Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [192]
“I’m fine, Wade,” resisting the urge to speak louder so that Wade could still hear him down there at the bottom of the world. “What’s happening?”
“I’m on a flight over the Ross Sea, and I’m looking at a big tabular berg that’s just come off from the coastline. Really really really big. It’ll be on the news soon, but I wanted to call you guys and tell you. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has started to come off big time.”
“Oh my God. You’re looking at a piece of it already off?”
“Yes. It’s about a hundred miles long, the pilot says.”
“My God. So sea level has already gone up a foot?”
“You got it Charlie! I was trying to tell Roy.”
“That’s why I told you to sit down,” Roy put in.
“I had better sit down,” Charlie admitted, feeling a little wobble, as for instance the axis of the Earth. “Any guesses by the scientists down there as to how fast the rest will come off?”
“They don’t know. It’s happening faster than they expected. Some of them are running a pool now, and the bets range from a decade to a century. Apparently the goo underneath the ice is the consistency of toothpaste. It lets the ice slide, and the tides tug at it, and there’s an active volcano down underneath there too.”
“Shit.”
“So we’re talking sea-level rise?” Roy asked, trying to get confirmation.
“Yes,” Wade said. “Hey boys I’ve got to go, I just wanted to let someone know. I’ll talk to you more soon.”
He got off and Charlie then explained the situation to Roy. Giant ice sheet, warming, cracking—sliding off its underwater perch—floating away in chunks, displacing more water than it had when perched. If the whole thing came off, sea level up seven meters. A quarter of the world’s population affected, perhaps fifty trillion dollars in human and natural capital at risk. Conservatively.
Roy said, “Okay Charlie. I get the point. It sounds like it will help Phil in the campaign.”
“Roy, please. Not funny.”
“I’m not being funny.” Although he was laughing like a loon. “I’m talking about addressing the problem! If Phil doesn’t win, what do you think will happen?”
“Okay okay. Shit. My God.” Everything Anna and her colleagues had been doing to restart the Gulf Stream was as nothing to this news. Changing currents, maybe—but sea level? “The stakes just keep getting higher, don’t they?”
“Yes they do.”
Kenzo had run the numbers and found that most seasonal weather manifestations varied by about eight percent, year to year—temperature, precipitation, wind speeds, and so on. Now all that was over. They had passed the point of criticality, they had tipped over the tipping point in the same way a kid running up a seesaw will get past the axis and somewhere beyond and above it plummet down on the falling board. They were in the next mode, and coming into the second winter of abrupt climate change.
The president announced on the campaign trail that he had inherited this problem from his Democratic predecessors, particularly Bill Clinton, and that only free markets and a strong national defense could battle this new threat, which he continued to call climactic terrorism. “Why, you can’t be sure you won’t wake up someday to find the world spitting in your face. It’s not okay, and I’m going to do something about it. My administration has been studying the problem and getting recommendations from our scientists, and I’m proud to say that on my watch the National Science Foundation initiated this great counterterrorist operation in the North Atlantic, which will soon restore the Gulf Stream to its rightful flow, and show how American knowhow and technology is a match for anything.”
This played well, like most things the president did. He visited NSF for half an hour, and later appeared on the news in a briefing with Diane Chang, the heads of NOAA and the EPA, and his science advisor, Dr. Strengloft. The president got a great deal of credit for taking on the weather in such a forceful and market-based manner, bypassing the scientists