Flood (23 page)

So it was just Lily who sat beside Nathan Lammockson, on a balcony that overlooked the theater where Thandie would present. The room was sparsely populated, a dozen of the hundred or so seats occupied by middle-aged types with the eccentric dress sense, hair styles and facial fluff that seemed to mark out the professional scientist. They knew each other, it seemed, and held conversations leaning over the backs of their seats. They ignored Thandie, who was scrolling through her presentation. In the air before her was a big three-dimensional display that held a translucent image of the whole Earth. It spun before Thandie’s touch; Lily could see her earnest face through the planet’s ghostly layers.

Lammockson sucked on a coffee, and leaned over to Lily. “Quite a view we’ve got here.”

“Yes. I like Thandie’s three-D projector.”

He glanced at her. “I guess you haven’t seen a crystal ball before?”

“I missed a lot of the new toys while I was stuck down those cellars in Barcelona.”

“Yeah. The principle’s simple, as I understand it. It’s a fool-the-eye thing.” He lifted his hand upright and mimed rotation.“You have a translucent screen, upright like this, spinning a thousand times a minute. And you have three projectors firing light at it, through systems of lenses and mirrors. So at any instant you have a slice through the three-dimensional object you’re looking at. Spin it up and those slices merge in the vision. Terrific tool in medicine, I’m told. Surgery, you know, scans of skulls with tumours in ’em, that kind of thing. Of course they’re mostly used for porn.”

That made her laugh.“Actually, looking down on Thandie like this, I feel like I’m about to watch surgery.”

He grunted.“Well, so you are, in a way. These arseholes will do their very best to dissect whatever Thandie puts before them. You got to understand how the IPCC works, Lily, what it’s for . . .”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been established by the governments back in the 1980s to provide authoritative assessments on information and predictions regarding climate change.

“You have working groups covering the physical science of climate change, impact on the world, and mitigation. Now, that word ‘authoritative’ is the key. Everything about the way the panel operates is designed to reinforce that. Every time they produce a report you have a lead author for each section, but typically you’ll get hundreds of expert reviewers providing tens of thousands of comments. The rule of thumb is they only let through what there’s absolute consensus on. Especially when it comes to the Summary for Policymakers, which is the only bit anybody ever reads.”

“Wow. It’s amazing anything gets through at all.”

“That’s the point. The IPCC is ferociously conservative. You can criticize it for being too slow to respond to the evidence for climate change, for instance. But when it does speak the governments listen.”

“So do you think they’ll accept any of Thandie’s data and conclusions?”

“Maybe the data. Less so the conclusions. There’s bound to be a debate. Even those who accept the reality of the sea-level rise see it as a symptom of climate change, and can’t accept any justification of it that doesn’t come from their old models—can’t accept it as something entirely new. A lot will depend on Thandie’s headline prediction, I think. Right now they’re clinging to eighty meters, tops, as an outer limit. I mean that would be catastrophic enough, but—”

“Why eighty meters?”

“Because that’s what you would get if all the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica were to melt. And the melting ice is the only source generally accepted for the ocean rise.”

Lily nodded. “So it’s going to be hard for them to listen if Thandie tells them otherwise.”

“Exactly.”

“So what do you think is going to come out of today?”

“Nothing, immediately. It will take them months to come up with a report. Even then the governments probably won’t accept it, until the oceans are lapping around their feet. However other players will be listening hard.” He glanced down at the lecture theater. “I could point to five of those clown-haired characters down there who are in the pocket of members of the LaRei.”

“The LaRei?”

He grinned. “An exclusive Manhattan society. Even more exclusive than the MetCircle. You need a net worth of a hundred million bucks just to get in the door. The rich are listening, believe me.”

She nodded. “And the rich will take care of themselves.”

He eyed her. “Rich arseholes like me, you mean?”

