Kim Robinson - New York 2140

“I’ll help get you up there,” I said, standing up. “Come on, boys.” Their plates had been empty seconds after they sat down to them. “You can finish what you began.”

Vlade nodded at them and joined us as we headed toward the elevators, leaving the two women behind. I would have given a lot to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, but it was not to be; and if I had been present the conversation would not have been the same. So with a qualm I passed by Jojo and said, “See you later?”

She frowned. “I’m tired, I’ll probably just go home in a while.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll come back down when I’m done, see if you’re still here.”

“I’ll be up in a bit,” Charlotte said. “I want to see how things look up there.”

So the evening was screwed. And in fact it had been going badly most of the night, judging by Jojo’s face, and that was worrying me quite badly. Adjustments were going to have to be made, but which ones? And why?

The First Pulse was not ignored by an entire generation of ounce brains, that is a myth. Although like most myths it has some truth to it which has since been exaggerated. The truth is that the First Pulse was a profound shock, as how could it not be, raising sea level by ten feet in ten years. That was already enough to disrupt coastlines everywhere, also to grossly inconvenience all the major shipping ports around the world, and shipping is trade: those containers in their millions had been circulating by way of diesel-burning ships and trucks, moving around all the stuff people wanted, produced on one continent and consumed on another, following the highest rate of return which is the only rule that people observed at that time. So that very disregard for the consequences of their carbon burn had unleashed the ice that caused the rise of sea level that wrecked the global distribution system and caused a depression that was even more damaging to the people of that generation than the accompanying refugee crisis, which, using the unit popular at the time, was rated as fifty katrinas. Pretty bad, but the profound interruption of world trade was even worse, as far as business was concerned. So yes, the First Pulse was a first-order catastrophe, and it got people’s attention and changes were made, sure. People stopped burning carbon much faster than they thought they could before the First Pulse. They closed that barn door the very second the horses had gotten out. The four horses, to be exact.

Too late, of course. The global warming initiated before the First Pulse was baked in by then and could not be stopped by anything the postpulse people could do. So despite “changing everything” and decarbonizing as fast as they should have fifty years earlier, they were still cooked like bugs on a griddle. Even tossing a few billion tons of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere to mimic a volcanic eruption and thus deflect a fair bit of sunlight, depressing temperatures for a decade or two, which they did in the 2060s to great fanfare and/or gnashing of teeth, was not enough to halt the warming, because the relevant heat was already deep in the oceans, and it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, no matter how people played with the global thermostat imagining they had godlike powers. They didn’t.

It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately. They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e. doctor) to seek aid.

But okay, you can’t really imagine a catastrophe will hit you until it does. People just don’t have that kind of mental capacity. If you did you would be stricken paralytic with fear at all times, because there are some guaranteed catastrophes bearing down on you that you aren’t going to be able to avoid (i.e. death), so evolution has kindly given you a strategically located mental blind spot, an inability to imagine future disasters in any way you can really believe, so that you can continue to function, as pointless as that may be. It is an aporia, as the Greeks and intellectuals among us would say, a “not-seeing.” So, nice. Useful. Except when disastrously bad.

So the people of the 2060s staggered on through the great depression that followed the First Pulse, and of course there was a crowd in that generation, a certain particular one percent of the population, that just by chance rode things out rather well, and considered that it was really an act of creative destruction, as was everything bad that didn’t touch them, and all people needed to do to deal with it was to buckle down in their traces and accept the idea of austerity, meaning more poverty for the poor, and accept a police state with lots of free speech and freaky lifestyles velvetgloving the iron fist, and hey presto! On we go with the show! Humans are so tough!

But pause ever so slightly—and those of you anxious to get back to the narrating of the antics of individual humans can skip to the next chapter, and know that any more expository rants, any more info dumps (on your carpet) from this New Yorker will be printed in red ink to warn you to skip them (not)—pause, broader-minded more intellectually flexible readers, to consider why the First Pulse happened in the first place. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat in the atmosphere by way of the well-understood greenhouse effect; it closes a gap in the spectrum where reflected sunlight used to flash back out into space, and converts it to heat instead. It’s like rolling up the windows on your car all the way on a hot day, as opposed to having them partly rolled down. Not really, but close enough to elucidate if you haven’t gotten it yet. So okay, that trapped heat in the atmosphere transfers very easily and naturally to the oceans, warming ocean water. Ocean water circulates and the warmed surface water gets pushed down eventually to lower levels. Not to the bottom, not even close, but lower. The heat itself expands the water of the ocean a bit, raising sea level some, but that’s not the important part. The important part is that those warmer ocean currents circulate all over, including around Antarctica, which sits down at the bottom of the world like a big cake of ice. A really big cake of ice. Melt all that ice and pour it in the ocean (though it pours itself) and sea level would go 270 feet higher than the old Holocene level.