The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [3]
Three years of this, and still the climatologists could only shrug their shoulders and say, "We haven't a clue what's happening or why."
Some blamed global warming, stating that this freak cold snap proved somehow that our carbon footprints had fucked the ecosystem, things would be steaming up again soon but we could expect to see a continual seesawing between extremes, higher hot peaks, deeper cold troughs, the planet not knowing what to do with itself, fiddling with its own thermostat in a desperate effort to balance things out.
Others claimed it was obviously the onset of a new ice age. Ice ages came along every eleven thousand years, and seeing as the last one was eleven thousand years ago, the next was due, even overdue.
Most, though, were pointing the finger at the recent spate of volcanic eruptions worldwide. Etna, Mount St Helens, Stromboli, Kilauea, Piton de la Fournaise on La Réunion, Eyjafjallajökull and its bum-chum Katla - all of them had blown their tops big-time during the past decade, shoving up billions of tons of soot and ash into the atmosphere and increasing the earth's albedo, whatever that was, creating a haze of cloud that reflected away the sun's rays. Result: bit of a nip in the air.
Whatever the cause, people were worried, no two ways about it. Not only had the crop harvests had been consistently poor three years running, meaning food shortages, but the old folk were dropping off their perches by the thousand. Most hospitals, you couldn't move for the sick and dying elderly that were clogging up the corridors, stricken with pneumonia and hypothermia, rattling their last. Everywhere, the wheels of industry were grinding slower and slower. Economies were suffering. Not to mention the infrastructure of certain nations, including our dear own United Kingdom, was falling to pieces.
Prime Minister Clasen had been trying to keep a lid on it all and failing significantly. The more the plummy-voiced, baby-faced buffoon insisted in his cod-statesmanlike way that everything was under control, the less anyone believed him. All those floggings, fagging and buggery at public school hadn't moulded a man capable of coping with a nation in crisis. Daddy couldn't open the chequebook and get him out of this one. He was going to have to handle it himself. Or not, as the case may be.
Clasen said how much he was looking forward to putting heads together with America's President Keener in a few weeks' time and having a full and frank exchange of ideas about the crisis, and it just so happened that the very next item on the programme featured the luscious Mrs Keener herself. It was coverage of her State of the Union address which she'd given the previous evening and which she claimed was directed not just at Congress or even the American people but at "all the citizens of the world."
What it boiled down to was some guff about not panicking, digging in and seeing this through. The usual bromides from the First Lady, delivered in that honeydew Deep South accent of hers.
God, though, she could always make it sound good. Plausible. Like there was no reason why you shouldn't trust every word she said. No reason to doubt her.
Helped that she was so fit, too.
"I'm from the state of Georgia," Mrs Keener said,