Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“I’m just fucking with you,” Alastair admitted. “My family have a cottage on Skye. I’m going there in three weeks, for a last visit before winter closes in. Was checking the ferry timetables yesterday. It’s got high tide warnings posted for those dates.”

“Well played,” Willem said. “Coffee?” For they were near the café where the strange conversation with Bo had happened just a few minutes ago. Bo was gone. An older woman had seized his newspaper and opened it to a lavish photo spread showing the hats and frocks that had been on display yesterday at the Ridderzaal.

“No, thank you,” Alastair said. “Anyway, storms are obviously more difficult to predict than tides. Oh, we know what such a storm would look like. It would look like 1953. A low pressure system of unusual intensity forming up near Iceland and coming down the chute between Scotland and Norway, pushing a surge ahead of it. Lots of rain just adds gasoline to the fire, if I can mix my metaphors.”

“How far in advance could you predict the formation of that low pressure system?”

“Ten days? A couple of weeks?”

“Not three weeks? Four?”

“There might be some really cutting-edge models that would run that far out. With big error bars though.”

Willem nodded. They exited the station and came out into a continuation of yesterday’s hot weather. Scattered clouds hinted at a change later. Willem led Alastair around some construction barricades and got them pointed toward Noordeinde.

“I thought I was here to predict climate, though. Not weather. For weather you want a different sort of chap.” He was just being playful.

“I got a hot tip that there would be a once-in-a-lifetime storm in three weeks,” Willem explained, “and I’m trying to figure out whether it should be taken seriously.”

“Does the tipster have connections to well-funded boffins with very advanced computational modeling capabilities?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’re fucked. Keep an eye on the North Atlantic!” Alastair said. “I’ll do likewise, now that you’ve aroused my curiosity. Perhaps my trip to Skye shall have to be postponed.”

“Oh, I’ve got another question,” Willem said. “What did you mean by snaparound?”

“Sorry to be enigmatic. It’s a thing Greens have been fretting about for years. They have always harbored a suspicion that one day their opponents—oil companies, basically—would suddenly reverse their position on climate change.”

“As Martijn Van Dyck did yesterday.”

“Yes. But then, instead of falling in line with what the Greens want, those people would say, ‘Och, too late, the damage has been done, water under the bridge, the only answer is geoengineering.’”

“So from the Green point of view,” Willem said, “they—the Greens—are steadfastly holding to the position they’ve held all along. But their opponents have snapped way around from one extreme to another.”

Alastair nodded. “I got excited and sent you that text because, as I mentioned, Greens have been worrying about this forever. A lot of their political strategy in the climate debate is predicated on fear of snaparound. But this was the first time in all these years I’d ever watched it happen in real time!”

“Do you expect there’ll be more of it?”

“I expect,” Alastair said, “that T.R. has many observant friends in boardrooms up and down the length of Houston’s Energy Corridor.” He slowed for a moment and took an appraising look at Noordeinde Palace. “Including . . .”

“Royal Dutch Shell,” Willem said.

The queen brought her daughter to the meeting. By the letter of the law, Princess Charlotte ought to be in school. But she’d reached an age when classes were less regimented, and independent study was encouraged. As long as the princess wasn’t falling behind in her schoolwork, she was allowed a certain number of absences. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to invite her to the weekly one-on-one with the prime minister, for example. But on occasions when there was legitimate educational value, and especially when it might help prepare Charlotte for her future duties as sovereign, she was allowed to skip school and sit in. Quietly.

Many of the old grand rooms in Noordeinde had too much historical value to be kitted out with modern office gear, but one room had been brought reasonably up to the standards prevailing in the early twenty-first century and so Alastair plugged his gear into that. Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.

Willem decided to make some practical use of the resultant delay. “Now that we have finally gotten past Budget Day and all that,” he said, “I have been taking a look at your schedule for the next few weeks.”

“And what do you think?” the queen asked.

“Well, it’s a bit sparse. Just because we’ve been too distracted to pack in a lot of events. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Alastair did remark that there is an unusually high tide coming up three weeks from now. Could cause problems if it happened to coincide with bad weather. If you aren’t averse to adding some new items to your schedule, then I’d suggest we emphasize disaster preparedness.”

She smiled. “No one can ever criticize the queen for taking a bold stance in favor of disaster preparedness.”

Charlotte produced an eye roll. The target, however, was not her mother. “They will criticize you for anything . You should see—”

Frederika gave her daughter an appraising look. “Been reading the comments, have we?”

Charlotte looked as if she’d been caught red-handed in the liquor cabinet.

“We’ve talked about this,” Frederika said.

“I know. Reading the Internet will drive me crazy.”

“People will make fun of me for being a predictable Goody Two-Shoes if I advocate for disaster preparedness,” the queen agreed. “But it is a natural segue from the Scheveningen disaster. And it will flush Texas and Pina2bo and Martijn Van Dyck out of the news cycle.” She turned her gaze toward Willem as she said this and gave him a nod.

“Very well, I’ll begin looking for such opportunities,” Willem said. “Given the usual lag, it might take a couple of weeks before this gets into full swing.”

Suddenly the AV system sprang to life and the coat of arms of the House of Orange appeared on the royal flat-screen. Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia’s breeding took over as she found a way to compliment the technician on his brilliance without making him look bad for not having had the thing ready in the first place.

Three-dimensional augmented-reality globes might actually have been useful in this case, but the software Alastair had been using was no-nonsense academic research code that liked to plot simple flat rectangular maps. So that was what they were going to be looking at. He’d made hard copies too, which he distributed to Willem and the queen. He hadn’t known Princess Charlotte was coming, so she had to share her mother’s copy.

“I’ll get right to it,” he said. “If Pina2bo continues to operate as planned, it’s good for the Netherlands. That is the most salient information I can give you during this meeting.”

The queen, who’d been leafing through the handout, crossed her arms and looked at him. Lotte looked like she’d been biting her tongue. She drew the handout toward herself and perused it as Alastair went on:

“Many of the negative effects and heightened risks that climate change has inflicted on your country—and mine, as it happens—in recent decades will tend to be reversed. In some cases the speed of that reversal will be dramatic. Temperatures will drop noticeably. The amount of evaporation from the ocean’s surface will be reduced and so we won’t see as much torrential rainfall. Ice caps will stop melting. This reduces the possibility of a sudden change in the North Atlantic Current, which truly would be a catastrophe for all of Europe.”