“How much water would that be?” Bob asked.
“All the glaciers together, maybe sixty cubic kilometers. It’s still a lot, but it’s not three thousand six hundred.”
“Or three hundred and sixty thousand!” Adele added. “Which is what a single meter rise in sea level would be.”
“Right. Also, the meltwater at the bottom of the glaciers is really from three sources. Surface water draining down moulins is the new stuff. Then geothermal energy melts a little bit of the glacier’s bottom from below, as always. It never melted much before, except over certain hot spots, but a little. Third source is the shear heat created by ice moving downstream, the friction of that movement. So. Geothermal in most places raises the temperature at the bottom of the glacier to about zero degrees, while up on the surface it can be as cold as forty below. So normally the heat from geothermal mostly diffuses up through the ice, it dissipates like that and so the ice on bottom stays frozen. Just barely, but normally it does. But now, the moulin water drains down there and lubricates a little, then as glacier speeds up going down its bed, the shear heat down there increases, so more heat, more melting, more speed. But if you suck the bottom water out and slow the glacier back down, it won’t shear as much, and you won’t get that friction melt. My modeling suggests that if you pump out about a third to a half of the water underneath the glaciers, you get them to slow down enough to reduce their shear heat also, and that water doesn’t appear in the first place. The glaciers cool down, bottom out, refreeze to the rock, go back to their old speed. So you only need to pump out something like thirty cubic kilometers, from under the biggest glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland.”
“How many glaciers?” Pete asked.
“Say the hundred biggest. It’s not so bad.”
“How many pumps per glacier would you need?” Bob asked.
“Who knows? It would be different for each, I’m sure. Would be an experiment you’d have to keep trying.”
“Expensive,” Bob noted.
“Compared to what?” Pete exclaimed.
Adele laughed. “Jurgen said a quadrillion dollars.”
Slawek nodded, mouth pursed solemnly. “This would cost less.”
They all laughed.
Adele said to him, “So, Slawek, why didn’t you bring this up at the session today? It was about this acceleration of glaciers.”
Slawek quickly shook his head. “Not my thing. A scientist gets into geoengineering, they’re not a scientist anymore, they’re a politician. Get hate mail, rocks through window, no one takes their real work seriously, all that. I’m not ready for that kind of career change. I just want to get back on the Ice while I can still get PQ’ed.”
“But the fate of civilization,” Bob suggested.
Slawek shrugged. “That’s your job, right? So I thought I’d mention it. Or really, Pete thought I’d mention it.”
“Thanks, Slawek,” Pete said. “You are a true glaciologist.”
“I am.”
“I think we should drink another round of Drambers to celebrate that.”
“Me too.”
23
It took a while to get a gun. Not easy. Finally he managed it by stealing a rifle and its ammunition from a Swiss man’s closet, where Swiss men so often kept their service rifles. It turned out to be absurdly easy; the country was so safe that quite a few people never locked their doors. Of course Swiss men were ordered to keep their service rifles under lock and key, and they all did that, but some were more careless with their hunting rifles, and he found one of those.
He was ready to act.
He researched his subjects of interest. One of them would be attending a conference in Dübendorf in a month.
So he carried the stolen rifle in a backpack over the Zuriberg, to a parking garage near the conference center in Dübendorf. He took the stairs up to its top floor, then climbed up onto its roof. When he got to the roof he was looking down on the main entrance to the conference center. He assembled the rifle and set it on a wooden stand he had knocked together, and looked through its sight at the entrance area.
His target walked up broad stairs to the entry and turned to say something to an assistant. Blue suit, white shirt, red tie. He looked like he was making a joke.
Frank regarded the man in the crosshairs. He swallowed, aimed again. He could feel his face heating up, also his hands and feet. Finally the man went inside.
Frank put the rifle back in the backpack and carried it down the stairs. Up in the forest, on the hill separating the city from its suburban town, he cast the rifle onto the ground under a tree. Then down the hill, back to his shed.
That had been a criminal, something like a war criminal, there in the crosshairs of that gun. A climate criminal. Few war criminals would kill as many people as that man would. And yet Frank hadn’t pulled the trigger. Hadn’t been able to. A target whose life’s work would drive thousands of species to extinction, and cause millions of people to die. And yet he hadn’t done it.
Maybe he wasn’t as crazy as he thought. Or maybe he had completely lost it. Or simply just lost his nerve. He wasn’t sure anymore. He felt sick, shaky. Like he had just missed getting hit by a bus. That made him angrier than ever. He still wanted to kill one of the people killing the world. A Child of Kali, here in the West. A fellow traveler.
He had seen people die, had been broken by that very
