Stephen Baxter - Flood

He grunted.“Well, so you are, in a way. These arseholes will do their very best to dissect whatever Thandie puts before them. You got to understand how the IPCC works, Lily, what it’s for…”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been established by the governments back in the 1980s to provide authoritative assessments on information and predictions regarding climate change.

“You have working groups covering the physical science of climate change, impact on the world, and mitigation. Now, that word ‘authoritative’ is the key. Everything about the way the panel operates is designed to reinforce that. Every time they produce a report you have a lead author for each section, but typically you’ll get hundreds of expert reviewers providing tens of thousands of comments. The rule of thumb is they only let through what there’s absolute consensus on. Especially when it comes to the Summary for Policymakers, which is the only bit anybody ever reads.”

“Wow. It’s amazing anything gets through at all.”

“That’s the point. The IPCC is ferociously conservative. You can criticize it for being too slow to respond to the evidence for climate change, for instance. But when it does speak the governments listen.”

“So do you think they’ll accept any of Thandie’s data and conclusions?”

“Maybe the data. Less so the conclusions. There’s bound to be a debate. Even those who accept the reality of the sea-level rise see it as a symptom of climate change, and can’t accept any justification of it that doesn’t come from their old models-can’t accept it as something entirely new. A lot will depend on Thandie’s headline prediction, I think. Right now they’re clinging to eighty meters, tops, as an outer limit. I mean that would be catastrophic enough, but-”

“Why eighty meters?”

“Because that’s what you would get if all the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica were to melt. And the melting ice is the only source generally accepted for the ocean rise.”

Lily nodded. “So it’s going to be hard for them to listen if Thandie tells them otherwise.”

“Exactly.”

“So what do you think is going to come out of today?”

“Nothing, immediately. It will take them months to come up with a report. Even then the governments probably won’t accept it, until the oceans are lapping around their feet. However other players will be listening hard.” He glanced down at the lecture theater. “I could point to five of those clown-haired characters down there who are in the pocket of members of the LaRei.”

“The LaRei?”

He grinned. “An exclusive Manhattan society. Even more exclusive than the MetCircle. You need a net worth of a hundred million bucks just to get in the door. The rich are listening, believe me.”

She nodded. “And the rich will take care of themselves.”

He eyed her. “Rich arseholes like me, you mean?”

That made her uncomfortable. This man was, after all, her boss. “Nathan-”

“Oh, don’t worry. Look, I know what you think of me, even though I saved your lives. In a supposedly capitalist society everybody despises the accumulation of wealth, save those who have it. Listen. Damn right I’m intending to act. I’m not going to wait around until the governments get over their collective denial, as Dr. Jones puts it. Damn right I’m intending to save myself, and my son Hammond, if I can-and save my wealth, whatever that means in the coming world. Who wouldn’t? But remember this: I sponsored Thandie’s survey, I recruited the arseholes she needed from Woods Hole and wherever else. I’m even sponsoring this meeting today. What more can I do than that?”

Lily said nothing. She didn’t believe he was after her approval, as such, or her praise. With Nathan it was all about dominance. But Nathan was no monster just because he had made himself rich. She could see his foresight in operation, as he steadily converted his wealth into more tangible assets, land and equipment and people. And if Thandie’s projections about the speed of events in the years to come were correct, the world might need figures like Nathan, with the decisiveness and resources to make things happen fast.

Gary Boyle hurried in, a laptop under his arm. “Hi,” he whispered to Lily, settling beside her. “I’m not late, am I?”

“Just in time. How’s Aaron?”

He opened the laptop, and showed her an image taken from a camera on the roof. The sky was dominated by an immense swirl of cloud. “Windspeed rising. Pressure dropping. They’ve flown in a HIRT. That’s a Hurricane Intercept Research Team, running around in speedboats and SUVs with weather instruments and laptops. And they’ve sent up a plane to drop a meteorology sonde into the eye. But they still don’t think Aaron’s going to make landfall.”

Nathan said, “They don’t think so, huh?” He murmured into a cellphone, ordering a chopper to be readied on the Freedom Tower helipad.

In the lecture theater, Thandie stood beside her translucent three-dimensional Earth and began to speak.

Thandie began with the basics, a summary of the data on the global sea-level rise. By now the rise was being logged in detail, as alarmed oceanographers had planted a dense network of tide gauges across the planet, and specialized satellites probed the ocean with laser and radar altimeters.

And Lily watched, fascinated, as Thandie demonstrated the raising of ocean surfaces across the planet. A ghostly pink meniscus lifted up, indeed it accelerated with time, the vertical scale exaggerated, pulsing and rippling, evidently a signal of multiple sources feeding into the global rise. The graphic image was backed up by labels, data and equations annotating detail, and text was downloaded into screens set before the delegates.

Thandie talked about the changing nature of the ocean. As well as a global rise the scientists were witnessing a drop in salinity, an increase in ocean heat, and a change in distribution of that heat. The warmth of the ocean drove the climate, and thus the climate was also being reshaped, said Thandie. She ran through new climate models by NASA’s Goddard Institute, the Hadley Center in England, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and other groups in Russia, Japan, Germany, elsewhere. She showed how specific incidents could be tied to the anomalous warming, such as last year’s early monsoon across Asia.

Gary whispered to Lily, “Yeah. It’s the heat of the ocean surface that is spawning that big storm outside right now. Ocean heat is the fuel for hurricanes.”

Thandie outlined the effects on the biosphere. There had been blooms and diebacks in the living things in the oceans. Coral reefs, for instance, were being hit hard by the temperature shifts and increasing depths of coastal waters.

All of this was uncontroversial enough. It was when Thandie moved on to the fundamental causes of the flood, and her projections for its future, that the IPCC delegates started muttering.

The oceans were rising. There was a complication that as the oceans heated up the water expanded, which itself contributed to the rise. But the blunt truth was that to fill up the oceans, just like a brimming bathtub, you needed a running tap.

It didn’t take Thandie long to dismiss the consensus theory that the source of the floodwater could be melting ice caps. The caps, north and south, were monitored as closely as any other aspect of the planet’s climate system, and yes, they were melting-in fact the global ocean rise was accelerating the melting in Antarctica and Greenland, as it lifted sheets of ice away from the rock that anchored it. But there was no way the measured mass loss from the ice caps could be fueling the global expansion of the oceans; the numbers simply didn’t add up.