Sixty Days and Counting

But she was persistent, even adamant. ‘We have to put the Gulf Stream action to one side, and take a look at all the rest of it,’ she commanded. ‘Chase is going to need that from us to go forward.’

Back in his office, therefore, Frank would sit at his desk, staring at his list of Things To Do. But all in a vain attempt to take his mind off Caroline.

Ordinarily the list would be enough to distract anyone. Its length and difficulty made it all by itself a kind of blow to the head. It induced an awe so great that it resembled apathy. They had done so much and yet there was so much left to do. And as more disasters blasted into the world, their Things To Do list would lengthen. It would never shorten. They were like the Dutch boy sticking his fingers into the failing dike. What had happened to Khembalung was going to happen everywhere.

But there would still be land above water. There would still be things to be done. One had to try.

Caroline had spoken of her Plan B as if she had confidence in it. She must have had a place to go, a bank account, that sort of thing.

Frank checked out the figures from the oceanography group. The oceans covered about seventy percent of the globe. About two hundred million square kilometers, therefore, and in the wake of the first really big chunks of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet floating away, sea level was reported to have risen about twenty centimeters. The oceanographers had been measuring sea level rise a millimeter at a time, mostly from water warming up and expanding, so they were blown away and spoke of this twenty centimeters’ rise as of a Noah’s flood. Kenzo was simply bursting with amazement and pride.

Back of the envelope calculation: .2 meters times the two hundred million square kilometers, was that forty thousand cubic kilometers? A lot of water. Measurements from the last few years had Antarctica losing a hundred and fifty cubic kilometers a year, with thirty to fifty more coming off Greenland. So, now about two hundred years’ worth had come off in one year. No wonder they were freaking out. The difference no doubt lay in the fact that the melt before had been actual melting, whereas now what was happening was a matter of icebergs breaking off their perch and sliding down into the ocean. Obviously it made a big difference in how fast it could happen.

Frank 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 side of the bridge and chose one of the Indian ones. Ate a meal thinking about the names on the wine list. Vineyards in Bangalore, why was this surprising? Read his laptop over milk tea.

When it was late enough, he struck off to the northwest, toward Bethesda. Back streets, residential, the forest taking over. Night in the city, sound of distant sirens. For the first time in the day he felt awake. It was a long hike.

Up on Wisconsin he came into the realm of the Persian rug shops, and slowed down. It was still too early. Into a bar, afraid to drink, afraid to think. A whiskey for courage. Out again into the bright night of Wisconsin, then west into the strange tangle of streets backing it. The Metro stop had been like a fountain of money and people and buildings pouring up out of the earth, overwhelming what had been here before. Some of the old houses that still remained undemolished suggested a little urban space of the 1930s, almost like the back streets of Georgetown.

This was the Quiblers’ neighborhood, but he didn’t want to intrude, nor was he in the mood to be sociable. Too late for that, but not early enough for his task. Pass by and on up Woodson, off to the left, now he was in the well-remembered neighborhood of Caroline and her ex-husband. Finally it was late enough, and yet not too late: midnight. His pulse was beginning to pound a little in his neck, and he wished he hadn’t had that whiskey. The streets were not entirely empty; in this city that wouldn’t happen until more like two. But that was okay. Up the steps of the apartment building that Caroline’s ex had gone into. The drape had pulled back at the top window of the building. He shone his penlight on the address list under its glass, took a photo of it with his cell phone. Quite a few of the little slots had been left blank. He photoed the street address above the door as well, then turned and walked down the street, away from the streetlight he had stood under on that most fateful election night. His own fate, Caroline’s, the nation’s, the world’s – but who knew. Probably it only felt that way. His heart was beating so hard. Fight or flight, sure; but what happened if one could neither fight nor flee?

He turned a corner and ran.

Back in his office. Late in the day. He had given Edgardo his information from Bethesda a few days before. Soon he would have to decide again what to do after work.

Unable to face that, he continued to work. If only he could work all the time he would never have to decide anything.

He typed up his notes from Diane’s last two meetings. So, he thought as he looked them over, it had come to this: they had fucked up the world so badly that only the rapid invention and deployment of some kind of clean power generation more powerful than what they had now would be enough to extricate them from the mess. If it could be done at all.

That meant solar, as Diane had concluded. Wind was too diffuse, waves and currents too hard to extract energy from. Fusion was like a mirage on a desert road, always the same distance away. Ordinary nuclear – well, that was a possibility, as Diane had pointed out. A very real possibility. It was dangerous and created waste for the ages, but it might be done. Some kinds of cost-benefit analysis might favor it.

