Chapter 25
Vince took a sip of coffee, taking in the aqua blue swimming pool amidst lazy swaying palms. A tranquil safe place, paradisiacal, the type of place you’d want to set your laughing children free. He’ll need to explain the world, and ideal circumstances to his little girl one day. Maybe soon. What are you doing daddy? Changing the color of the sky, baby. The sky at Africa? The sky everywhere, our Calgary sky, all of the sky. My favourite color is purple daddy. Yes, Annalise, you can see some purple sky at bedtime. When the sun goes down. And a lighter blue sky when you’re at school. Okay daddy. He sighed.
How will he ever fit in a ‘sorry about that’? That he had tried his best to somehow keep the blue sky gift unaltered from his childhood. That gift word wrapped around his thoughts, reminding of all those wrapped gifts he’d watched his daughter open with twinkling eyes. A gift. A shining delight when first unwrapped.
Tamanna slid into the seat across from him. “Sorry, I was speaking a little long with Her Excellency the Minister. She understands people so well, really a wise woman.” Vince shook his head slightly, “No problem.” He glanced her way, then back at the pool. “You speak British or Australian, I’m not sure which.”
Smiling, she sank in more comfortable. “Well, I did grow up in Britain, you guessed that one. My mum moved over from Bangladesh when she was a young girl, however, and my father is an interesting mix of Scottish, Welsh and English. I prefer to speak as a global citizen, no matter what ring my voice sounds.”
“I see...you’ve the ethnic mix for that then.” Vince relaxed somewhat himself. “You know the Isle of Mull? One of the Inner Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. Anyway, Calgary got its name from a castle over there. That’s me, I come from Calgary…the Stampede City over in Western Canada.”
“Yes, I am familiar with some of your background. You are the Canadian.” Tami watched Vince’s half smile. “Sounds like you have interests beyond engineering.”
“Yeah.” His smile faded, and he paused. “You know, there’s knowledge that allows you to work in a place like Calgary and support a family and then there’s a whole raft of other things you know because they’re so darned interesting.” He sighed.
“A raft?”
“Lots or many.” His smile returned. “So that Minister is pretty wise to people?”
Tami told Vince how Nishat absorbed not only facts, but the science-supported numbers behind. She also knew how people deal with a crisis or any society threatening situation. Lots of them simply let irrational thought transition into denial. They basically pretend whatever was happening simply wasn’t happening, or they have a tantrum and look for someone else to kick in the trousers. Many look elsewhere. Some turn to beliefs, looking for salvation from the man in the clouds. Others simply give up on all things, becoming listless. “So whilst all these stages previous to acceptance have been processing, we the global citizens have run fresh out of time.”
“Whilst?”
“At the same time as.” The view of concern for ‘our grandchildren’ lost any reality for its frame of time reference, she said, even parental concern for children no longer made sense. The reality of now, not some future generation had become blaring. Adults alive today have the ball fully in their court. A North American expression, was that not? As the grandparents and then parents had simply kicked the can further down the road, today’s people were left with a looming schedule. “Minus the far flung idea that we want to destroy our own life support system, the time to act is now past, and we have been designated as the catch up actors.” Even the idea of green growth had become a decades-back missed opportunity. They now had but a tiny time window to work within.
“You know I’ve been thinking along those lines.” Vince sat up straight. “Taking our foot off the gas pedal at one time was a real option. Now we need a safety net spread below the cliff we’re driving off, and a trampoline net strong enough to bounce our car back up.” She looked at him, nodding. The game really being played matched people, or really human nature, against the laws of physics and chemistry. Those laws of nature that drove the planetary climate. And with no inside intervention, who would you place the odds on? With no change to the rules of the game, who would one think most likely to win?
“Can we actually bring on a Green Sahara?” Vince asked.
Tami looked at him, swallowing. Trusting her instincts, she started to explain. A little more on the reality of the idea of global cooling and bringing about a wetter desert. The naturally caused historical Green Sahara, also known as the Neolithic Subpluvial, had actually been caused by a variation in the planet’s tilt and the effect that had on African monsoons. “We can’t bring back a tilt variation in our planet. No reasonable person would fathom geoengineering the planetary orbit to replicate that climatic scenario.” The Sahara was actually larger during the Younger Drydas, when things became a lot colder globally. “There could be other ways to do it, but those methods depend on a lot, like reasonable people making decisions, which we may or may not have.” The idea of recreating the Green Sahara based merely on the Nigerien national volcano was highly unlikely, and the best the local president could hope for on that route was a return to more rain like a few decades ago. Not the Green Sahara of previous millennia.
