"Kim Stanley Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Hudson, and the Mississippi, and out west, a lake covering most of Montana had
drained down the course of the Columbia River several times, leaving an area in
Washington called the scablands which gave eloquent testimony to the power of these
floods to tear into the bedrock. Presumably the same thing had happened on the East
Coast, but the signs had mostly been submerged by rising sea levels or the great eastern
forest, so that they were only now being discerned.
Frank, looking at the map on the screen, thought of how Rock Creek had looked that
morning at dawn. Theirs had been a very tiny flood relative to the ones Kenzo was
describing, and yet the watershed was devastated.
So, Kenzo continued, fresh water, dumped into the North Atlantic all at once,
appeared to block the thermohaline cycle. And nowadays, for the last several years, the
Arctic Ocean's winter sea ice had been breaking up into great fleets of icebergs, which
then sailed south on currents until they encountered the Gulf Stream's warm water,
where they melted. The melting zones for these icebergs, as a map on the next slide
made clear, were just above the northern ends of the Gulf Stream, the so-called
downwelling areas. Meanwhile the Greenland ice cap and glaciers were also melting
much faster than had been normal, and running off both sides of that great island.
"How much fresh water in all that?" Diane asked.
Kenzo shrugged. "The Arctic is about ten million square kilometers. The sea ice lately
is about five meters thick. Not all of that drifts into the Atlantic, of course. There was a
paper that estimated that about twenty thousand extra cubic kilometers of fresh water
had diluted the Arctic over the past thirty years, but it was plus or minus five thousand
cubic kilometers."
"Let's get better parameters on that figure, if we can," Diane said.
"Sure."
They stared at the final slide. The implications tended to stall on the surface of the
mind, Frank thought, like the water in the north Atlantic, refusing to gyre down. The
whole world, ensconced in a global climate mode called warm and wet, and getting
warmer and wetter because of global warming caused by anthropogenically released
greenhouse gases, could switch to a global pattern that was cold, dry, and windy. And
the last time it happened, it had taken three years. Hard to believe; but the Greenland ice
core data were very clear, and the rest of the case equally persuasive—one might even
say, in science's distinctive vocabulary of levels of certainty, compelling.

When Kenzo and his team had left, Diane turned to Frank. "What do you think?"
"It looks serious. It may get people to take action."
"Except by now it may be too late."
"Yes."
They considered that in silence for a few moments, and then Diane said, "Let's talk
about your next year here, how to organize it to get the most out of you."
That was a pretty blunt way to put it, given Diane's manipulations, but Frank was
careful not to express any resentment. "Sure," he said. It had been documented that if
you forced your face to take on pleasant expressions, your mood tended helplessly to
follow. So, small smile of acceptance; pull chair up to desk.
They worked their way down a list Diane had made, identifying areas where NSF
might do something to deal with the impacts of abrupt climate change. As they did
Frank saw that Diane was well ahead of him in thinking about these matters, which he
found a little surprising, although of course it made sense; otherwise why would she
have wanted him to stay? His letter would not have been what brought her the news of
NSF's ineffectiveness in dealing with a crisis situation.