Green Earth

The wrinkles were laugh lines, however, combined with the lines of a wide-eyed expression of surprise that bunched up his forehead. He seemed cheerful, and certainly attacked his pizza with the same enthusiasm as his young assistant. With their shaved heads they shared a certain family resemblance.

She said, “I suppose going from Tibet to a tropical island must have been a bigger shock than coming from the island to here.”

“I suppose. I was born in Khembalung myself, so I don’t know for sure. But the old ones like Rudra here, who made that very move, seem to have adjusted well. Just to have any kind of home is a blessing.”

Anna nodded. The two of them did project a certain calm. They sat in the booth as if there was no hurry to go anywhere else. Anna couldn’t imagine any such state of mind. She was always in a tearing hurry. She tried to match their air of being at ease. At ease in Arlington, Virginia, after a lifetime on an island in the Ganges. Well, the climate would be familiar. But everything else had to have changed quite stupendously.

And, on closer examination, there was a certain guardedness to them. Drepung watched Anna with a slightly cautious look, reminding her of the pained expression she had seen earlier in the day.

“How is it that you came to rent a space in this particular building?”

Drepung paused to consider this question for a surprisingly long time. Rudra said something to him.

“We had some advice there,” Drepung said. “The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has been helping us, and their office is located nearby.”

Anna thought it over while she ate. It was good to know that they hadn’t just rented the first office they found. Nevertheless, their effort in Washington looked to her to be underpowered at this point. “You should meet my husband,” she said. “He works for a senator, one who is interested in climate change, and a good guy, and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.”

“Ah—Senator Chase?”

“Yes. You know about him?”

“He has visited Khembalung.”

“Has he? Well, I’m not surprised, he’s been every—he’s been a lot of places. Anyway, my husband Charlie works for him as an environmental policy advisor. It would be good for you to talk to Charlie.”

“That would be an honor.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far. But useful.”

“Useful, yes. Perhaps we could have you to dinner at our residence.”

“Thank you, that would be nice. But we have two small boys and we’ve lost all our babysitters, so to tell the truth, it would be easier if you and some of your colleagues came to our place. In fact I’ve already talked to Charlie about this, and he’s looking forward to meeting you. We live in Bethesda, just across the border from the District. It’s not far.”

“Red Line.”

“Yes, very good. Red Line, Bethesda stop.”

She got out her calendar, checked the coming weeks. Very full, as always. “How about a week from Friday? On Fridays we relax a little.”

“Thank you,” Drepung said, ducking his head. He and Rudra Cakrin had an exchange in Tibetan. “That would be very kind. And on the full moon, too.”

“Is it? I’m afraid I don’t keep track.”

“We do. The tides, you see.”

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_1f4439ba-ac1e-59d8-aadf-dc6c28135293)

INTELLECTUAL MERIT (#ulink_1f4439ba-ac1e-59d8-aadf-dc6c28135293)

Water flows through the oceans in steady recycling patterns, determined by the Coriolis force and the particular positions of the continents in our time. Surface currents can move in the opposite direction to bottom currents below them, and often do, forming systems like giant conveyor belts of water. The largest one is already famous, at least in part: the Gulf Stream is a segment of a warm surface current that flows north up the entire length of the Atlantic, all the way to Norway and Greenland. There the water cools and sinks, and begins a long journey south on the Atlantic Ocean floor, to the Cape of Good Hope and then east toward Australia, and even into the Pacific, where the water upwells and rejoins the surface flow, west to the Atlantic for the long haul north again. The round trip for any given water molecule takes about a thousand years.

Cooling salty water sinks more easily than fresh water. Trade winds sweep clouds generated in the Gulf of Mexico west over Central America to dump their rain in the Pacific, leaving the remaining water in the Atlantic that much saltier. So the cooling water in the North Atlantic sinks well, aiding the power of the Gulf Stream. If the surface of the North Atlantic were to become rapidly fresher, it would not sink so well when it cooled, and that could stall the conveyor belt. The Gulf Stream would have nowhere to go, and would slow down, and sink farther south. Weather everywhere would change, becoming windier and drier in the Northern Hemisphere, and colder in places, especially in Europe.

The sudden desalination of the North Atlantic might seem an unlikely occurrence, but it has happened before. At the end of the last Ice Age, for instance, vast shallow lakes were created by the melting of the polar ice cap. Eventually these lakes broke through their ice dams and poured off into the oceans. North America still sports scars from three or four of these cataclysmic floods; one flowed down the Mississippi, one the Hudson, one the St. Lawrence. These flows stalled the world ocean conveyor belt current, and the climate of the whole world changed as a result, sometimes in as little as three years.

Now, with Greenland’s ice cap melting fast, and the Arctic sea ice breaking into bergs, would enough fresh water flow into the North Atlantic to stall the Gulf Stream again?

Frank Vanderwal kept track of climate news as a sort of morbid hobby. His friend Kenzo Hayakawa, an old grad school housemate, had spent time at NOAA before coming to NSF to work with the weather crowd on the ninth floor, and so Frank occasionally checked in with him, to say hi and find out the latest. Things were getting wild out there; extreme weather events were touching down all over the world, the violent short-termed ones almost daily, the chronic problems piling one on the next, so that never were they entirely clear of them. The Hyperniño, severe drought in India and Peru, lightning fires in Malaysia; then on the daily scale, a typhoon destroying most of Mindanao, a snap freeze killing crops and breaking pipes all over Texas, and so on. Something every day.

Like a lot of climatologists and other weather people Frank had met, Kenzo presented all this news with a faintly proprietary air, as if he were curating the weather. He liked the wild stuff, and enjoyed sharing news of it, especially if it supported his theory that the heat humans had added to the atmosphere had been enough to change the monsoon patterns for good, triggering global repercussions; meaning almost everything. This week for instance it was tornadoes, previously confined almost entirely to North America as a kind of freak of that continent’s topography and latitude, but now appearing in East Africa and in Central Asia. Last week it had been the weakening of the Great World Ocean Current in the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic.

“Unbelievable,” Frank would say.

“I know. Isn’t it amazing?”

Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little room filled with file cabinets and copy machines informally called “The Department of Unfortunate Statistics.” Someone had started to tape onto the walls of this room extra copies of pages that held interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.

The oldest ones were headlines, things like:

WORLD BANK PRESIDENT SAYS FOUR BILLION LIVE ON LESS THAN TWO DOLLARS A DAY.

or

AMERICA: FIVE PERCENT OF WORLD POPULATION, SEVENTY PERCENT OF CORPORATE OWNERSHIP

Later pages were charts, or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles out of the scientific literature.

When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was, looking at the latest. It was another headline:

352 RICHEST PEOPLE OWN AS MUCH AS THE POOREST TWO BILLION, SAYS CANADIAN FOOD PROJECT

“I don’t think this can be right,” Edgardo declared.

“How so?” Frank said.

“The poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a big percentage of the world’s capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to match the top three hundred and fifty.”

Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belaboring the obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up a brief quote: “72.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.”

Frank, wanting to bug her, said, “What do you think, Anna?”

“About what?”

Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.

Anna said, “I don’t know. Seven magnitudes is a lot. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three hundred.”

“Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latest Forbes 500?”