But it was hard to imagine making it really safe. To do so they would have to become like the French (gasp!), who got ninety percent of their power from nuclear plants, all built to the same stringent standards. Not the likeliest scenario for the rest of the world, but not physically impossible. The U.S. Navy had run a safe nuclear program ever since the 1950s. Frank wrote on his notepad: Is French nuclear power safe? Is U.S. Navy nuclear safe? What does safe mean? Can you recycle spent fuel and guard the bomb-level plutonium that would finally reduce out of it? All that would have to be investigated and discussed. Nothing could be taken off the table just because it might create poisons that would last fifty thousand years.

On the other hand, solar was coming along fast enough to encourage Frank to hope for even more acceleration. There were problems, but ultimately the fundamental point remained: in every moment an incredible amount of energy rained down from the sun onto the Earth. That was what oil was, after all; a small portion of the sun’s energy, captured by photosynthesis over millions of years – all those plants, fixing carbon and then dying, then getting condensed into a sludge and buried rather than returning to the air. Millions of years of sunlight caught that way. Every tank of gas burned about a hundred acres of what had been a forest’s carbon. Or say a hundred years of a single acre’s production of forest carbon. This was a very impressive condensate! It made sense that matching it with the real-time energy input from any other system would be difficult.

But sunlight itself rained down perpetually. About seventy percent of the photosynthesis that took place on Earth was already entrained to human uses, but photosynthesis only caught a small fraction of the total amount of solar energy striking the planet each day. Those totals, day after day, soon dwarfed even what had been caught in the Triassic fossil carbon. Every couple of months, the whole Triassic’s capture was surpassed. So the potential was there.

This was true in so many areas. The potential was there, but time was required to realize the potential, and now it was beginning to seem like they did not have much time. Speed was crucial. This was the reason Diane and others were still contemplating nuclear.

It would be good if they needed less energy. Well, but this was an entirely different problem, dragging in many other issues – technology, consumption, lifestyles, values, habits – also the sheer number of humans on the planet. Perhaps seven billion was too many, perhaps six billion was too many. It was possible that three billion was too many. Their six billion could be a kind of oil bubble.

Edgardo was not calling, neither was Caroline calling.

Desperate for ways to occupy his mind – though of course he did not think of it that way, in order not to break the spell – Frank began to look into estimates of the Earth’s maximum human carrying capacity. This turned out (usefully enough for his real purpose) to be an incredibly vexed topic, argued over for centuries already, with no clear answers yet found. The literature contained estimates for the Earth’s human carrying capacity ranging from one hundred million to twelve trillion. Quite a spread! Although here the outliers were clearly the result of some heavily ideological analysis; the high estimate appeared to be translating the sunlight hitting the Earth directly into human calories, with no other factors included; the low estimate appeared not to like human beings, even to regard them as some kind of parasite.

The majority of serious opinion came in between two billion and thirty billion; this was satisfyingly tighter than the seven magnitudes separating the outlier estimates, but for practical purposes still a big variance, especially considering how important the real number was. If the carrying capacity of the planet were two billion, they had badly overshot and were in serious trouble, looking at a major die-back that might spiral to near extinction. If on the other hand the thirty billion figure was correct, they had some wiggle-room to maneuver.

But there were hardly any scientific or governmental organizations even looking at this issue. Zero Population Growth was one of the smallest advocacy groups in Washington, which was saying a lot; and Negative Population Growth (a bad name, it seemed to Frank) turned out to be a mom-and-pop operation run out of a garage. It was bizarre.

He read one paper, written as if by a Martian, that suggested if humanity cared to share the planet with the other species, especially the mammals – and could they really survive without them? – then they should restrict their population to something like two billion, occupying only a networked fraction of the landscape. Leaving the rest of the animals in possession of a larger networked fraction. It was a pretty persuasive paper.

As another occupier of his thoughts (though now hunger was going to drive him out into the world), he looked into theories of long-term strategic policy, thinking this might give him some tools for thinking through these things. It was another area that seemed on the face of it to be important, yet was under-studied as far as Frank could tell. Most theorists in the field, he found, had agreed that the goal or method of long-term strategic thinking ought to be ‘robustness,’ which meant that you had to find things to do that would almost certainly do some good, no matter which particular future came to pass. Nice work if you could get it! Although some of the theorists actually had developed rubrics to evaluate the robustness of proposed policies. That could be useful. But when it came to generating the policies, things got more vague.

