Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [114]
She banished these thoughts and made her own quick report about the infrastructure distribution programs that she had been studying. These had been in place for some years, and she could therefore provide some quantitative data, tallying increased scientific output in the participating countries. A lot of infrastructure had been dispersed in the last decade. Anna’s concluding suggestion that the programs were a success and should be expanded was received with nods all around, as an obvious thing to do. But also expensive.
There was a pause as people thought this over.
Finally Diane looked at Frank. “Frank, are you ready?”
Frank stood to answer. He did not exhibit his usual ease. He walked over to the whiteboard, took up a red marker, fiddled with it. His face was flushed.
“All the programs described so far focus on gathering data, and the truth is we have enough data already. The world’s climate has already changed. The Arctic Ocean ice pack breakup has flooded the surface of the North Atlantic with fresh water, and the most recent data indicate that that has stopped the surface water from sinking, and stalled the circulation of the big Atlantic current. That’s been pretty conclusively identified as a major trigger event in Earth’s climactic history, as most of you no doubt know. Abrupt climate change has almost certainly already begun.”
Frank stared at the whiteboard, lips pursed. “So. The question becomes, what do we do? Business as usual won’t work. For you here, the effort should be toward finding ways that NSF can make a much broader impact than it has up until now.”
“Excuse me,” one of the Board members said, sounding a bit peeved. He was a man in his sixties, with a gray Lincoln beard; Anna did not recognize him. “How is this any different from what we are always trying to do? I mean, we’ve talked about trying to do this at every Board meeting I’ve ever been to. We always ask ourselves, how can NSF get more bang for its buck?”
“Maybe so,” said Frank. “But it hasn’t worked.”
Diane said, “What are you saying, Frank? What should we be doing that we haven’t already tried?”
Frank cleared his throat. He and Diane stared at each other for a long moment, locked in some kind of undefined conflict.
Frank shrugged, went to the whiteboard, uncapped his red marker. “Let me make a list.”
He wrote a 1 and circled it.
“One. We have to knit it all together.” He wrote Synergies at NSF.
“I mean by this that you should be stimulating synergistic efforts that range across the disciplines to work on this problem. Then,” he wrote and circled a 2, “you should be looking for immediately relevant applications coming out of the basic research funded by the Foundation. These applications should be hunted for by people brought in specifically to do that. You should have a permanent in-house innovation and policy team.”
Anna thought, That would be that mathematician he just lost.
She had never seen Frank so serious. His usual manner was gone, and with it the mask of cynicism and self-assurance that he habitually wore, the attitude that it was all a game he condescended to play even though everyone had already lost. Now he was serious, even angry it seemed. Angry at Diane somehow. He wouldn’t look at her, or anywhere else but at his scrawled red words on the whiteboard.
“Three, you should commission work that you think needs to be done, rather than waiting for proposals and funding choices given to you by others. You can’t afford to be so passive anymore. Four, you should assign up to fifty percent of NSF’s budget every year to the biggest outstanding problem you can identify, in this case catastrophic climate change, and direct the scientific community to attack and solve it. Both public and private science, the whole culture. The effort could be organized through something like Germany’s Max Planck Institutes, which are funded by the