Vince listened closely.
Unless they could get some activity going above the Atlantic, but that was more complicated, Tamanna explained.
“The Atlantic?”
“To really stimulate the West African monsoon, you would want a regional cooling out over the mid-Atlantic. That would make for an ideal Green Sahara plan.”
“So, it is feasible.”
“Possibly. But politically, not likely.”
“Nishat’s a politician?”
And a scientist, she told Vince, with special interest in the science of humanity. Nishat acquainted herself with the most recent scientific papers. She actually read them, and she pointed out the peer review status of her favourites. How Nature and Science had by far the most references, that they were the top journals. From papers of specific interest she would directly quote science. She would state conclusions like when it came to people and climate, any measure exceeding the safe estimate of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent challenged the viability of contemporary human society. She would leave quotes like that for her audience to absorb.
Vince turned his visiscreen towards Tamanna. “So hey, have a look, I tracked down those cumulative emission numbers.” The half smile returned to Vince. Tamanna watched the visiscreen as he displaying a chart beside a global map. The United States leaped out as by far the largest when total historical emissions were included, with China and Russia next, almost tied for second place. Those of course included large populations and took into account industrial history. Canada, with its much smaller population, still sat up in the top nine countries. His voice took on an excited tone. Canada, with less than three percent of China’s population, had dumped over a quarter of China’s emissions over time. So even if China was the number one annual emitter now, this carbon debt was still on the books, and China would certainly take this into account. China, the now economically powerful nation, and with a touch higher vulnerability to climate change than the U.S. depending who was calculating, would certainly have an early interest in supporting action towards mitigation of climate effects.
“Exactly. China and now other countries have been making that argument politically for some time now,” Tami said. “And as their power grows, their voice gets louder.”
“And as they argue on,” Vince said, looking at Tami. “Nothing gets done, right?”
“True.” She sighed.
“Bangladesh has an extreme risk according to one climate change index, very high according to another.” Vince pointed to the visiscreen. “Yet the Bangladeshi emissions for each person are only a quarter even of the HICCC average. Way low. That first index rates them as the highest risk country, and not just because of lousy geographic luck. They don
’t have the finances to adapt, so that has a lot to do with their extreme risk.” He pointed to a graph beside the map, then back. “And look at the map, those other countries all around Bangladesh rate extreme risk too. Bangladesh may be the epicentre of climate change risk—but look at the string of countries on either side.” He waved a finger back and forth. “East and west along the bottom edge of China and then they leapfrog over, what’s that, the South China Sea to the Philippines. The only other extreme risk countries are in East Africa. And Haiti in the west.”
Tami nodded. “Yes, those would all be HICCC members.” She looked at Vince. “However, the lack of finances has become something of a mute point. Sulphur emissions can be quite affordable. The cost of the project we are designing right now, right here, is quite low, actually, very low. Which puts Bangladesh in a completely new position when it comes to having a voice.”
They glanced at each other, almost directly.
“Right.” Vince reclined, looking back at the swaying palms, the aqua blue pool.
“So...I have a question,” Vince said. “A few actually. On the climate, our climate. To start with, what is slow feedback sensitivity?”
Tamanna joined his gaze.
“Right. Well, slow-feedback climate sensitivity depends on slow-feedback processes, which as implied, can best be analyzed over the longer time period. So one must look further back into the earth’s climatic history, back say to the Cenozoic.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Millions of years.”
He settled in, fingers before visiscreen to take notes.
“Okay, well, at that time major geological events happened. Like the collision of the Indian and Asian tectonic plates, which raised the Himalayas and formed the Tibetan Plateau. That reduced a subduction source supplying volcanic outgassing which at the time kept the planet much warmer than today.”
“Outgassing? Like volcanoes? Emitting sulphur, like us?”
“Yes.”
He keyed into a personal infogram.
