The first two months of the year were, by the standards of this decade, downright temperate. In the United States, snow fell as far south as Maryland and Tennessee, although it melted in a matter of days. Snowfall was much heavier than average in Canada, Siberia and northern Europe. By the end of January, the city of Helsinki had completed its new showcase sewer system, designed and built at great expense to accommodate a tropical downpour. It met the challenge of the spring snowmelt and passed with flying colors, proving that at least some changes in the climate could be adapted to… by those willing to spend the money.

There were other bits of semi-good news. The Antarctic Peninsula glaciers and the West Antarctic ice sheet experienced several major collapses, raising global sea levels by… a millimeter and a half. Hurricanes appeared off the Brazilian coast from late February to the first week of April, but never made landfall. In China, the outbreak of H5N1 was officially over in February, and the new Party leadership celebrated by… ordering vast quantities of mosquito netting. (Scientists had detected the spread of malarial mosquitoes into new parts of China, and the government was not about to be caught napping a second time.)

As a sign of how others were adapting to a changing ecology, in May fishermen out of Alaska were threatened with firearms in international waters, and forced to withdraw, by a Japanese fleet catching tuna — not to kill, but to collect tissue samples for the growing kuron-maguro industry. (Over the past few years, declining fish stocks had led to a revolution in the fishing industry. Now, Japanese fishermen harvested small samples of tuna muscle and cloned them to grow multi-ton sheets of meat. As these tissue cultures eventually succumbed to cell senescence or infection, new samples were constantly needed. The fishing fleets were developing an almost pastoral[1] — and distinctly proprietary — relationship with the schools of tuna.)

In May, an army of young volunteers in Canada, Russia and Scandinavia set about planting trees in places where they were deemed likely to grow and less likely to have their roots drowned in the northern monsoon. The supply of seedlings ran out long before the volunteers could run out of energy.

The last of the ice disappeared from the Arctic Ocean on June 5, only five days earlier than the previous year. This raised hope that the freeze-and-melt cycle in the Arctic was settling into a new pattern that would last at least the next few decades. The resulting “neo-boreal” climate was one that had never been seen before, with warm to cool summers, heavy to extreme rain in the fall and heavy snow in the winter.

Unfortunately, this climate was having some very bad effects nearby. Once again, as had first happened in 2012 and had happened half a dozen other times since then, melting was taking place over the entire surface of the Greenland ice sheet. Normally, most of the meltwater refroze quickly, or flowed down a moulin[2] to the base of the icecap. This year was different. This year, starting in June, the entire ice sheet was being rained on. It wasn’t the torrential downpour of the northern monsoon, but it was enough. The rain and meltwater filled the moulins and eroded paths through the ice that ran down to the sea, crevasses and gorges that could be clearly seen from space. It was like a time-lapse of the formation of a river valley. Collapses occurred along the frayed edges of the sheet, where the ice was thinnest.

But a sheet of ice a mile thick is not going to be destroyed by a few inches of rain — or even, in some cases, five or six inches. Between the beginning of June and the end of September, the Greenland ice sheet lost less than one percent of its mass — enough to raise global sea levels by a little over two inches.

Of course, all that cold, fresh water pouring into the ocean at once had an unmistakable effect on the ocean around Greenland. What had happened in the North Atlantic two years ago happened again this summer, and it was much worse this time. Summer in western and central Europe was several degrees cooler than average, even as the East Coast of the U.S. sweltered in the heat. As in any year, the majority of Atlantic hurricanes turned east before hitting the mainland U.S., but those that did crossed the warm water of the backed-up Gulf Stream, and were swelled to monstrous size. Florida, North Carolina and eastern Long Island were hardest-hit.

[1] In the sense of “shepherd-like.”

[2] A vertical shaft in a glacier formed by flowing water.



2027 Part 2

“Climatology is not a morality play. The sky and the ocean do not care whether we restore balance to them through a wholesale reinvention of our civilization, the palliative measures of geoengineering, or both. And it seems more and more likely that both will be necessary.”

--The Canadian Prime Minister, delivering the keynote address to the U.N. Conference on Climate Change

The U.N. Conference on Climate Change had been scheduled for October 27 through November 4 in Toronto, in the hope that this year’s northern monsoon would focus the minds of the attendees on the urgency of the situation. The city experienced such heavy rains during the conference that the Metro Toronto Convention Centre had to be surrounded by a wall of sandbags.

Inside the Centre, they began by reviewing the progress that had already been made. The host nation and several others boasted of their tree-planting efforts. A representative from China revealed that by the end of this year, his country’s navy and merchant fleets[1] would have all their diesel and LNG engines replaced by fuel-cell engines. Australia had begun encouraging the growth of coral reefs further south, in waters that had never been warm enough before (although the project was a little constrained by the shipping lanes.)

Inside the Centre, representatives from virtually every nation on Earth reviewed the disasters that had already taken place, and learned that the worst might be yet to come. Vague warnings about the end of the world were replaced with specific scenarios of catastrophe. Climatologists painted a picture of a world, in 2100, of such heat and humidity that it was no longer physically possible for Homo sapiens to survive in the tropics (or the temperate zones during the summer) without air conditioning. Those who did survive in those areas would have to adjust to an entirely different assortment of crops, probably genetically engineered tropical plants.

