Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [81]
“Sure,” Derek said, handing over a glossy folder of material he had already prepared. “I understand. We can come back and talk to them too if you like, answer any questions.”
“That’s good, thanks.” Bannet put the folder on the table. With a few more pleasantries and a round of handshaking, Derek and Leo were ushered out.
Leo found he had no idea whether the meeting had gone well or poorly. And would that be a good sign or a bad one?
The Earth’s atmosphere now contains a percentage of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that is higher than it has been since the end of the Cretaceous. This means more heat from the sun is being trapped in our air, and the high-pressure cells we saw this year are bigger, warmer, and loft higher in the tropical atmosphere. Many common jet-stream patterns have been disrupted, and the storms spiraling out of the Tropics have gained in both frequency and intensity. The hurricane season in the Atlantic ran from April to November, and there were eight hurricanes and six tropical storms. Typhoons in the East Pacific happened all year, twenty-two all told. Mass flooding resulted, but it should be noted that in other regions droughts have been breaking records.
So the effects have been various, but the changes are general and pervasive, and the damage for the year was recently estimated at six hundred billion dollars, with deaths in the thousands. So far the United States has escaped major catastrophe, and attention to the problem has not been one of the administration’s central concerns. “In a healthy economy the weather isn’t important,” the President remarked. But the possibility is there that the added energy in the atmosphere could trigger what climatologists call abrupt climate change. How that might begin, no one can be sure.
ANNA FLEW through the blur of a midweek day. Up and off, Metro to the office; pound the keys, wrestling with some faulty data from an NSF educational outreach program, the spreadsheet work eating up hours like minutes. Stop to pump, then to eat at her desk (it felt a little too weird to eat and pump at the same time), all the while data wrangling. Then a look at an e-mail from Drepung and Sucandra about their grant proposals.
Anna had helped them to write a small raft of proposals, and it had indeed been a pleasure, as they did all the real work—and very well too—while she just added her expertise in grant writing, honed through some tens of thousands of grant evaluations. She definitely knew that world, how to sequence the information, what to emphasize, what language to use, what supporting documents, what arguments—all of it. Every word and punctuation mark of a grant proposal she had a feel for, one way or the other. It had been a pleasure to apply that expertise to the Khembalis’ attempts.
Now she was pleased again to find that they had heard back from three of them, two positively. NSF had awarded them a quick temporary starter grant in the “Tropical Oceans, Global Atmosphere” effort; and the INDOEX countries had agreed informally to expand their Project Asian Brown Cloud (ABC) to include a big new monitoring facility on Khembalung, including researchers. This would cement a partnership with the START units already scattered all over South Asia. Altogether it meant funding streams for several years to come—tens of millions of dollars all told, with infrastructure built, and relationships with neighboring countries established. Allies in the struggle.
“Oh that’s very nice,” Anna said, and hit the PRINT button. She cc’d the news to Charlie, sent congratulations to Drepung, and then got back to work on the spreadsheet.
After a while she remembered about the printouts, and went around the corner to the Department of Unfortunate Statistics to get the hard copies.
She found Frank inside, shaking his head over the latest.
“Have you seen this one?” he said, gesturing with his nose at a taped-up printout of yet another