This being the theory, she went on, planetary cooling then set in. This froze Antarctica for the first time, she told him, a continent that has been glaciated more or less ever since. That would be 34 million years ago, at the end of the Cenozoic. “The record shows a path towards snowball earth beginning then.”
“Snowball earth?”
“Oceanic ice sheets reaching to the equator.”
“Wow, catchy,” Vince said. “Paints a read image—our planet was a snowball.”
“Yes, I never thought of it that way.”
“Did that ever actually happen?”
“There is evidence of ice at the equator. But during a previous geological age, even further back than the Cenozoic. Hundreds of millions of years ago, in the Neoproterozoic.”
“Excellent. Added impact for any story I mean.”
“Yes.” She looked at him. “Or better yet in the case of a warming planet take the Venus effect.”
“The what?”
“Consider this, if you want an image. Picture the earth not as a frozen snowball, but with an industrial furnace atmosphere like Venus.” She watched his eyes brighten. “The truth be told, if we were foolish enough to burn all available hydrocarbon reserves, NASA has postulated that theory. That might catch as a real talking point.”
“Absolutely.” Vince’s half smile had long been replaced by a gaping grin.
“You want more?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, there are the much more recent millennial scale events.”
Tamanna went over the history of recent Ice Ages and how past sea levels had varied by up to 120m between glacial periods and interglacial warmer times.
“Holy crap. People would notice that, I mean, that would make for a Moses type flood.”
The last interglacial, the Eemian, had spanned several millennia but peaked at 122,000 years ago. Then, sea level was up to ten meters higher and the temperature was 1.5 to 2 degrees warmer. This was a time when slow-feedbacks had carried through at a natural pace. The slow processes like continental ice melting down, sea levels rising and forest cover extending polewards. Ice receded enough and growing conditions changed to the point where trees grew on the edge of the Arctic ocean at that time. “Excellent evidence for comparison, if two degrees is now our supposed danger line.”
Vince nodded. “Where were people at the time?”
“Modern humans? Mostly still in Africa. A little movement out on the Arabian peninsula. Nobody in the new world, or Europe.”
“I see,” he said. “So we only compare our climate to the Eemian time, not our human behavior. We mighta been cave dwelling hunter gatherers at best, so not much climate change from campfire emissions.”
“Right. And now, we are not in any way on a slow process. As we now live in the Anthropocene, the human influenced epoch, we are dumping carbon into our atmosphere faster than any natural process ever has. Much faster.”
“Fill me in on say sea level only,” Vince said.
Looking at things right now, she told him, if all the mountain ice caps and glaciers melted, that would raise the sea level by just over half a meter. But then there were Greenland and Antarctica. With only the Greenland ice gone, they would have a seven metre sea level rise. One critical threshold for Greenland melting had been estimated at 1.6 degrees. Although slow feedback meant this Greenland melt off would be over centuries and could be reversed, it brought up another scary thought. The West Antarctic ice sheet alone made for another five meters of sea water. The unthinkable accompanied knowing the world like before the Himalayas were formed. With all Antarctic ice melted, the sea level would rise an incredible fifty seven meters.
“How come I didn’t know this? How come everyone doesn’t know this?”
“Bangladesh knows. The Maldives know. Tuvalu knows.”
“No sea level issue in Niger.” He stared. “But they know about a growing desert.” He looked at her. “Back home, people don’t know. Or they wouldn’t want to know.”
“And, that would be politicians, who don’t want people to panic.” Tami looked grim. “Or they don’t want them to wake up.” She shrugged. “The Minister says human nature has developed people into crisis managers, only motivated to real action by real or perceived threats. So perhaps the best thing we can do is supply them with a nice gentle crisis to manage. The more manageable, the better of course.”
“So, this project we’re doing. We’re gathering research data? For geoengineering?”
Tamanna swallowed, looking away. How much of the project was theoretical research remained a question. Too many. She had to keep her silence with all project personnel for a while longer for sure. Nishat had been quite clear on that.
“Look Vince.” She touched his hand. “I wish I could tell you everything, I really do. But Minister Jabbar only releases so much. To each of us. So I can’t. What I can tell you up front, honestly, is that I can’t tell you everything up front. Just so that you know.”
“Yeah, okay, no problem.” His smile didn’t fade.