This wasn’t the worst-case scenario. That honor belonged to the “Rotting Ocean” or "Green Sky" scenario, theorized to be possible if CO 2 levels rose above 1000 ppm, in which the ocean currents that exchanged water between the surface and the deep sea halted or slowed to a crawl. In this scenario, oxygen levels in the deep ocean dropped below the point that could sustain most forms of life… except of course for anaerobic bacteria, which exploded in numbers, feasting on the corpses of everything that died at sea and poisoning the ocean — and the air above it — with hydrogen sulfide. (According to one theory, something like this had happened a little over 250 million years ago, and had played a large part in the “Great Dying” — the mass extinction which separated the Permian and Triassic eras, arguably the worst catastrophe in the history of life on Earth.) Under these conditions, whatever was left of the human species might be reduced to living like settlers on Mars, sealed in airtight cities, perhaps for thousands of years. There was some question whether this was possible under the present configuration of the continents, but as one attendee put it, “The story of global climate change has been the story of one decade’s hysterical doomsaying becoming the next decade’s unwarranted optimism.”

There was a very strong sense in Toronto that something needed to be done. The Chinese representatives were particularly emphatic — after Typhoon Haishen and Lake Turpan, the new Party leadership was not inclined to take half-measures. There were, however, three controversial questions:

• How could the Conference solve the free-rider problem?

• Geoengineering: good idea or bad?

• Should the goal be to stop the world from warming further, or to restore the climate of the mid-20th century?

The free-rider problem was one the conferees had been trying to cope with since the Kyoto Protocol. All the attendees were committed to action, but suspected each other of wanting to continue business as usual and leave the heavy lifting to others. And the U.S. and other industrial giants, which were the nations that most needed to change, were also the nations that the U.N. had the least power to punish.

Ultimately, the question was considered moot, since the nations in question were not holding themselves to the same standards to begin with. China, for example, was already one year into a five-year plan to replace all coal-fired plants with solar, wind and (to the dismay of some) nuclear power plants, and a ten-year plan to replace all internal combustion engines in vehicles with hybrid or electric engines. Most nations were somewhat less ambitious in their goals, but everyone was promising dramatic action. (Representatives from the more authoritarian states were rather smug in pointing out that they, at least, could make promises that their governments would keep.)[2]

Geoengineering made a lot of people nervous, for two reasons: it might be used as an excuse for inaction in other areas, and it had immense potential for unintended consequences. Even the Chinese representatives were uneasy about it. (China had its share of experience with ill-fated attempts at large-scale ecological redesign, and there was no reason to think such things were limited to communist states. The inclusion of sparrows in the original “Four Pests” campaign, for example, had been a failure of ornithology, not of economic doctrine.) The prospect of random climate-altering schemes being carried out willy-nilly, with or without any scientific basis, at the behest of rogue governments or eccentric billionaires, was only slightly less terrifying than the “Green Sky” scenario.

On the other hand, it was clearly too late to solve the problem entirely the “right” way. If for no other reason, methane (a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO 2 ) had been found leaking from the melting permafrost and the Arctic seabed, and would continue to do so no matter what limits were placed on fossil fuels.

So the Conference (now a permanent intergovernmental body of the U.N.) established a Geoengineering Commission to study proposals for “large-scale alterations of the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans or insolation” and approve or reject them. (The Commission’s reach was deliberately limited to “large-scale” projects. More low-key efforts — white roofs and lighter pavements to lower the albedo of urban areas, for example, or tax breaks for corporations that placed artificial trees on their grounds — would be outside their jurisdiction.)

As for what sort of “large-scale alterations” they would permit, the Commission would give priority to those projects which attacked the greenhouse gases and oceanic carbon directly, rather than trying to force temperatures down in spite of them. They authorized the fertilization of selected areas of the ocean with a total of 100,000 tons of iron dust in 2028, just as a beginning. In places where coral reefs and vital stocks of fish and mollusks were being damaged by ocean acidification, governments were authorized to add gypsum to the water.[3]

The injection of sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere, on the other hand, was rejected for the time being. The sulfur wouldn’t stay in the upper atmosphere, and would need to be injected constantly and indefinitely in order to work. Moreover, it would do absolutely nothing to counter ocean acidification — in fact, when the particles descended into the troposphere they would turn to acid rain and make the situation slightly worse. However, the U.S., Japan and South Korea were authorized to conduct a joint experiment involving the seeding of low-lying clouds over the North Pacific with salt water to increase their albedo, on the theory that, whether or not it did any good, salt water falling in the ocean was unlikely to do any harm.

Tied into the question of what measures should be taken to counteract climate change was the deeper question of what sort of climate the world wanted, and what sort it should be willing to settle for. Reversing the changes that had already happened and returning global temperatures to about what they were between 1940 and 1970 (assuming this was possible) would require far more radical geoengineering than the Commission was prepared to allow. At the moment, the Conference’s goal was simply to stop the climate from changing further.

Many found this completely unsatisfactory. The climate as it existed today was one of burning forests, diminishing harvests, shrinking glaciers, falling aquifers and rising sea levels. Although the melting of Greenland had stopped for the year and the ice sheet was now covered with a reassuring blanket of snow, no one had any illusions about the future. Even if global temperatures did not rise one more degree, that ice sheet would be gone in a hundred years or so. The value of every piece of real estate less than seven meters above sea level had to be adjusted to reflect its new impermanence… and that wasn’t even taking West Antarctica into account. “Are you prepared to say goodbye to New Orleans, Venice, Bangkok and eventually who knows how many other cities?” asked the president of the Maldives, who did not mention that essentially his entire nation would disappear as well, although everyone knew it.

It was with a sense of relief that the representatives left Toronto. In spite of all they had agreed to, they were plagued by the feeling that every minute spent talking was a minute not spent acting.

“Contrary to what some have said, the past forty years have not been wasted. We have developed the tools we need to save ourselves, and have begun to use them on a small scale. Now it’s time to go big.”

-The President of the United States, delivering closing remarks

[1] China and Hong Kong actually have separate merchant marines. (I figure when fuel cells start to see serious use, it will be in cargo ships. The weight of the insulation would be less of a problem there.)

[2] In 1997, President Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, but didn’t bother submitting it to the Senate, which had already indicated it wouldn’t pass.