Just do the obvious things, Vanderwal. Do the necessary.

Diane was already acting in the manner suggested by most long-term strategy theory, because in any scenario conceivable, copious amounts of clean solar energy would almost certainly be a good thing. It was, therefore, a robust plan.

So, solar power:

1) there were the photovoltaics, in which sunlight was transformed into alternating current by way of photons stimulating piezoelectricity in silicon.

2) There were the Stirling engines, external heat engines that used mirror dishes controlled by computers to reflect sunlight onto a hydrogen-filled closed element that heated to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, driving pistons which generated the electricity. The engine had been designed by a Scot named Stirling in 1816.

All solar technologies had efficiency rates measured as a percentage of the sunlight’s photonic energy transferred successfully to alternating current electricity. They had been getting some really good numbers from solar panels, up to twenty percent, but this Stirling engine got thirty, Given the amount of photons raining down, that was really good. That would add up fast.

Then he found a link to a site that explained that Southern California Edison had built a Stirling system to power a 500 megawatt plant; most traditionally-powered plants were 500 or a thousand megawatts, so this was full size. That meant there was some practical experience with real-world, commercial versions of this technology. Also some manufacturing ability, ready to be deployed. All good news when contemplating the need for speed.

Banishing the thought (recurrent about every hour) that they should have been doing this a long time ago, Frank called SCE and asked a long string of questions of the CPM (the Cognizant Program Manager, a useful acronym that only NSF appeared to use). This turned out to be a man who was more than happy to talk – who would have talked all day, maybe all night. With difficulty Frank got him to stop. Lots of enthusiasm for the Stirling system there.

Well, more grist for the mill. Over the past year Frank had been giving alternative energy about a quarter of his working time, and now he saw he was going to have to bump that up. Everything from now on would be jacked to emergency levels. Not a comfortable feeling, but there was no avoiding it. It was like an existential condition, as if he had become Alice’s White Rabbit: I’m late! I’m late! I’m late! And most of the time he managed to obscure from his conscious train of thought the true source of his anxiety.

One day, later that week, when he was deep in work’s oblivion, Diane appeared in his doorway, startling him. He was pleased, then nervous; they had not yet found a new balance. After Caroline had called Frank with her emergency situation, Frank had hastily called Diane to cancel before thinking of any plausible non-other-woman-related reason for doing so, and so had given no explanation at all – which opacity was suspicious, and probably more impolite than the cancellation per se. Opacity seldom conducive to rapport.

‘Hi, Diane,’ he said now, aping normality. ‘What’s happening?’

She looked at him with a curious expression. ‘I just got a call from Phil Chase.’

‘Wow, what did he want?’

‘He asked me if I would be his science advisor.’

Frank found he was standing. He reached out and shook Diane’s hand, then hugged her. ‘Now that is news we have to celebrate,’ he declared, seizing the bull by the horns. ‘I’m sorry about that the other night, I still owe you dinner! Can I take you out tonight?’

‘Sure,’ she said easily, as if there had been no problem. She was so cool; maybe there never had been a problem. Frank couldn’t be sure. ‘Meet you at,’ she checked her watch, ‘at six, okay? Now I’m going to go call my kids.’

But then she stopped on her way out, and again looked at him oddly. ‘You must have had something to do with this,’ she said suddenly.

‘Me? I don’t think so. What do you mean?’

‘Talking to Charlie Quibler, maybe?’

‘Oh, no. I mean, of course I’ve talked to Charlie about some of our stuff, generally –’

‘And he’s been Chase’s environment guy.’

‘Well yes, but you know, Charlie’s just part of a large staff, and he’s been staying at home with Joe, so he hasn’t been a major factor with Chase for some time, as I understand it. Mostly just a voice on the phone. He says he doesn’t get listened to. He says he’s kind of like Jiminy Cricket was to Pinocchio, when Pinocchio’s nose was at its longest.’

Diane laughed. ‘Yeah sure. Let’s meet over at Optimodal, shall we? Let’s say seven instead of six. I want to run some of this off.’

Now that was something he could understand. ‘Sure. See you there.’

Frank sat in his chair feeling his chest puffed out: another cliché revealed to be an accurate account of emotion’s effects on the body. Everyone was the same. It occurred to him that maybe Charlie had had something to do with it, after all. Someone had to have advised Chase whom to choose for this post, and as far as Frank knew, Chase and Diane had never met. So – that was interesting.