Sixty Days and Counting (25 page)

“Can that danger be quantified?” Diane asked.

“Sure, they are trying. Lots of the finest seashells are dissolved by what we’re seeing already, but it may be that more resilient ones will bloom to fill the niche. So we have some parameters, but it’s all pretty loose. What’s clear is that if the plankton and the coral reefs both die, the oceans could go catastrophic. A major mass extinction, and there’s no recovering from that. Not in less than several million years.”

Unlike his pronouncements on the weather, Kenzo exhibited none of his usual happy air, of an impresario with a particularly spectacular circus. This stuff could not possibly be interpreted as some kind of fun, too-interesting-to-be-lamented event; this was simply bad, even dire. To see Kenzo actually being grave startled Frank, even frightened him. Kenzo Hayakawa, making a dire warning? Could there be a worse sign?

And yet there were ongoing matters to attend to, new things to try. The springtime reports from Siberia indicated that the altered lichens the Russians had released the previous summer were continuing to grow faster than predicted. “Like pond scum,” as one of the Russian scientists reported. This was very unlike the pace of growth and dispersion for ordinary lichens, and seemed to confirm the suggestion that the bioengineered version was behaving more like an algae or a fungus than like the symbiosis of the two typically did. That was interesting, perhaps ominous; Kenzo thought it could cause a major carbon drawdown from the atmosphere if it continued. “Unless it kills the whole Siberian forest, and then who knows? Maybe instead of gray goo, we die by green goo, eh?”

“Please, Kenzo.”

On other fronts the news was just as ambiguous. Vicious infighting at the Department of Energy, the nuclear folks still doing their best to forestall the alternatives crowd; Diane was trying to convince the president to order Energy to develop clean energy ASAP—first finding bridge technologies, moving away from what they had now while still using it—then the next real thing, the next iteration on the way to a completely sustainable technology. Diane thought it would take two or three major iterations. Lots of federal agencies would have to be entrained to this effort, of course, but DOE was crucial, given that energy was at the heart of their problem. But all this would depend on who Phil appointed to be the new Energy Secretary. If that person were on board with the program, off they would all go; if opposed, more war of the agencies. One could only hope that Phil would not tie down his people in such a self-defeating way. But campaign debts were owed, and Big Oil had a lot of people still in positions of great power. And Phil had not yet appointed his Energy Secretary.

After a meeting running over the list of possible candidates for this crucial cabinet position, Diane came by Frank’s new office, which had no living-room feel whatsoever—in fact it looked like he had been condemned to clerk in some bureaucratic hell, right next to Bob Cratchit or Bartelby the Scrivener.

Even Diane seemed to notice this, to the point of saying “It’s a pretty weird old facility.”

“Yes. I don’t think I’ll ever like it like I did NSF.”

“That turned out pretty well, in terms of the building. Although that too was a political exile.”

“So Anna told me.”

“Want to go out and hunt for a new coffee place?”

“Sure.”

Frank got his windbreaker from its hook and they left the building and then the compound. Just south of the White House was the Ellipse, and then the Washington Monument, towering over the scene like an enormous sundial on an English lawn. The buildings around the White House included the Treasury, the World Bank, and any number of other massive white buildings, filling the blocks so that every street was as if walled. These big expanses of granite and concrete and marble were very bad in human terms; even Arlington was better.

But there were many coffee shops and delis tucked into the ground floor spaces, and so the two of them hiked around in an oblong pattern, looking at the possibilities and chatting. Nothing looked appealing, and finally Diane suggested one of the little National Park tourist kiosks out on the Mall itself. They were already east of the White House, and when they came out on the great open expanse into the low sun they could see much of official Washington, with the Capitol and the Washington Monument towering over everything else. That was the dominant impression Frank had of downtown at this point; the feel of it was determined principally by the height limit, which held all private buildings to a maximum of twelve stories, well under the height of the Washington Monument. The downtown was as if sheered off by a knife at that height, an unusual sight in a modern city, giving it a strangely nineteenth-century look, as for instance Paris right before the arrival of the Eiffel Tower. Once away from the federal district, this invisible ceiling gave things a more human scale than the skyscraper downtowns of other cities, and Frank liked that quality, even though the result was squat or unwieldy.

