Fifty Degrees Below. Kim Stanley Robinson

sat behind her desk, talking on the phone. She gestured for him to sit down. Graceful hands. Short, Chinese-American, good-looking in an exotic way, businesslike but friendly. A subtly amused expression on her face when she listened to people, as if pleased to hear their news.

      As now, with Frank. Although it could be amusement at his resignation letter, and the way she had jiu-jitsued him into staying at NSF. So hard to tell with Diane; and her manner, though friendly, did not invite personal conversation.

      ‘You’re into your new office?’ she asked.

      ‘My stuff is, anyway. It’ll take a while to sort out.’

      ‘Sure. Like everything else these days! What a mess it all is. I have Kenzo and some of his group coming this morning to tell us more about the Gulf Stream.’

      ‘Good.’

      Kenzo and a couple of his colleagues in climate duly appeared. They exchanged hellos, got out laptops, and Kenzo started working the Power Point on Diane’s wall screen.

      All the data, Kenzo explained, indicated stalls in what he called the ‘thermohaline circulation.’ At the north ends of the Gulf Stream, where the water on the surface normally cooled and sank to the floor of the Atlantic before heading back south, a particularly fresh layer on the surface had stalled the downwelling. With nowhere to go, the water in the current farther south had slowed to a halt.

      What was more, Kenzo said, just such a stall in the thermohaline circulation had been identified as the primary cause of the abrupt climate change that paleoclimatologists had named the Younger Dryas, a bitter little ice age that had begun about eleven thousand years before the present, and lasted for a few thousand years. The hypothesis was that the Gulf Stream’s shutdown, after floods of fresh water coming off the melting ice cap over North America, had meant immediately colder temperatures in Europe and the eastern half of North America. This accounted for the almost unbelievably quick beginning of the Younger Dryas, which analysis of the Greenland ice cores revealed had happened in only three years. Three years, for a major global shift from the worldwide pattern that climatologists called warm-wet, to the worldwide pattern called cool-dry-windy. It was such a radical notion that it had forced climatologists to acknowledge that there must be nonlinear tipping points in the global climate, leading to general acceptance of what was really a new concept in climatology: abrupt climate change.

      ‘What caused the stall again?’ Diane said.

      Kenzo clicked to the next slide, an image of the Earth portraying the immense ice cap that had covered much of the northern hemisphere throughout the last ice age. The end of that one had arrived slowly, in the old-fashioned linear way, melting the top of the ice cap and creating giant lakes that rested on the remaining ice. These lakes had been held in place by ice dams that were themselves melting, and when the dams had at last given way, extraordinarily large floods of fresh water had rushed down into the ocean, emptying volumes as large as the Great Lakes in a matter of weeks. Signs left on the landscape indicated this had happened down the watersheds of the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Mississippi, and out west, a lake covering most of Montana had drained down the course of the Columbia River several times, leaving an area in Washington called the scablands which gave eloquent testimony to the power of these floods to tear into the bedrock. Presumably the same thing had happened on the East Coast, but the signs had mostly been submerged by rising sea levels or the great eastern forest, so that they were only now being discerned.

      Frank, looking at the map on the screen, thought of how Rock Creek had looked that morning at dawn. Theirs had been a very tiny flood relative to the ones Kenzo was describing, and yet the watershed was devastated.

      So, Kenzo continued, fresh water, dumped into the North Atlantic all at once, appeared to block the thermohaline cycle. And nowadays, for the last several years, the Arctic Ocean’s winter sea ice had been breaking up into great fleets of icebergs, which then sailed south on currents until they encountered the Gulf Stream’s warm water, where they melted. The melting zones for these icebergs, as a map on the next slide made clear, were just above the northern ends of the Gulf Stream, the so-called downwelling areas. Meanwhile the Greenland ice cap and glaciers were also melting much faster than had been normal, and running off both sides of that great island.

      ‘How much fresh water in all that?’ Diane asked.

      Kenzo shrugged. ‘The Arctic is about ten million square kilometers. The sea ice lately is about five meters thick. Not all of that drifts into the Atlantic, of course. There was a paper that estimated that about twenty thousand cubic kilometers of fresh water had diluted the Arctic over the past thirty years, but it was plus or minus five thousand cubic kilometers.’

      ‘Let’s get better parameters on that figure, if we can,’ Diane said.

      ‘Sure.’

      They stared at the final slide. The implications tended to stall on the surface of the mind, Frank thought, like the water in the north Atlantic, refusing to gyre down. The whole world, ensconced in a global climate mode called warm and wet, and getting warmer and wetter because of global warming caused by anthropogenically released greenhouse gases, could switch to a global pattern that was cold, dry, and windy. And the last time it happened, it had taken three years. Hard to believe; but the Greenland ice core data were very clear, and the rest of the case equally persuasive – one might even say, in science’s distinctive vocabulary of levels of certainty, compelling.

      

      When Kenzo and his team had left, Diane turned to Frank. ‘What do you think?’

      ‘It looks serious. It may get people to take action.’

      ‘Except by now it may be too late.’

      ‘Yes.’

      They considered that in silence for a few moments, and then Diane said, ‘Let’s talk about your second year here, how to organize it to get the most out of you.’

      That was a pretty blunt way to put it, given Diane’s manipulations, but Frank was careful not to express any resentment. ‘Sure,’ he said. It had been documented that if you forced your face to take on pleasant expressions, your mood tended helplessly to follow. So, small smile of acceptance; pull chair up to desk.

      They worked their way down a list Diane had made identifying areas where NSF might do something to deal with the impacts of abrupt climate change. As they did Frank saw that Diane was well ahead of him in thinking about these matters, which he found a little surprising, although of course it made sense; otherwise why would she have wanted him to stay another year? His letter would not have been what brought her the news of NSF’s ineffectiveness in dealing with a crisis situation.

      She spoke very quickly. Slightly fog-minded, Frank struggled to keep up, looking at her more closely than ever before. Of course every face was inscrutable in the end. Diane’s was dramatically planed, cheekbones, forehead, and jaw all distinct and somehow angled to each other. Formal; formidable. Asian dragon lady, yes. She drew the eye. She was about ten years Frank’s senior, he had gathered; a widow, he had heard; had been NSF head for a long time, Frank wasn’t sure how long. Famous for her incredibly long work days. They used to call people like her workaholics before everyone got up to speed and the concept had gone away. Once Edgardo had said of Diane, she makes Anna look like a slacker, and Frank had shuddered, because Anna was a veritable maniac for work. Anything beyond that pretty much had to be insane. And this was who he was going to be working for.

      Well, fine. He had not stayed in D.C. to fool around. He too wanted to work long hours. And now it was clear he would have Diane’s ear and her support, therefore the cooperation of anyone needed at NSF; things would therefore get done. That was the only thing that would make staying in Washington bearable.

      He focused on her list:

      • Coordinate already existing federal programs

      • Establish new institutes and programs where necessary

      • Work with Sophie Harper, NSF’s congressional liaison officer, to contact and educate all the relevant Congressional committees and staffs, and