representing planetary influences, a whole flotilla of grey pods for different cloud effects and feedbacks, some of which seemed to contribute to warming and some, like their reflection of sunlight, to cooling. Likewise there were beautiful glacier-blue pods for ice and off-white sledges for snow, an array of green buds and brown bugs for biota, huge submarines in dark turquoise for the various oceans basins, slices of sun seated in several brands of bright orange sports cars (several? Oh, different fluxes, frequencies and magnetic effects), and many many more. My own pod was racing red, for temperature.
As the collection of crazy craft careered forward, I tried to put aside panic and make out how this immense machine operated. Straightaway my vision improved and a wickedly complex web of springs became evident, connecting the pods to each other in various different ways. I recognised that my own pod must be both effect and cause, as were lots of others, meaning their corresponding tracks were also functions of the whole bouncy push-pull system. As a row of ice pods bottomed in a steep valley and launched speedily up the other side, I realised that the huge inertia of the ocean basins worked to keep the terrestrial pods stable. Without these vast volumes of water, would some players simply fly hither and thither right out of the contraption altogether?
Millions of years raced by. I couldn’t keep my eyes on everything at once. As ice continued to shoot upwards I plunged down towards a landscape upon which life was adopting a defensive position as irresistible glaciers advanced. An Ice Age. Terror gripped me; I was sure to hit the ground! I looked frantically around for the CO2 pod and spotted it behind me, trailing my course. How could a supposedly dominant forcing of temperature, lag my pod? Didn’t I see that enigmatic gas ahead a while ago?
Life clung on; yet I perceived that if CO2 fell to about 40% of the modern concentration, already close now, all vegetation would suffocate and die, followed swiftly thereafter by all higher life. Ground-rush from a whitening world dazed me. I closed my eyes and prepared for the crash.
It never came. My stomach dropped behind as I was suddenly propelled upward again, the straining springs from planetary pods and clouds startling me as they cracked and groaned, throwing off accumulated frost as the entire machine executed a stunning status change. Now elevating fast, my bones warmed somewhat. I was surprised to see that the CO2 pod, the size of which was determined by its greenhouse strength, was utterly dwarfed by the looming grey pod representing water vapour’s analogous power, which I guessed was not far below thirty times bigger. In a fiendishly complex clockwork that seemed derived by the devil himself, pod sizes were also varying in subtle ways; how did the far weightier greenhouse effect of water play out?
Action on terra firma beneath me distracted my attention. I noticed regular environmental patterns that corresponded to bumps on the ride; the pseudo-cyclic swells of natural variability, my perception supplied, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and other ocean turnovers. I’d heard of the PDO before, with its troublesome children El Nino and La Nina. We were pulling out of deep history towards the modern era and the ride was less scary, though I happened to be over the Americas and saw that on the ground those cruel children were nevertheless wreaking havoc upon societies, smashing the Lambeyeque people with a wall of water, wiping out agricultural civilisations of North American Indians with mega-droughts, the like of which we haven’t seen in modern times, challenging the Maya and many others in all those lands before the challenge of the Spanish came.
My vehicle glided smoothly to a halt. Hang on a second, too smoothly?
I noticed the CO2 pod had grown a little mascot, like the leaping jaguar on cars of that name and representing the three percent or so of annual anthropogenic contribution. Then I was bathed by early spring sunshine back in our garden, my forgotten rake still clutched tightly in both hands.
Quite aside from being scary, the ride had been intellectually challenging too. How come CO2 had for much of geological time ridden so high? Four, five, six times and more above the modern concentration of 0.04%, yet life had prospered and the planet hadn’t fried. How come I hadn’t spotted anything unprecedented about current times? Neither the absolute positions of pods or their speeds, neither weather extremes or climate trends. Had the kaleidoscopic swirl of the whole machine confused my eye?
Twentieth century warming was significantly less than one Celsius; much less than vast numbers of similar bumps on the ride through geological time, similar or less even than a few during historical time. Less than the typical difference between two rooms in a house. A lot less if it was Evelyn’s house! Surprising. What fraction of that rise might we have caused?