That made her uncomfortable. This man was, after all, her boss. “Nathan—”

“Oh, don’t worry. Look, I know what you think of me, even though I saved your lives. In a supposedly capitalist society everybody despises the accumulation of wealth, save those who have it. Listen. Damn right I’m intending to act. I’m not going to wait around until the governments get over their collective denial, as Dr. Jones puts it. Damn right I’m intending to save myself, and my son Hammond, if I can—and save my wealth, whatever that means in the coming world. Who wouldn’t? But remember this: I sponsored Thandie’s survey, I recruited the arseholes she needed from Woods Hole and wherever else. I’m even sponsoring this meeting today. What more can I do than that?”

Lily said nothing. She didn’t believe he was after her approval, as such, or her praise. With Nathan it was all about dominance. But Nathan was no monster just because he had made himself rich. She could see his foresight in operation, as he steadily converted his wealth into more tangible assets, land and equipment and people. And if Thandie’s projections about the speed of events in the years to come were correct, the world might need figures like Nathan, with the decisiveness and resources to make things happen fast.

Gary Boyle hurried in, a laptop under his arm. “Hi,” he whispered to Lily, settling beside her. “I’m not late, am I?”

“Just in time. How’s Aaron?”

He opened the laptop, and showed her an image taken from a camera on the roof. The sky was dominated by an immense swirl of cloud. “Windspeed rising. Pressure dropping. They’ve flown in a HIRT. That’s a Hurricane Intercept Research Team, running around in speedboats and SUVs with weather instruments and laptops. And they’ve sent up a plane to drop a meteorology sonde into the eye. But they still don’t think Aaron’s going to make landfall.”

Nathan said, “They don’t think so, huh?” He murmured into a cellphone, ordering a chopper to be readied on the Freedom Tower helipad.

In the lecture theater, Thandie stood beside her translucent three-dimensional Earth and began to speak.

34

T
handie began with the basics, a summary of the data on the global sea-level rise. By now the rise was being logged in detail, as alarmed oceanographers had planted a dense network of tide gauges across the planet, and specialized satellites probed the ocean with laser and radar altimeters.

And Lily watched, fascinated, as Thandie demonstrated the raising of ocean surfaces across the planet. A ghostly pink meniscus lifted up, indeed it accelerated with time, the vertical scale exaggerated, pulsing and rippling, evidently a signal of multiple sources feeding into the global rise. The graphic image was backed up by labels, data and equations annotating detail, and text was downloaded into screens set before the delegates.

Thandie talked about the changing nature of the ocean. As well as a global rise the scientists were witnessing a drop in salinity, an increase in ocean heat, and a change in distribution of that heat. The warmth of the ocean drove the climate, and thus the climate was also being reshaped, said Thandie. She ran through new climate models by NASA’s Goddard Institute, the Hadley Center in England, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and other groups in Russia, Japan, Germany, elsewhere. She showed how specific incidents could be tied to the anomalous warming, such as last year’s early monsoon across Asia.

Gary whispered to Lily, “Yeah. It’s the heat of the ocean surface that is spawning that big storm outside right now. Ocean heat is the fuel for hurricanes.”

Thandie outlined the effects on the biosphere. There had been blooms and diebacks in the living things in the oceans. Coral reefs, for instance, were being hit hard by the temperature shifts and increasing depths of coastal waters.

All of this was uncontroversial enough. It was when Thandie moved on to the fundamental causes of the flood, and her projections for its future, that the IPCC delegates started muttering.

The oceans were rising. There was a complication that as the oceans heated up the water expanded, which itself contributed to the rise. But the blunt truth was that to fill up the oceans, just like a brimming bathtub, you needed a running tap.

It didn’t take Thandie long to dismiss the consensus theory that the source of the floodwater could be melting ice caps. The caps, north and south, were monitored as closely as any other aspect of the planet’s climate system, and yes, they were melting—in fact the global ocean rise was accelerating the melting in Antarctica and Greenland, as it lifted sheets of ice away from the rock that anchored it. But there was no way the measured mass loss from the ice caps could be fueling the global expansion of the oceans; the numbers simply didn’t add up.

