Fifty Degrees Below (22 page)

“We need to be sure,” Diane said.

“That’s going to be hard, in this area anyway.”

In another meeting they discussed methods that had been proposed for direct climate alteration, including adding chemicals to jet fuel so that contrails would last longer and reflect more light back into space; seeding clouds; shooting dust into the upper atmosphere in imitation of volcanoes; and flying various sunscreens to high altitude. Again, because of the complexity of the various feedback mechanisms, and the importance of water vapor both in blocking incoming light and holding in outgoing heat, it was hard to predict what the result of any given action would be. No one had a good sense of how clouds might change in any given scenario.

“I don’t think we’re ready for anything like these projects,” Diane said. “We can’t be sure what effects we’ll get.”

At the time she said it, they were all looking at a slide from an NSF polar programs ecologist’s presentation. Both poles were heating up fast, but especially the Arctic; and the slide informed them that one-seventh of all the carbon on Earth was cached in biotic material frozen in the Arctic permafrost, which was rapidly melting. Once it was liquid again, bacterial action would start releasing some of that carbon into the atmosphere. “It could be more positive feedback, like the methane hydrates unfreezing on the continental shelves.”

“It’s the law of unintended consequences again.”

“Wouldn’t the tundra just turn into peat bogs?” Frank asked.

“Peat bogs are anoxic. Permafrost isn’t.”

“Ah.”

In a meeting the next day, a team from NOAA gave a presentation on what they had done to try to get a handle on the numbers involved in any potential scheme to intervene in the North Atlantic. It was a matter of sensitive dependencies, their main speaker claimed, so there was chaos math involved. Frank was interested in the algorithms used in the computer modeling, but he saved that aspect for later; accuracy within orders of magnitude was probably good enough for the questions facing them now. How much water used to sink in the downwelling? What volume of water would have to sink at each particular site to start it again? What kind of thermohaline differentials were they talking about? How much more saline would the sea have to be to sink through the freshwater cap on the ocean now there? How much dry weight of salt would be needed to create that differential?

The NOAA people did their best with these questions. Frank and the others there tried out various back-of-the-envelope calculations, and they talked over what it might take to bring that much salt to bear. It seemed within the industrial and shipping capacities of the advanced nations, at least theoretically—somewhat similar to the numbers involved in oil transport—although there were also questions concerning whether this would be a one-time application, or would have to be an annual thing to offset the Arctic sea ice that would presumably form every winter, break up every spring, and float south every summer.

“We can deal with that issue later,” Diane declared. “Meanwhile I want all the answers here as constrained as possible, so I can take a plan to Congress and the president. Anything we can do that makes the point we are not helpless will be useful on other fronts. So, as far as I can tell, this is as good a place to start as any.”

At lunch he ran with the NSF runners, when he could get away. It was an indulgence but he couldn’t help himself. He justified it by inventing questions he could ask Kenzo about the Arctic climate and so on. That would get Kenzo started on his Master of Disaster shtick, detailing the latest like a curator with an exceptionally good show; but this was likely to happen anyway, for Kenzo never tired of the role, nor seemed to think he was telling the story of the beginning of the end of civilization.

That part was Edgardo’s job. “How are your Khembalis doing, Frank?”

“Well, it’s getting pretty crowded at their house.”

“I can see they’re sleeping in their office too.”

“Yes. I think Immigration is beginning to get on their case. They’re going for some kind of refugee status.”

“They’ll never get that,” Edgardo advised. “They should call themselves Washington’s only Buddhist think tank.”

“Maybe so.”

“They should say they are the embassy from Atlantis.”

“That’ll really help them with access to Congress.”

Edgardo laughed. “It would! They would love it! Atlantis, Shambhala—your guys have to be from somewhere interesting. Do they have lawyers identifying who to sue for compensation?”

“No.”

“Do they have insurance companies ready to back their suit?”

“No! Be quiet and run, will you?”

