by Paul Briggs
“From what I’ve heard, he’d agree with you,” said Isabel. “But if he’s actually going to see reason on climate change, that’s a good thing.”
“Clark also has some news,” said Mom. “Pretty big news, too.” She looked happy.
“I got a letter from the bank,” said Pop. “They said to help me cover the damage to the house, they’ve decided to give me something called ‘mortgage forgiveness.’”
Isabel blinked. “What do you mean, forgiveness?”
“It means I own the house now. The deed’s in my name—they moved it to my safe-deposit box themselves. I don’t have to make any more payments.”
“What, just like that?”
“Just like that. I’m not the only one, either. Bob Tilghman, Jerry Anthony, Paul Mister—same thing happened to them. No warning. They just got everything handed over. Jerry’s a happy guy—he bought the house just last year.”
“Are you sure there isn’t a catch?”
“There probably is, girl, but what am I supposed to do about it? They gave me the deed. I can’t exactly march into the bank and make ’em take it back.”
* * *
After dinner, Isabel called Sandy and reassured her that her family was basically okay. Isabel’s family, that is, not Sandy’s. Since the death of her mother, Sandy had no family left on Tilghman Island.
“How are things going with business?”
“We had to shut down the plant in Lusby for a few days, but we’re back on track. The real problem was getting everything locked up somewhere secure and making sure nobody found out where.” Most warehouses didn’t have the kind of security that was good enough for Sandy’s stock-in-trade. “Of course, right now I’m more worried about what the Supreme Court says. Or doesn’t say.”
About 6.7 percent of Earth's surface is more than 60° north of the equator, and by the beginning of September all of it was clouded over. From space, it looked like a white skullcap on the world, frayed around the edges but still growing. In three places in particular, the sea of clouds expanded southward and brought rain. Meteorologists described the weather in these places as “precipitation anomalies.”
The change in the weather came slowly in eastern Siberia. In the third week of September, a little over an inch of rain fell on the Taymyr Peninsula and the hills east of the lower Lena. In the next week, two to five inches fell over the land between the Kotuy and the Kolyma—a stretch of tundra and forest roughly twelve hundred miles wide. In the week after that, more than a foot of rain fell over the entire basin of the Lena, which would not normally receive so much precipitation in a whole year.
The city of Yakutsk, in the heart of the basin, was no stranger to flooding. It was a natural risk of living in Siberia—the rivers flow south to north, so when spring comes the upper parts of the rivers always thaw before the lower parts. In recent years the melting of record snowfalls had caused some particularly bad floods.
But nothing like this. Computer simulations made it clear that the levees would not hold. The Red Cross recommended that at least a quarter of the city's three hundred thousand people be evacuated. But the few roads of Siberia had been washed out in many places, and the nearest unaffected settlement was three hundred miles to the south.
In western Canada, the change came suddenly and without warning. In the fourth week of September, a knife-blade of storm cloud slid south along the eastern edge of the Rockies as far as Lethbridge. The three worst hailstorms in the history of Calgary all happened within a space of eleven days, accompanied by fifteen inches of rain.
It was the western edge of a triangular precipitation anomaly stretching from the Mackenzie Delta to the Melville Peninsula. Further east, the rain was still abnormal, but not so extreme. As far as conditions on the ground went, this mattered less than the fact that the rivers flowed southwest to northeast, carrying the downpour along the edge of the Rockies into northern Manitoba. With its paper-thin coating of soil, the Canadian Shield was less able to cope with flooding than almost any other place on Earth.
The worst anomaly, however, was the one that began stretching over northern Europe in the second half of September. It encompassed all Scandinavia, the Baltic nations, most of the British Isles, the Netherlands and northern Belgium, Germany, and Poland, along with a swath of northeastern Russia that included St. Petersburg and Archangel. Within the first three weeks, Hamburg had been evacuated and Oslo, Berlin, Stockholm, and Copenhagen were suffering under more than two feet of rain.
