together.
Recall: home.
The radio droned out an audio documentary. Unusual. The driver flipped stations as we paused at the first set of lights and Motown took over, but not before I realised there’d been something in that programme I ought to have paid attention to. I concentrated hard on recall, hoping my perception would do the rest and regurgitate the nub, the truth of what had passed me by. Worked much better than I hoped; an exact replication.
“Stated briefly,” announced Professor Lindzen, atmospheric physicist from MIT, in his seminar at the House of Commons, “I will simply try to clarify what the debate over climate change is really about. It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is. It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is. It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should. The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.”
Reframing such scepticism regarding sensitivity and effects into ‘denial’ of century-scale atmospheric warming or greenhouse gas physics was outrageous at best, and at worst exactly what my fellow trainee Sid had once pointed out. Especially since no one had yet slammed sensitivity behind robustly short error bars, and most thermal mass was in the sea not the air anyhow. Yet the hissing of that social worm drowned out reason, and its spit of overstated urgency corroded post normal-science into negatively post-normal science. Reason would be the beast’s death, which maudlin hacks helped avoid by portraying CO2 immorality with la muerte de los nietos, a profitable product-line for seers of old ironically inconvenienced by El Nino and La Nina.
Recall: abroad.
The boy slipped in and out of consciousness. A sore-throated helicopter flogged past beneath the heavy cloud ceiling, trailing a dirty shroud as it gradually lost height. The gentle drizzle wasn’t sufficient to wash sticky blood from my fingers. The loud crump of mortars rolled past my ears, way too close; even the soft cough of the last two being launched was audible, albeit
I was downwind. Machine guns stuttered near and far. My arms ached from holding the boy’s weight for so long.
It was much more frightening to be a civilian in a combat zone. As a soldier I’d always been aware of the tactical situation, the disposition of forces, usually, the objectives, where the shots would come from. Minus battle kit and information, traversing this ridge was akin to crossing a busy road with a blindfold on. I hoped my erratic perception would actually fire up if immediate danger loomed.
I made it. A ravaged village lay before me, part veiled by spindly trees, the pale and pock-marked medical building rising above dilapidated houses. The sun was low and roofs glowed orange as though already afire.
Recall: abroad.
The ward was overcrowded, chaotic, dim. The only resident doctor seemed to move at twice normal speed. A manic mood blazed in his eyes, sweat ran down unshaven jowls. His coat was blue, not white, darkly stained upon the arms and chest. He probably hadn’t slept for days and was running on adrenalin, or something stronger. Nurses treated him like a god.
He declared my young victim would live, if the boy didn’t succumb to infection; supplies were running low.
As natural light finally faded a single inconstant bulb etched stoic patients in deceptive shadow. I noticed three stacks of medical equipment, all turned off. After four hours helping out I persuaded the doctor to join me for a break, in the small canteen that was doubling as a triage station. There was real coffee.
“Why is there no proper power? Has the government cut you off for treating rebels?”
As caffeine took hold the doctor’s eyes bulged still more. His voice strained and his hands flapped against sticky air.
“The government? No. Nor the rebels. Electricity is life, electricity is freedom, electricity is cleanliness, electricity is learning. They don’t want us to have it!”
“They?”
“You! The West. Charities each with half-billion dollar budgets opposed our power station. War intervened, but maybe it’d never have been built anyway.”
I struggled with this. “Charities? Which ones? Why?”
“Environmental, of course. Here, it’d burn coal. The crap can be economically filtered out, but not CO2…”
He spilled into a wild rant, spitting words and stabbing out with a dangerous digit. Unfortunately I couldn’t understand the diatribe because he’d unconsciously reverted to his native tongue. However my perception soon switched in, not translating word-for-word (clearly there were more of those than I was getting), but providing what I assumed was a philosophical distillation.
“Where are the million-dollar muscles to oppose poaching, to save our rare species? Where is the big budget bonanza to stop habitats fragmenting below sustainable thresholds? Where is the lake of cash for clean water infra-structure across our region? Why has the strength leaked out of our fight against disease and the genuine environmental problems?
“Next year the rebel war will be over. Or the year after. But all the other wars will still rage. The main strength of our once allies is poured into the useless black hole of opposing CO2 emissions, into opposing our electricity. To add insult to injury food is poured into the throats of cars apparently for the same reason, though the benefit escapes me. Higher global prices: more starvation. And now rain-forest is being sacrificed for bio-fuel too!”
He paused and I asked something mundane about the light-bulbs, mainly to try and calm him a little. His answer was back in my own language.
“We have the generous donation of three solar panels; but it’s rained for four days straight and the batteries ran down. So it’s just the genny now, which incidentally spews smoke; black carbon, never mind carbon dioxide. We can power the bulbs or the equipment, but not both.
“We’re not worthy to have what you have. It’s eco-colonialism.”
I wondered about back home, that grey cloud around the windmills. Would our lights go out one day too?
The doctor crushed his cup and flung it against the wall.
“Sorry, I’m exhausted, angry, hitting out. But there are some uncomfortable truths.”
I put my hand over his. His skin was slick.
“Friend, you’re talking to the one man who knows that more than anyone. Get some sleep. They won’t miss you for a couple of hours.”
He returned to the ward.
I thought of all I’d learned about the great social worms. Had the unleashing of one such fearsome dragon, in the name of a supporting actor from the climate cast, served or sabotaged overall planetary conservation? Hordes of breathless PhDs and bright-eyed Evelyns spurred on their bolting brute, whose dinosaur brain mistook logical for nomic, ingesting a sugar-rush of trillions.
Oh no! I’d asked a very thorny question; one that might require the injection of many fundamentals to answer. Pins-and-needles erupted over my scalp, probably a precursor…
Pain repeatedly stabbed my head, intense white flashes interrupted my sight. I thought I must be having a stroke. I couldn’t get enough air. I stumbled outside. It ought to be dark but everything was brilliantly illuminated in false colours that betrayed the inner workings of every leaf and blade of grass, every insect, all I could see in fact, in-between fleeting super-novas that blinded. I slid down the outer wall of the medi-centre, wailing my agony and dismay.
Then the novas started to deliver massive shocks of revelation: the dizzying balance of co-opetition in multi-dimensions and massive scale, the dramatic full landscape in which the social beasts battled and bred, their necessity to hold together huge agglomerations of poorly co-operative humans, despite p
arasitism and feral frenzies that could misdirect the efforts of millions.
My head would surely burst. It was too much to take, a torture of knowledge. I wouldn’t survive. I screamed and begged the sky for mercy, though who I was asking? Not the hard-wired ogres of religion, certainly. I recalled the old woman. Who had she asked? The memory prompted another massive stab, and suddenly I knew everything about every kind of war: the brother wars, the wars of renewal, tectonic wars – ah this was the rift I’d glimpsed between me and her! The rift she saw too; a centuries old civilisational fault-line ignited yet again.
The next nova had me shrieking uncontrollably and writhing on the floor as it delivered still more: the monstrous constructal waterfall of life, the eons-old evolutionary modes of energy capture, the great grinding mill of James Thomson as blunt mathematics that bashed my skull like a baseball bat.
No longer able to see the real world, I crawled through a teeming mass of shining equations and fumbled my desperate way to the little guard-hut at the gate of the modest compound. No guns were allowed inside the medical building itself, so a few were usually lodged in here by visitors. The guy who was supposed to watch them, and the gate too, must have run off in fear of the rebels. By feel I found my way to a pistol – the cupboard was unlocked, typical rather than fortunate I guessed – checked the cartridge,