Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [76]
It was something you could be aware of without quite comprehending. They sat around the table pondering it.
Frank seized his pen, squeezed it as if it were his recalcitrant brain. “I’ve been looking at some numbers,” he said haltingly. “Postulating, for a second, that we have developed really significant clean energy generation, then, observe, the amount of water displaced by the detached Antarctic ice so far is on the order of forty thousand cubic kilometers. Now, there are a number of these basins in the Sahara Desert and all across central Asia, and in the basin and range country of North America. Also in southern Africa. In effect, the current position of the continents and the trade wind patterns have desiccated all land surfaces around the thirtieth latitudes north and south, and in the south that doesn’t mean much, but in the north it means a huge land area dried out. All those basins together have a theoretical capacity of about sixty thousand cubic kilometers.”
He looked up from his laptop briefly, and it was as he had expected; they were looking at him like he was a bug. He shrugged and looked back at the PowerPoint, and forged on:
“So, you could pump a lot of the excess sea water into these empty basins in the thirties, and perhaps stabilize the ocean’s sea level proper.”
“Holy moly,” Kenzo said in the silence after it was clear Frank was done. “You’d alter the climate in those regions tremendously if you did that.”
“No doubt,” Frank said. “But you know, since the climate is going haywire anyway, it’s kind of like, so what? In the context of everything else, will we even be able to distinguish what this would do from all the rest?”
Kenzo laughed.
“Well,” Frank said defensively to the silent room, “I thought I’d at least run the numbers.”
“It would take an awful lot of power to pump that much water inland,” Anna said.
“I have no idea what kind of climate alteration you would get if you did that,” Kenzo said happily.
Frank said, “Did the Salton Sea change anything downwind of it?”
“Well, but we’re talking like a thousand Salton Seas here,” Kenzo said. He was still bug-eyed at the idea; he had never even imagined curating such a change, and he was looking at Frank as if to say, Why didn’t you mention something this cool out on our runs? “It would be a real test of our modeling programs,” he said, looking even happier. Almost giddy: “It might change everything!” he exclaimed.
“And yet,” Frank said. “People might judge those changes to be preferable to displacing a quarter of the world’s population. Remember what happened to New Orleans. We couldn’t afford to have ten thousand of those, could we?”
“If you had the unlimited power you’re talking about,” Anna said suddenly, “why couldn’t you just pump the equivalent of the displaced water back up onto the Antarctic polar plateau? Let it freeze back up there, near where it came from?”
Again the room was silent.
“Now there’s an idea,” Diane said. She was smiling. “But Frank, where are these dry basins again?”
Frank brought that slide back up on the PowerPoint. The basins, if all of them were entirely filled, could take about twenty percent of the predicted rise in sea level if the whole WAIS came off. It would take about thirty terawatts to move the water. The cost in carbon for that much energy would be ten gigatons, not good, but