And it was getting worse…
* * *
The knock on the greenroom door came just as Lisa was about to start applying makeup to Isabel’s face.
“Who is it?” said Lisa.
“It’s me.” No name. No need. That high-pitched rasp was well known. Even Isabel, who wasn’t a regular viewer, could recognize it. Anyway, this was his show.
“Come in,” said Lisa. Isabel was about to get up, but Lisa had a hand on her shoulder.
This was the first time Isabel had ever been alone face to face with a genuine celebrity. Up close, he didn’t seem like that big of a deal—a bald guy in a black turtleneck who just happened to look exactly like that guy with the libertarian show.
“Mr. Yuschak… Hi.”
“You can call me Walt.” He sat down in front of her. “How’re you feeling?”
“Little nervous.”
“Yeah, most people are when it’s their first time… damn, this conversation is turning into accidental innuendo. Sorry about that.”
Isabel chuckled. Her appearance had been delayed by two weeks—the first week because a documentary filmmaker wanted to promote a movie he’d just made about next-generation psychoactive drugs and all their wonderful and terrifying possibilities, the second week because Henry Pratt had chosen to put in an appearance on This Week in Freedom. Well, okay, Isabel had to admit Pratt was a bigger deal than she was. So was the documentary guy, now that she thought about it. Actually, lots of things were bigger deals than she was. Her chief claim to fame, at the moment, was not being in the stomach of a polar bear—something most people managed with far less effort. Right now, she was in the fourteenth minute of her allotted fame and the clock was ticking.
Which was a relief, really. The past few weeks had been a real pain, between her trying to get back to her schoolwork and make sure her family and friends were still doing okay while everybody and their grandmother wanted to interview her.
“Anyway, let me talk you through this,” Walt said. “First, you tell us a little bit about yourself. Nothing too personal, just who you are, where you’re from, how you came to be on that boat in the middle of the Arctic. Then we run the tape again and you tell us what it was like. And what happened to the bear. People really care about that—I mean, no offense, you’re important too, but we can see you’re doing okay. That should get us to the first commercial break.
“After that, we talk about some of this crazy weather we’re having. I understand you’re a meteorologist and I’ve read some of your blog, so I figure you can explain it to my viewers better than a lot of people could. Try not to cuss, don’t look into the cameras… you’ve got notes, right?”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “I’m going to have to talk about global warming. You okay with that?”
“Sure. I never denied it. Well, maybe when I was a teenager, but not lately. So, any questions?”
“Why is this called a greenroom?” Isabel waved her hand to take in the room and its furnishings, none of which were green.
“I don’t know,” said Walt. “That’s just what these places are called. Ever do any acting?”
“Hmm? No.”
“I used to do a little community theater,” said Walt. “Every theater’s got a room like this. They usually aren’t green either.”
Isabel nodded. “Why’d you stop?”
“Two reasons. One, once I hit big-time this show kind of took up all my energy. Two, just between you and me, I was a shit actor. I couldn’t play
a corpse if you cut off my head… So, you’re still in school?” There was barely any pause between topics—he just jumped from one to the other. The conversation turned to her schoolwork, and then with equal abruptness to her father’s work and the skipjack that was his pride and joy. Then he left, letting Lisa get back to helping Isabel with her makeup.
By the time Lisa was done, Yuschak had begun his opening monologue, and his voice was coming over the comm system. He seemed to be bellowing about foreign aid today. To the surprise of no one, he was against it. “Canada? Britain? Germany? Ireland? Sweden? Denmark?” he shouted. “These are not poor countries! The Netherlands? They’ve been holding off flooding for years! They’re famous for it! Russia? Even if those guys needed our help they’d die before they asked for it! I mean, come on! The last time the Russians admitted they could use a hand with something, panzers were looking for parking spaces right outside Moscow!