So Thandie spoke of other sources—of water stored within the Earth, and now being released. She produced images taken from the
Trieste
and other probes of vast, turbulent, underwater fountains, places where it seemed clear that hot, mineral-laden water was forcing its way out of the rock substrate.

And she produced her most striking figure. It was a map of the subterranean seas she believed she and others had been able to detect, from the evidence of seismic waves and direct submersible exploration. They were long reservoirs beneath all the major mid-ocean ridges, under the Atlantic, around Africa, spanning the Antarctic Ocean and surrounding the vast Pacific plate. The Atlantic reservoir was the best mapped, directly from
Trieste
; the rest she had had to construct from coarser seismic data.

Thandie had boldly given these sunken seas names, like Ziosudra and Utnapishtin and Deucalion, the last for the great Atlantic reservoir. Thandie said the names were variants of Noah, for a legend of a global flood had arisen in many cultures. Ziosudra was Sumerian, and Utnapishtin featured in the Gilgamesh saga. Deucalion came from Greek mythology. When Zeus punished the men of Hellas with heavy rain, he instructed Deucalion to build a chest within which he floated for nine days, finally landing on Mount Parnassus . . .

The delegates were increasingly restless, Lily saw, shifting in their seats and glancing at each other.

“Big mistake,” murmured Nathan. “You don’t bring in Noah with these guys.”

Thandie moved on to the question of why it should be just now that the subterranean reservoirs broke open. But here she was on shaky ground. She could only point to dramatic and abrupt changes in Earth’s climatic state in the past. Earth didn’t move smoothly through climatic changes; it seemed to have only a fixed number of stable states, between which it lurched, rapidly. For the last two million years the climate seemed to have been flickering between ice ages, glaciation, and warmer interglacials. The transitions could be rapid, taking only decades, even mere years. Maybe this was just another of those dramatic but natural transitions.

Or maybe it was humanity’s fault, Thandie said cautiously. She produced familiar statistics that showed how, since the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, humanity had become a planet-shaping species now overwhelming natural processes, making significant changes to cycles of oxygen and sulfur and nitrogen and moving ten times as much rock and dirt each year as the wind and the rain. Maybe the level of human intervention in the Earth’s cycles had reached what the climate modelers called DAI, for Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference. Humans were kicking the complex, interwoven, nonlinear processes of Earth so hard that the whole system was flipping over to a new stable state . . .

It seemed to Lily that Thandie had already lost her audience. The IPCC delegates looked away, chatted to each other, and one was even talking into a phone.

Thandie produced her conclusions, in a stark set of bullet points. She recommended funding for a widening study of the sea-level rise and its sources. For instance she wanted the use of US Army Deep Digger bombs, meant for busting bunkers, which could burrow deep and fast into solid rock, to confirm what was down there under the ocean floors. She wanted the big spaceborne planet-finder telescopes to focus on the physics of other watery worlds: did those planets have a dry-wet cycle? She wanted more modeling of the impact on the changing ocean heat distribution on global climate systems. She wanted modeling of the changing isostatic loads: would there be any more Istanbuls?

And, most of all, she wanted the delegates to have their governments prepare for, not a cessation of the sea-level rise, but an acceleration. There was no foreseeable limit to the volume of water her subterranean seas could yet release. The trends were still uncertain, but a long-term exponential rise was emerging: exponential meaning the rise would double, and double again and again, beyond any limit Thandie could see.

That was it. She didn’t get a round of applause. There were a couple of questions, neutral points about details of the science. Then the meeting broke up; people simply stood and walked out. Thandie, isolated, closed down her display. Lily saw Piers enter at the back of the room. He snagged delegates by the coffee machines; he seemed to be trying to talk to them.

Nathan Lammockson sat back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks. “Well. She blew it.”

Gary was looking worriedly at the data on his laptop screen.“They’re not so sure about the track of the storm as they were. The city’s Office of Emergency Management has woken up. Telling people not to try to evacuate the island, the freeways and expressways are jammed, where they’re not already flooded or otherwise blocked. They should go home and prepare a safe room.”

“Nice advice if you’re living in a tent in Central Park.”