But Frank couldn’t run fast enough to wind them. They were stronger runners than he was, and so it was talk talk talk, every step of the way. Scientists, bureaucrats—scientific bureaucrats—technocrats—they were all
intellectuals
to one degree or another. Although of course not therefore all equally talkative, or the same in personality. Frank pounded along behind Edgardo and Kenzo contemplating the different characters in even so homogenous a technocracy as NSF. There were shy types; there were science geeks like Kenzo; then also raving intellectuals like Edgardo; and bluff “simple folk” like Bob or Clark, who weren’t willing to admit to knowing anything or having any opinions except in their areas of expertise, implying that this modesty was the purest form of scientific precision and right action: no opinions, only assert what you think you can prove.

Edgardo was not like that. He had come up with another idea for a popular science bestseller: “I was reading an enormously long paper on hypergraphia when it came to me that the researcher suffered from the disease and that was why he was interested. I wonder how often that is the case. Anyway this hypergraphia is kind of like epilepsy, it happens in the same part of the brain.”

“Hard to imagine the evolutionary history of that,” Frank noted. “A tendency to write things down?”

“Presumably it’s just a variant of hyperlogia,” Kenzo said, “which would explain Edgardo’s interest too.”

“Ha ha, but no that’s a different part of the brain. Talking is in Broca’s and Wernicke’s, hypergraphia is in the epilepsy region, and it actually creates a kind of style. There is a suite of stylistic habits that can be abstracted and quantified by computer to make the diagnosis. Of course sheer mass of output is still the first clue, and it must have been useful to several very prolific novelists, this is a nice match of problem and solution. But even with the hypergraphic greats like Balzac or Dick it seems to have been as much a pain as a benefit, like a kind of priapism, but what I noticed immediately is that these stylistic tics common to hypergraphics are all evident in both the
Book of Mormon
and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, and then of course the Quran, and I thought, of course, all these prophets, writing down the truth at great length—and the religious center of the brain is also tightly bound with the epilepsy center! It’s all one complex! So these scribbling prophets were all suffering from a form of epilepsy, they wrote under the spell of a convulsion.”

“Mohammed dictated the Quran.”

“Is that right? Well, maybe hyperlogia is also implicated.”

“How many religions do you think you could offend at once with this book?”

“I would think many, but that would not be the point. Explanation of our behavior is the point. Besides humanism too could be included here. Sartre was clearly hypergraphic, especially when he used amphetamines.”

“You’re going to have quite a tour promoting this one!” Kenzo said.

On other lunchtimes Frank went out and ate with Anna and Drepung at the Food Factory. Drepung would come in with the latest from the embassy, shaking his head as he ate. Every week it seemed clearer that they had lost Khembalung for good. Salvage plans had replaced restoration in his talk.

“Did you have any flood insurance?” Anna asked.

“No. I don’t think anyone would underwrite it.”

“So what will you do?”

Drepung shrugged. “Not sure yet.”

“Ouch,” Anna said.

“I do not mind it. It seems to be good for people. It wakes them up.”

Frank nodded at this, but Anna only looked distressed. She said, “But you’re making arrangements?”

“Yes, of course. Such freedom from habit cannot last, people would go mad.” He glanced at Frank and laughed; Frank felt his face get hot. “We’re talking with the Dalai Lama, of course, and the Indian government. Probably they would give us another island in the Sundarbans.”

“But then it will only happen again,” Frank pointed out.

“Yes, it seems likely.”

“You need to get to higher ground.”

“Yes.”

“Back to the Himalayas,” Anna suggested.

“We will see. For now, Washington, D.C.”

“Go higher than that for God’s sake!”

Sometimes Drepung would leave on errands and Frank and Anna would order another coffee and talk a few minutes more before taking the coffees back up to work. They shared their news in a desultory fashion. Anna’s was usually about Charlie and the boys, Frank’s about something he had done or seen around the city. Anna laughed at the discrepancy between their tales: “Things are still happening to you.”