“Listen to me! This is not about saving the world! This is not about helping people who actually need help! This is about our government—our State Department, our USAID—needing to be needed! Not just by us, but by everybody in the whole world! They just can’t stand the thought that somebody somewhere has a problem and is solving it on their own!” At this point Isabel managed to block him out enough to give her notes one last go-over.
“Don’t worry,” said Lisa. “He’s mellowed out a lot. He hasn’t called a woman a crotchburger in years. I kinda miss it.” Isabel wasn’t sure how to respond to this.
“Well,” said Isabel, smiling a little, “I could call you one, if it would help.”
“No thanks. Wouldn’t be the same.”
* * *
“Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, our special guest is that girl who took down the world’s last polar bear!” I’m pretty sure that wasn’t literally the last one, thought Isabel. “An Arctic explorer, a meteorologist, and the author of… well, nothing yet, but you know it’s just a matter of time. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to Isabel Bradshaw!”
Isabel stepped out onto the soundstage, looking as good as she ever had in her life. Her makeup was perfect, her hair styled in such a way as to fall fetchingly over one shoulder instead of its usual ponytail. Her dress was a shade of blue that was, she hoped, just dark enough to be conservative while still being bright enough to bring out her eyes.
Walter Yuschak presided over the set from behind his polished black faux-anchorman desk. In addition to his usual charcoal blazer and black sweater, today he was proping in a keffiyeh. (“Proping”—short for “appropriating”—was a new trend. To do it, you simply put on a piece of clothing that came from some other culture, preferably a culture you knew absolutely nothing about, just to show how little you cared if you offended anybody. It was an easy way to establish yourself as a Bad Boy or Bad Girl without doing any harm. In Isabel’s opinion, it was also an easy way to make a complete fool of yourself—surprisingly few guys could pull off a feathered war bonnet, for instance—but Yuschak’s keffiyeh looked kind of good on him.) Isabel gave what she hoped was a friendly-looking smile as she waved to the studio audience, then sat down in her appointed place.
“First of all, girl,” he said, “I gotta take off my hat to you.” Yuschak doffed his keffiyeh. He was wearing a yarmulke under it. Should’ve seen that coming, thought Isabel. As far as she knew, he was as Jewish as he was Arabic. She was almost impressed. What would you call that? Multi-proping?
The first part of the interview went smoothly. Isabel told them about where she was from, spending her childhood indoors or working on Pop’s boat because of her bee allergy, and added some fun facts about crabbing and oystering (“Let me give you a little advice—if you think there might be a chunk of sea nettle on your glove, don’t rub your eyes.”). She gave a little shout-out to Hunter, and then it was time to watch the bear tape.
Isabel had seen Nikki’s tape before, but never on such a big screen. The strange thing was that she couldn’t read the expression on her own face. Anyone looking at it would have thought it was a look of annoyance rather than terror. It was a look that said Crap, there’s this stupid polar bear and now I have to drop everything and run away and rummage around for a weapon and DAMMIT THERE ARE SALINOMETERS TO FIX.
They showed the photo of her doing that stupid pose next to the unconscious bear. Then she reported that the bear was currently in a zoo in Reykjavik, and was getting its weight back without violently subtracting from anyone else’s. The audience did sound happy about that.
The commercial break gave Isabel a chance to take a discreet peek at herself in the mirror and make sure there wasn’t something horribly wrong with her appearance. It was amazing how calm you could be if you just concentrated on saying what you came to say and looking good while saying it and didn’t think about the fact that millions of people were watching you.
Now it was time for Part Two of the interview. “Isabel, you’re a weather expert, right?”
“It’s one of my fields, yeah.”
“Maybe you could help my viewers understand what the hell is going on out there.”
Yuschak pressed a button. A screen behind the desk showed a highway clogged with traffic, headlights and taillights shining under a gunmetal-gray sky. According to the caption, this was somewhere east of Calgary. Police were trying to shepherd the vehicles around a dozen or more accidents. Hailstones bigger than gravel were pelting everything in sight. “They’re evacuating just under a million people from western Canada,” said Yuschak.