Diane nodded as he tried to express these mixed feelings. She pointed out the lion statues surrounding Ulysses S. Grant in front of the Capitol: “See, they’re Disney lions!”

“Like the ones on the Connecticut Avenue bridge.”

“I wonder which came first, Disney or these guys?”

“These must have, right?”

“I don’t know. Disney lions have looked the same at least since
Dumbo
.”

“Maybe Disney came here and saw these.”

Within a week or so they had worked up a new traditional walk together. One afternoon as they drank their coffee, Diane suggested they return to work by way of a pass through the National Gallery annex; and there they found a Frederic Church exhibit. “Hey!” Frank said, and then had to lie a little bit, explaining that he had learned about Church on Mount Desert Island, long ago. As they walked through he remembered his intense time on the island, which he now saw through the eyes of the painter who had invented rusticating. His paintings were superb, far better than Bierstadt or Homer or any other American landscape artist Frank had ever seen. Church had been able to put an almost photorealist technique in the service of a Transcendentalist eye; it was the visionary, sacred landscape of Emerson and Thoreau, right there on the walls of the National Gallery. “My God,” Frank said more than once. This was also the time of Darwin and Humboldt; indeed the wall-sized “Heart of the Andes,” fifteen feet high and twenty wide, stood there like some stupendous PowerPoint slide illustrating all of natural selection at once, both data and theory.

“My—God.”

“It’s like the IMAX movie of its time,” Diane said.

In the rooms beyond they saw Church travel and grow old, and become almost hallucinogenic in his coloring, like Galen Rowell after he discovered Fujichrome. These were the best landscape paintings Frank had ever seen. A giant close-up of the water leaping off the lip of Niagara Falls; the Parthenon at sunset; waves striking the Maine coast; every scene leaped off the wall, and Frank goggled at them. Diane laughed at him, but he could not restrain himself. How had he never been exposed to such an artist as this? What was American education anyway, that they could all grow up and not be steeped in Emerson and Thoreau and Audubon and Church? It was like inheriting billions and then forgetting it.

Then Diane put her hand to his arm and directed him out of the gallery and back toward their new office. Back into the blackened old building, if not arm in arm, then shoulder to shoulder.

Their meeting that evening had to do with the latest from Antarctica, compiled by NSF’s Antarctic division from the austral summer just past.

Much of the research had been devoted to trying to determine how much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might come off, and how fast it would happen. The abstract of the summary made it clear that the several big ice streams that ran like immense glaciers through more stationary parts of the ice sheet had accelerated yet again, beyond even the earlier two accelerations documented in previous decades. The first acceleration had followed the rapid detachment of the two big floating ice shelves, the Ross and the Weddell. Their absence had destabilized the grounding line of the WAIS, which rested on land that was a bit below sea level, and so was susceptible at the edges to the lifting of tides and tearing of currents. As the ice margins tore away and followed the ice shelves out to sea, that exposed more grounded ice to the same tides and currents.

What they had found this last summer was that all Antarctic temperatures, in air, water, and ice, had risen, and this was allowing melt water on the surface of the WAIS to run down holes and cracks, where it froze and split the ice around it further. When this “water wedging” reached all the way through the ice it poured down and pooled underneath, thus floating the broken ice a bit and lubricating its slide into the sea.

Why the ice streams moved so much faster than the surrounding ice was still not fully understood, but some were now postulating under-ice watersheds, where melt water was flowing downstream, carrying the ice over it along. This would explain why the ice streams were now acting more like rivers than glaciers. There were different hydrodynamics resulting in different speeds.

Diane interrupted the two glaciologists making the report before they got too deep into the mysteries of their calling. “So what kind of sea-level rise are we looking at?” she asked. “How much, and when?”

The glaciologists and the NOAA people looked around at each other, then made a kind of collective shrug. Frank grinned to see it.

“It’s difficult to say,” one finally ventured. “It depends so much on stuff we don’t know.”