Frank rolled his eyes at this. For a while they talked in a different way than they usually did, about how things felt; and they agreed that lives were not easily told to others. Frank speculated that many life stories consisted precisely of a search for a reiterated pattern, for habits. Thus, one’s set of habits was somehow unsatisfactory, and you needed to change them, and were thereby thrown into a plot, which was the hunt for new habits, or even, but exceptionally, the story of the giving up of such a hunt in favor of sticking with what you have, or remaining chaotically in the existential moment (not adaptive if reproductive success were the goal, he noted under his breath). Thus Frank was living a plot while Anna was living a life, and when they talked about personal matters he had news while she had the “same old same old,” which was understood by both to be the desired state, irritating and difficult though it might be to maintain.

Anna merely laughed at this.

One day the
Things To Do
list included a lunch meeting at a Crystal City restaurant with the four-star general who headed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a friendly and unassuming man named Arthur Wracke, “pronounced
rack
,” he said, “yes, as in rack and ruin.” White-haired, brown-skinned, grizzled. A strangely pixie grin. Unflappable; this, Frank saw, was what had gotten him his four stars. And along the way he had surely been in any number of political firestorms over major environmental interventions like the ones they were now contemplating at NSF.

When Frank expressed doubt that any major climate mitigation was possible, either physically or politically, Wracke waved a hand. “The Corps has always done things on a big scale. Huge scale. Sometimes with huge blunders. All with the best intentions of course. That’s just the way things happen. We’re still gung-ho to try. Lots of things are reversible, in the long run. Hopefully this time around we’ll be working with better science. But, you know, it’s an iterative process. So, long story short, you get a project approved, and we’re good to go. We’ve got the expertise. The Corps’ esprit de corps is always high.”

“What about budget?” Frank asked.

“What about it? We’ll spend what we’re given.”

“Well, but is there any kind of, you know, discretionary fund that you can tap into?”

“We don’t seek funding, usually,” the general admitted.

“But could you?”

“Well, in tandem with a request for action. Say you came to us with a request for action that would cost more than you have available. We could refer it up, and it would have to go to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get supplementary funding. Do even the Chiefs have much discretionary funding?” He grinned. “Sure they do. But not as much as you might think. They got into some trouble for what they called reprogrammed funding. Really, it all goes back to Congress. They control the purse strings. Even more than the president. So if
they
were to allocate funds, the Joint Chiefs would do what they’re told to with it, by and large.”

Frank nodded. “But if it was just the Pentagon. . . .”

“We’d have to see. But we could make your case, and if the funding’s there, we are good to go.”

“Major climate mitigation.”

“Oh heck yes. We like these kinds of challenges. Who wouldn’t?”

Frank had to laugh. The world was their sandbox. Castles and moats, dams and bulwarks . . . they had drained and then rehydrated the Everglades, they kept New Orleans dry, they had rerouted all the major rivers, irrigated the West, moved mountains. You could see all that right there on the general’s happy face. Stewardship, sustainability—fine! Rack but not ruin! Working for the long haul just meant no end, ever, to their sandbox games.

“No deep ecologists in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, I guess.”

“Ha ha.” Wracke’s eyes twinkled. “You give us a chance and we’ll
become
deep ecologists. We’ll go right down to the
mantle
.”

Driving back to the office Frank considered how interesting it was to see the way some people enjoyed becoming the avatar of the institution they worked for, expressing the organizational personality like an actor in a role they love. Most people played their institution’s personality with diligence but no particular flair; sometimes, however, he met good actors in a role well-matched to them. Diane was somewhat like that herself, though as Edgardo had noted, she was pushing the NSF character into realms it had never entered before, so the vibe she gave was not like Wracke’s evocation of the Corps, supremely at ease with his role, but rather that of a person in the midst of a great awakening, or coming into one’s own. Diane as Science, becoming self-aware. Maybe even unbound. Diane the prometheus.

In the last hour of the work day Frank usually sat back in his office chair and glanced through jackets. No matter that you might be inventing a new-but-old world religion, or saving the biosphere itself, you still had to complete NSF’s unconscious life-support activity, its heartbeat and breath. How many jackets did you process today?