But then he turned a corner and came on the White House, just like that, the planet’s center of power practically in the middle of downtown. According to the news on the Angel radio his grandson had shown him how to use, the President and her administration had long fled to their refuge in Denver. But the protesters were still here, a ragged band of them opposite the gates, their banners complaining about taxes, foreign wars and inequities in flood relief. And there were headquarters of other tremendously important institutions only blocks away, like the FBI and NASA and the World Bank. It was a city that was somehow too small for its significance.
He walked to the grassy expanse of the Mall, where the Washington Monument stood tall and slim. Gelertner oriented himself; there was the Capitol building to the east, the Lincoln Memorial sitting grandly to the west. The grass was soggy, giving under his leather shoes. Though he could explore the Lincoln Memorial as much as he pleased, the Capitol building was closed to visitors. And he was disappointed to find that the various Smithsonian museums were closed too, although there was much activity around them as staff bundled up precious exhibits for moving.
He was vague about the progress of the flooding. That evening the TV news showed alarming images and maps of the threat to DC; the rising ocean had pushed into Chesapeake Bay, and was backing up the Potomac to the city. He wouldn’t have thought that DC would be under such immediate threat, but there you go, he recorded in his blog.
He was woken in the night by a fire alarm. The hotel had to be evacuated.
Gelertner had his airline ticket, but quickly learned the airport was closed. Unsure what to do, he stayed put. By mid-morning he found himself in a crowd of families, mostly black, mostly poor, waiting for a requisitioned school bus to take them to higher ground. Stern-looking Homeland Security guards made sure they didn’t try to get away from their allocated group, or compromise the convoys that were already underway, taking out the remaining federal government employees, major corporate players and the rich.
Gelertner was out of the city by noon.
That was pretty much all he saw of Washington, a city he happened to visit in the midst of its abandonment. He saw nothing significant of the flood itself. It struck him as strange that the very first visit he made to the capital, at the end of his own long life, might turn out to be one of the last made by any tourist, ever.
Gelertner was particularly disappointed not to have got to see Apollo XI in the National Air and Space Museum. He never learned if the heavy capsule had been evacuated successfully.
33
Nathan Lammockson met them in an anteroom to the lecture theater, deep within the Freedom Tower, where Thandie was to present her results to a subcommittee of the IPCC. Thandie went off to wash and set up, and Piers disappeared, having business of his own with the IPCC delegates. Gary was called away to talk to other climatologists in the building, from NOAA’s hurricane center in Miami and elsewhere. They were being tapped up by local weather watchers who were growing concerned about that incoming ocean storm, now referred to as system Aaron.
So it was just Lily who sat beside Nathan Lammockson, on a balcony that overlooked the theater where Thandie would present. The room was sparsely populated, a dozen of the hundred or so seats occupied by middle- aged types with the eccentric dress sense, hair styles and facial fluff that seemed to mark out the professional scientist. They knew each other, it seemed, and held conversations leaning over the backs of their seats. They ignored Thandie, who was scrolling through her presentation. In the air before her was a big three-dimensional display that held a translucent image of the whole Earth. It spun before Thandie’s touch; Lily could see her earnest face through the planet’s ghostly layers.
Lammockson sucked on a coffee, and leaned over to Lily. “Quite a view we’ve got here.”
“Yes. I like Thandie’s three-D projector.”
He glanced at her. “I guess you haven’t seen a crystal ball before?”
“I missed a lot of the new toys while I was stuck down those cellars in Barcelona.”
“Yeah. The principle’s simple, as I understand it. It’s a fool-the-eye thing.” He lifted his hand upright and mimed rotation.“You have a translucent screen, upright like this, spinning a thousand times a minute. And you have three projectors firing light at it, through systems of lenses and mirrors. So at any instant you have a slice through the three-dimensional object you’re looking at. Spin it up and those slices merge in the vision. Terrific tool in medicine, I’m told. Surgery, you know, scans of skulls with tumours in ’em, that kind of thing. Of course they’re mostly used for porn.”
That made her laugh.“Actually, looking down on Thandie like this, I feel like I’m about to watch surgery.”
He grunted.“Well, so you are, in a way. These arseholes will do their very best to dissect whatever Thandie puts before them. You got to understand how the IPCC works, Lily, what it’s for…”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been established by the governments back in the 1980s to provide authoritative assessments on information and predictions regarding climate change.
“You have working groups covering the physical science of climate change, impact on the world, and mitigation. Now, that word ‘authoritative’ is the key. Everything about the way the panel operates is designed to reinforce that. Every time they produce a report you have a lead author for each section, but typically you’ll get hundreds of expert reviewers providing tens of thousands of comments. The rule of thumb is they only let through what there’s absolute consensus on. Especially when it comes to the Summary for Policymakers, which is the only bit anybody ever reads.”
“Wow. It’s amazing anything gets through at all.”
“That’s the point. The IPCC is ferociously conservative. You can criticize it for being too slow to respond to the evidence for climate change, for instance. But when it does speak the governments listen.”
“So do you think they’ll accept any of Thandie’s data and conclusions?”
“Maybe the data. Less so the conclusions. There’s bound to be a debate. Even those who accept the reality of the sea-level rise see it as a symptom of climate change, and can’t accept any justification of it that doesn’t come from their old models-can’t accept it as something entirely new. A lot will depend on Thandie’s headline prediction, I think. Right now they’re clinging to eighty meters, tops, as an outer limit. I mean that would be catastrophic enough, but-”
“Why eighty meters?”
“Because that’s what you would get if all the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica were to melt. And the melting ice is the only source generally accepted for the ocean rise.”
Lily nodded. “So it’s going to be hard for them to listen if Thandie tells them otherwise.”
“Exactly.”
“So what do you think is going to come out of today?”
“Nothing, immediately. It will take them months to come up with a report. Even then the governments probably won’t accept it, until the oceans are lapping around their feet. However other players will be listening hard.” He glanced down at the lecture theater. “I could point to five of those clown-haired characters down there who are in the pocket of members of the LaRei.”
“The LaRei?”
He grinned. “An exclusive Manhattan society. Even more exclusive than the MetCircle. You need a net worth of a hundred million bucks just to get in the door. The rich are listening, believe me.”
She nodded. “And the rich will take care of themselves.”
He eyed her. “Rich arseholes like me, you mean?”
That made her uncomfortable. This man was, after all, her boss. “Nathan-”
“Oh, don’t worry. Look, I know what you think of me, even though I saved your lives. In a supposedly capitalist society everybody despises the accumulation of wealth, save those who have it. Listen. Damn right I’m intending to act. I’m not going to wait around until the governments get over their collective denial, as Dr. Jones puts it. Damn right I’m intending to save myself, and my son Hammond, if I can-and save my wealth, whatever that means in the coming world. Who wouldn’t? But remember this: I sponsored Thandie’s survey, I recruited the arseholes she needed from Woods Hole and wherever else. I’m even sponsoring this meeting today. What more can
