The Wandering Island Factory

by TR Nowry

  Chapter 11

  Jason stood in the parkinglot in front of the apartment, pulled the old plug out of the socket, then screwed in a new one from the box.

  Steven had stopped coming around a few weeks after Ava started dating Allen, even though Allen didn't last much past a few dates. It was a pity; of the two, he liked Steven better.

  Ava didn't seem to dump anyone, she just stopped dating them and moved on. It seemed rude, but she pulled it off like a pro.

  Jason tightened the new plugs with the ratchet, connected the wires, then closed the hood on the Honda. Gina turned the key and it started right up. It had been running uneven lately. Plugs seemed as good a guess as any, and the cheapest place to start, too.

  She put it in gear, waved, then headed off for work.

  Housecleaning was seasonal and highly dependent on bookings and vacationers. They were at the whim of others, and vacationers seemed to be taking this week off. Hence, so was he.

  The cleaning company tried to give him something to do for three days this week. They tried to be fair among all their seasonal help, but nobody ever promised him regular work. He had dipped into his meager savings and now couldn't even afford a plane ticket home.

  He walked down to the end of the street, stopping at the bus stop, and fished in the trash for the classifieds. Most seemed to require a car, but he continued to look. It was a catch 22. He needed a better job to afford a car to get a better job. Arghhh!

  It was what it was.

  An article about middle of A5 caught his eye.

  Scientists had years ago discovered the 'jet stream' on the sun. It had long been known that the sun had cycles, every 11 to 22 years it seemed. But those cycles could last for hundreds of years, as was seen during the Little Ice Age. Back then, the sun had unusually few sunspots, not that anyone knew what sunspots were back then. Even today, scientists are still confused over what causes sunspots to begin and what regulates their size. But they are now, thanks to some very expensive satellites, able to observe currents and streams just under the surface of the sun. And these rivers of flowing, whatever it was, seemed to play a huge roll over whether a sunspot would form or not, and were a good predictor of their eventual strength. The jet stream on the sun was moving again, and scientists everywhere were excited about it.

  But unlike simple scientific observations, there was a lot riding on the outcome of this subtle and very distant change.

  Science seemed to be evenly divided into two camps. The first said that sunspots have little or no effect on Earth's temperatures and weather patterns. That the primary factor that dictated Earth's temperature were greenhouse gasses. Everything else was insignificantly minor.

  The other group, ridiculed in the media every day, yet still growing stronger, believed that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses were insignificant in comparison to the brute power of these little understood changes on the sun. Sunspot computer models were proving nearly four times as accurate as the CO2 weighted ones, yet sunspot models still received ten times the ridicule and a fraction of the respect.

  Well, as he read on, the two camps were headed into a scientific showdown. The sun cycle was changing, and it looked like it was changing in a powerful way.

  Sunspots had been unusually rare recently, and CO2 driven global warming theories had faltered when the world actually recorded a cooling for over a decade. But with the jet stream moving to where the sun scientists believed it was heading, they predicted a sharp spike of six degrees over the next six years. An increase in temperature on that scale was, in the lingo, an order of magnitude larger than anything CO2 computer models could ever account for. Since none of the CO2 centric models supported it, the theory was ridiculed as being scientifically impossible.

  The press, of course, loved the controversy.

  And even more, they loved the headlines it produced.

  "Scientists differ wildly, but agree that the world is screwed!"

  Humorous, but it seemed true by the end of the article.

  If the Sun scientists were right, the world would go into global warming meltdown in the next six years. The good news would be that CO2 and manmade gasses would be completely exonerated as the cause. The bad news would be it wouldn't matter because the world would end.

  If the CO2 scientists were right, nothing would happen but a slight warming of around a tenth of a degree that coincided with their models. Their models still predicted the end of the world, but in fifty to a hundred years. And if the warming was within the prediction of a tenth of a degree, the world would have to say goodbye to cars and planes, gasoline, tractors, and most powerplants. The world would be savable, but it meant sailboats and bicycles for everyone, except politicians.