“And that’s in a country of forty million,” said Isabel, “so this is a pretty big deal for them.”
“And here’s the latest from Siberia,” said Yuschak, turning on another screen. “Sucks to be in Yakutsk right now. I mean, more than usual.” Isabel nodded. Normally nobody in the U.S. spent much time thinking about Yakutsk unless they were playing Risk, but suddenly the place was in the news. Satellite photos showed water up to the second-floor windows and thousands of people huddled on the roofs.
“Okay, let’s look at Europe.” The screen showed a weather map of Europe. This was no neat triangle-shaped anomaly, but a vast disorganized mass of cloud that covered pretty much everything south of the Arctic Circle and north of Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw, and Minsk. It reached west of Ireland and tapered off in the east over northern Russia.
Another screen showed the consequences. Knee-deep or hip-deep water in the streets of twenty cities in the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and Germany. Lines of sandbags along the Thames in London. The huge Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland swelling its banks. Endless pumps set up along the dikes of the Netherlands to keep the sunken land from being flooded not by the sea but by the sky.
“Yeah, that’s pretty bad,” said Yuschak. “So, can you tell us why all this is happening?”
“I can,” said Isabel. “but I gotta warn you, you might not like it. You know how we always say you can’t attribute any one weather phenomenon to global climate change?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, this time you can. This weather pattern is absolutely a direct consequence of the changes that have been taking place in the Arctic. Let me explain.
“The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been melting earlier every year for the past three years. This year, for example, the last of it melted on July 9, and the North Pole was ice-free three weeks before that.”
“And how is that causing all this rain?”
“Imagine you put a pot of water on the stove, set the heat on the lowest setting, and then wandered off and forgot about it for the rest of the day,” said Isabel. “The water would be pretty warm after a while. That’s what happened to the Arctic Ocean this year. During the summer, insolation at the North Pole is higher than anywhere else on Earth.”
“Hang on—insulation?”
Isabel shook her head. “Insolation. Meaning it gets more sunlight.”
“What, more than the tropics?”
“Believe it or not, yes. Could we see the
Arctic up there?”
Yuschak pushed a button. The central screen showed a globe, centered more or less on Canada.
“Let me go up and show everybody what I’m talking about.”
“Sure.” Isabel got up, went over to the screen, and pointed at the Arctic. “You see, the sun is low on the horizon, but it never sets. With no sea ice to reflect the light, or to melt into the water and cool it, the ocean just spends the whole summer getting warmer and warmer and warmer. Especially here.” She pointed at a part of the ocean between the North Pole and Alaska. “This is the Beaufort Gyre. It mixes a little with water out of the Bering Strait, but mostly it just turns in place under constant sunlight. And as it heats up, you get evaporation. You get clouds. Lots and lots of clouds.
“Now let’s talk about why it’s getting out of the Arctic. This”—she pointed at a ring of wavy arrows circling the pole—“this is the polar jet stream. Normally, it acts like a barrier—Arctic air stays on one side and temperate air stays on the other, and the greater the difference in temperature between the Arctic and the temperate zones, the stronger the barrier is.
“What’s happening right now, this fall, is that the Arctic Ocean is still transferring heat to the air—mostly by evaporating. So the Arctic is still getting warmer at the same time the rest of the hemisphere is getting cooler… and the jet stream is getting weaker. It’s distorting.” Isabel brushed her finger against the screen. The display rotated the planet until it centered on California. “Whoops.” She brushed her finger against the screen again. The display rotated the planet until it centered on the North Pole. Whew. Quick save.
“Normally this would be more of a circle,” said Isabel, pointing at the jet stream. It was closer to a triangle than a circle. “Here, here, and here”—Isabel indicated the points of the triangle—“is where the flooding is.”