“Give me parameters then, and your best bets.”

“Well, I don’t know, I’m definitely getting out of my comfort zone here, but I’d say as much as half of the ice sheet could detach in the next several years. That would be down the middle on the Ross Sea side, where there’s a big trough under Ice Stream B. All that could flood and the ice get tugged away. Here, and here,” red-lighting the map like a kid waving a penlight, “are under-ice ranges connecting the Peninsular Range and the Transantarctics, and those create catchment basins which will probably anchor a good bit of these regions,” making big red circles. Having made his ignorance disclaimer, he was now carving the map like a geography teacher. Diane ignored this discrepancy, as did everyone else; it was understood that they were now guessing, and that his red circles were not data, but rather him thinking aloud.

“So—that implies what, a couple-few meters of sea-level rise?”

“A couple.”

“So, okay. That’s pretty bad. Time scales, again?”

“Hard to say? Maybe—if these rates hold—thirty years? Fifty?”

“Okay. Well…” Diane looked around the room. “Any thoughts?”

“We can’t afford a sea-level rise that high.”

“Better get used to it! It’s not like we can stop it.”

They turned with renewed interest to Frank’s suggestion of flooding the world’s desertified lake basins. The discussion went over the parts of an informal NSF study which suggested that big salt lakes would indeed cause clouds and precipitation downwind, so that watersheds to the east would receive more water. Local weather patterns would change with the general rise in humidity, but as they were changing anyway, the changes might be hard to distinguish from the background. Ultimate effects impossible to predict. Frank noted how many studies were coming to that conclusion. Like all of them, when it came to weather. It was like nerve damage.

They looked at each other. Maybe, someone suggested, if that’s what it takes to save the seacoasts from flooding, the global community would compensate the new lakes’ host nations for whatever environmental damage was assessed. Possibly a sea water market could be established along with the carbon market; possibly they could be linked. Surely the most prosperous quarter of humanity could find ways to compensate the people, often poor, who would be negatively impacted by the creation of these reservoirs.

Frank said, “We’ve tried some back-of-the-envelope numbers, estimating the capital worth of the major port cities and other coastal development, and got figures like five hundred trillion dollars.”

General Wracke, an active member of Diane’s advisory group, put his hands together reverently. “A half a quadrillion dollars,” he said, grinning. “That’s a lot of construction funding.”

“Yes. On the other hand, for comparison purposes, the infrastructural value of property in the superdry basins of Africa, Asia, and the American basin and range comes to well under ten billion, unless you throw in Salt Lake City, which actually has a legal limit on the books as to how high the Great Salt Lake is allowed to rise, that isn’t much higher than it is now. Anyway, in global terms, statistically, there’s nothing out there in those basins. Statistically insignificant populations to displace, possibility of building new settlements by new water. Local weather deranged, but it is already. So…”

The general nodded and asked about pumping water back up onto the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet, which was very high and stable. Some of the NSF report was devoted to this question. The pumped sea water would freeze and then sit unconformably as a kind of salty ice cap on the fresh ice cap. Every cubic kilometer of sea water placed up there would reduce sea level by that same amount, without the radical changes implied by creating new salt seas all across the thirties north and south. Could only pump half of the year using solar power.

The energy requirements needed to enact the lift and transfer remained a stumbling block; they would have to build many powerful clean energy systems. But they had to do that anyway, as several of them pointed out. The easy oil would soon be gone, and burning the oil and coal that was left would cook the world. So if some combination of sunlight, wind, wave, tide, currents, nuclear, and geothermal power could be harnessed, this would not only replace the burning of fossil fuels, which was imperative anyway, but possibly save sea level as well.

Some there advocated nuclear for the power they needed, others called for fusion. But others held fast for the clean renewables. The advocates of tidal power asserted that new technologies were already available and ready to be ramped up, technologies almost as simple as Archimedes’ screw in concept, relying on turbines and pumps made of glassy metals that would be impervious to sea water corrosion. Anchor these units in place and the ocean would flow through them and power would be generated. It was only a matter of making the necessary investment and they would be there.