solar. A kind of Manhattan Project devoted to solar power.’

      She raised a finger: ‘And when I say Manhattan Project, I don’t mean the kind of silver bullet that people seem to mean when they say Manhattan Project. I mean the part of the Manhattan Project that not only designed the bomb but also entrained something like twenty percent of America’s industrial capacity to make the fissionable material. About the same percent of capacity as the auto industry, and right when they needed every bit of capacity for the other parts of the war. That’s the kind of commitment we need now. Because if we had good solar power –’

      She made one of her characteristic gestures, one that Frank had become very fond of: an opening of the palm, turned up and held out to the world: ‘We might be able to stabilize the climate. Let’s push all the aspects of this. Let’s organize the case, and take it to Phil Chase, and get him prepped for when he takes office.’

      After the meeting, Frank couldn’t focus. He checked his e-mail, his cell phone, his FOG phone, his office phone: no messages. Caroline had not called for yet another day. No telling where she was or what was happening.

      That night he wandered north up Connecticut Avenue, past the hotel were Reagan had been shot, past the Chinese embassy with its Tibetan and Falun Gong protesters in front singing, until he crossed the big bridge over Rock Creek, guarded by its four Disneyesque lion statues. Out on the middle of the bridge there was a tiny relief from the claustrophobia of the city and forest. It was one of the only places where Rock Creek seemed like a big gorge.

      He continued to the clutch of little restaurants on the far СКАЧАТЬ