  He stuffed some of the more promising job slips in his pocket and trashed the rest of the paper before walking home.

  End of the world, or the end of a world worth living and the end of all modern conveniences. It was lose lose, lose lose.

  If it bleeds, it leads. If it means the end of the world, it's on A5.

  The problem, as he saw it, was that the debate was religious, not scientific. The CO2 side believed that salvation was only achievable if man repented for his sins. It required the same religious repentance as that of passing a rich man through the eye of a needle. The sun advocates, on the other religion, believed it was all out of their hands. It was all fate, and that repentance wasted precious resources that should be applied to adapting to changes as they happened. If the sun shifted into a hotter gear, as they predicted, we would need more powerplants, not less. Cooling towers could be reconfigured, inexpensively, to pump more reflective white clouds into the air during daylight, like putting on sun block, and switch to a form of radiator to vent heat directly into space at night. If the sun shifted to Ice Age, manmade clouds would be used at night like a blanket to keep in the heat, and cooling ponds during the day to retain BTUs near the ground. But that either way, the key to adapting to climate change required more powerplants, not less, according to the sun religion. And windmills and solar were worthless, either way.

  It was all more Buck's cup of tea. But it sounded right to Jason. Energy and climate policy was beyond his pay grade, as they say, and he only understood it but so well.

  "I've got an interview tomorrow at 10AM," he said in bed as Gina changed her clothes. "I'd like to say it's in the bag, but, I don't know. I did work a year at the shipyard changing heads on grinders, so, it isn't something— I just don't know. It's a chance."

  She buttoned her nightshirt, "Well, they work a lot of overtime, don't they?"

  "Yeah, they do. But, it's right here on the mainland—"

  "The other side of the mainland. It's like as far away from here as you can get without leaving the island, Jason."

  "An hour drive, I know. Each way. But it's a lot more money. Enough for a second car, something to give your Honda a break. Maybe I won't last there too long, but, I think I should give it a try. No harm in trying."

  She shrugged, then climbed into bed.

  He preferred that she shower off the smell of the smoky bar before coming to bed, but she was clearly too tired. She fell asleep almost immediately, ending any conversation they might have been building to. It didn't matter much anyway. It felt odd fooling around with her mother on the other side of the bedroom wall.

  He kissed her on the cheek, checked the alarm clock, then turned out the light and tried to sleep. He had another twenty minutes or so before the melatonin would kick in.

  He stood in one of the longest interview lines he had ever seen, discouragingly long. When he saw it that morning, as he was being dropped off, he almost gave up right then and asked to go back home. But, they were already there. He might as well take the chance, slim as it was.

  He listened to the chatter from those ahead of him.

  Just when this niche industry was recovering from its political problems, the Tonga factory had gotten into trouble for pollution. Chunks from finishing the products, the
dust and debris if you will, had made it to the island of trash that accumulated in the Pacific. A million tons of plastic bags, bottles, and coolers were suddenly insignificant, now that a few pounds of floating rocks had drifted into the mix.

  The rocks weren't even pollution, to his mind, but that wasn't the point of the trouble. Unlike the millions of tons of other trash, the floating rocks could be traced back to a single source. A source with deep pockets.

  It was hard for Jason to not be cynical. He had seen this very thing shut down the behemoth before. Nobody really cared about the pollution, they cared about re-election, campaign funds, and 'appearing' to stand for something. The fear was that Tonga was going to buck the western political system of throwing money at the problem and try to stand on moral grounds. Politicians were a lot like sharks, they could smell money in the water from miles away, and they swarmed in packs like piranhas until the source of money was gone. If they couldn't tax Tonga, they'd tax the behemoth, and that meant layoffs across the industry, not hires.

  This could all be made very temporary.

  After six hours of waiting, he left with little more than a promise that they 'might' call.