Chapter 27
“We never took this on, Jake” Tami bit her lip hard. “I met them once and now they’re both dead. They had families, children, like you and Anna. Like my cousins.”
“I know,” Jake nodded, his head hovering in the Holo-Skype cube on the table in her room. “Legal reminds we have an exit clause Tami. We can drop this contract.”
“No!” Tami said, then more quietly. “No Jake.”
“Still your choice.”
“Yes, thank you.”
Tamanna sat on the bed’s edge, her hands folded on knees.
“Remember Copenhagen?” Jake asked. “You hooked on to that ice-bubble story Anna told. You had her tell that one over and again, like a little tot. Then you followed that bubble trail back and forth on a time adventure through what I term as annual ice deposition.”
Tamanna nodded, staring into the cube.
“Anna tells great children’s stories,” Jake went on. “Remember how she connected the bubbles to the pirates of the Little Ice Age. All you got from me was science literature.”
Tamanna sighed. On the street curbs of Copenhagen, locked out of meetings, Jake had talked, and never stopped talking about the climate change research coming from the NASA Goddard space centre. Mostly authored by that New York scientist. She’d always been motivated by this American—a voice calling for change in human created forcings.
“I too get the science better,” she said. “But those stories Anna told, they somehow grab me.”
She had time, sitting there on the concrete, to read the literature he forwarded, especially the one on the Antarctic Vostok ice core. That one got her hooked on history, climate history.
“I hope Anna tells stories to your children,” Tami said. “Sometimes I picture Captain Vos and his pirate mates when I talk on climate sensitivity or the record of the Holocene.”
The bubbles in that ice core became the research topic for her PHD dissertation. Those little ice-trapped bubbles of gas told a story, a record of times past merging into the reality of now. Paleo spoke of the ancient, the Holocene when humans developed record keeping and the prehistoric before. That narrative from the distant past revealed so much of what was happening today. That paper had been a turning point in her career as a paleoclimatologist. Each tiny bubble revealed part of the all-important climate sensitivity, based on the account from long ago. That data confirmed and enhanced what the climate models could and could not show. The atmospheric samples grabbed by that frozen water, each year over thousands of years, revealed a backlog of the planet’s carbon measure—each bubble holding a micro chapter on the climate for that year.
“Copenhagen went it’s way,” she said. “Along with the Holocene.”
“Maybe for the COP story,” Jake said. “Not for ours.”
Slightly charmed and somewhat hopeful, mind set on a PHD, Tamanna met Jake and Anna at COP 16 in Cancun. While Anna told enchanting stories she felt her charm washed away and most hope dashed as scientists with facts were drowned out by industry lobbyists. And totally ignored by timid politicians. She realized gradually how a sudden awakening by governments could well come too late. At Durban COP 17, when Canada and Japan dropped out of the Kyoto protocol, a sinking reality set in on political agreements. They left that conference disillusioned with the political process, intent on finding another way. Any further COP attendance turned to a matter of gaining relevant experience only, and finishing research for her dissertation.
“When you sent that missile insurance advert I laughed,” Tami said. “Drone missiles were a joke, nothing more.”
“I sent that to legal for an opinion,” Jake said. “No response yet.”
“Climate change is not a joke,” Tami said.
“That, we know.”
The COP agreements and emissions targets up to Copenhagen, even if fully met which was a big if, placed the planet on a mean global warming trajectory of well over three degrees Celsius. Better than the A1F1 scenario that saw intense fossil fuel use with high economic growth on a business-as-usual pathway. That scenario put the planet at well over four degrees just after mid-century. Better, but not enough—simply put, still a world war scale crisis with no foreseeable victory.
“COP meetings were the joke.”
“Still?”
“I dunno, Jake.”
COP would be in Florence a few short weeks hence. Though likely another laugh, the meetings could prove valuable as a staging grounds for their contract outcome. She speculated there but Nishat had alluded to as much.
“Why don’t people get it? We have given up our gift,” Tami said. “The Holocene, why not our precious Holocene? Like in a child’s eyes.”
The climate of the Holocene, that geological age allowing civilization to develop, had officially ended. Knowing that drove Tamanna. Civilization, that which allowed her life as it was. The climate gift of the Holocene, that which kept her Bangladeshi cousins above the rising seas. Most had no idea what the Holocene was—how could she, a scientist, educate them? Now, this chance.
“Anna tells the children a story,” Jake said. “She gets them into the Age of Blessings, like the Holocene, and she does call it a given wonder. From some Ultra Being she imagines up.”
All children now were born and lived lives after the now forsaken Holocene. In the new Anthropocene, geoengineering had premium potential. To send a message on behalf of children, a noticeable voiceless signal to adults.
“Nishat needs press release material,” she sighed. “But the lost Holocene? That wouldn’t cut it any better than my spiel on the Volstok ice core. People just don’t follow the graph line of a bore hole down through a glacier.”
“Don’t ask me, Tami,” Jake said.
“A bore hole rates as boring in popular culture,” Tami said. “People don’t hear that. Life is not linear. And Jake, I am not a story teller.”
“I’ll try running that by Anna.”
Neither spoke for a moment.
“People roll the dice and look for action,” Tamanna said. “Seeking excitement.” Jake had seen the dice rolling infogram in the cube in her office. But NASA statistics didn’t translate well into people story either, no matter how hard that scientist tried. Natural forcings and infogram volcanic eruptions caught her and Jake’s attention. Wide eyed, they had discussed how certain volcanoes cooled the planet, but the raw data didn’t go over well for public consumption.
“People are people,” Jake said.
That rolling dice infogram concisely illustrated the science of a changing climate. That message—the thirty years before 1980 established a global average temperature base equal to the Holocene. Then, the shift in statistical probability of extreme weather events decade by decade so clearly showed the climate’s transformation. Climate forcings, human caused, came out in each roll. NASA’s consistent conclusion: that temperature would rise further due to human caused climate forcings.
They knew that, but how would others?
“Nishat speculates I search out a storyteller,” Tami said. “Maybe, Jake, I talk to one engineer Vince tomorrow.”