On a grand scale nothing at all threatening seemed to be happening now, or looked likely to happen. And how come my ride was dead flat for the last dozen years or more, implying no global temperature change? Given such grave warnings, this last was hard indeed to believe. Yet Helen had been pregnant; Tamin had admitted his treachery. So surely my perception was pure? Could these climate revelations still be consistent with imminent catastrophe?
I doubted my ability, seriously, determining to check what I could about the science via much more conventional means.
Recall: home.
Sergeant Boden’s funeral was the lowest point in my life to date. Everything I’d relied upon seemed to be changing, slipping away from me, and his steady presence was just one more loss. And I felt responsible for his death. My merciless vision revealed the ghosts of the children his widow would never have, being forcibly ripped away from her spirit arms by the irresistible winches of fate; a deeply wounding sight that left me haemorrhaging remorse and tears.
Recall: home.
The summer brought Noah’s joy and fear: biblical rain. I’d never seen so much vivid greenery in August, when not dimmed by incessant sheets of grey precipitation, that is. Wind and constant drenching lowered the temperature. Those many exquisite warm evenings before I’d completed my army training, delicately chorused by birdsong, were a dream drowned out by the familiar surf-like roar of frequent downpours.
Weather isn’t climate. Yet annoyingly the former seemed to have robbed the latter of my nice summer. After much soldiering in hot places, my bones chilled easily.
To my great relief the revelations from my sky-ride checked out, insomuch as could be determined regarding the ancient events. In particular, just ten minutes on the Net confirmed a flat global temperature average over the last dozen years at least, up to fifteen on some metrics. It seemed this was a sensitive subject, yet acknowledged by the consensus and named ‘the hiatus’. So my perception wasn’t lying, thank goodness; the strain and headaches of dealing with truth were getting worse and it was harder to suppress revelations, but deceptive visions would be an outright nightmare!
Further research on the topic deeply unsettled me though. After time to accommodate the notion, the presence of a hiatus wasn’t the real challenge to my pre-conceptions, but the fact that leading voices within the consensus proposed very different explanations. Some natural variability is to be expected, but we’ll soon enough be stifled by the ever-thickening blanket of greenhouse gases. I didn’t recall anyone saying this was ‘expected’ a few years back. Negative aerosol forcing. I presumed this to be from industrial fumes; the right sort reflect sunlight back into space. The Faustian aerosol bargain is probably more of a problem than had been assumed. Hmmm, objective scientific language then. Climate models have failed to reflect the sun’s cyclical influence on the climate. Hadn’t sceptics suggested that for years? The extra heat is being diverted into the deep oceans. It’ll come back to bite us later.
What was one to think of all this? If new proposals veered too much towards natural variability or the sun did it then, just as for Icarus, the wings supporting the hypothesis that ‘CO2 dominates everything’ would simply melt.
Fifteen years seemed like nothing, but this hiatus confusion was puzzling. Hadn’t more and more calamity been trumpeted during those years too? Yet all of the bad things were predicated on the t
emperature rising.
This voracious gift of veracity was consuming all my comfort zone. Hard to believe I’d once valued the strange ability, which now every day I wished to be gone from me. I decided that the truth and the message must meet somewhere in the middle; I just wasn’t smart enough to figure out the knitting in-between yet.
Unhelpfully, the pattern of knits and purls was stored as many pages within different obscure filing cabinets. My poor Internet skills eventually uncovered the consensus position that CO2 alone simply wasn’t strong enough for catastrophic warming. High climate sensitivity amplifies the effect, they said. System amplification is modest or very modest, said the sceptics, conceivably minus (damping). How come I hadn’t known of this before? Only the sight of that diminutive CO2 pod on the fairground ride had prompted me to find out.
Recall: home.
Though I could smell the threat of another soaking, for once rain held off as Joanne and I walked under leaden skies from the Tube station to the big gathering of Evelyn’s organisation in London. We had a little time to spare and Joanne led us on a slight detour. Just past the Duke of York Memorial people were spilling out of a white