"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

applied last fall. Maybe a certain percentage of the retiring oil fleet could be
mothballed, in case we needed a salt fleet to go up there again and make another
application.”
“It would take a change in thinking,” Diane said. “Up until now, people have only
wanted to pay for disasters after they’ve happened, to make sure the pay-out was
really necessary.”
Kenzo said, “But now the true costs of that strategy are becoming clear.”
“When it’s too late,” Edgardo added, his usual refrain.
Diane wrinkled her nose at Edgardo, as she often did, and made her usual rejoinder;
they had no choice but to proceed from where they were now. “So, let’s follow up
on that one. It would have to be a kind of insurance model, or a hedge fund. Maybe
the reinsurance industry will be trying to impose something like that on the rest of the
economy anyway. We’ll talk to them.”
She moved on to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet situation. One of Kenzo’s
oceanographer colleagues gave them a presentation on the latest, showing with maps
and satellite photos the tabular superbergs that had detached and slipped off their
underwater perch and floated away.
Diane said, “I’d like some really good 3-D graphics on this, to show the new
president and Congress, and the public too.”
“All very well,” Edgardo said, “but what can we do about it, aside from telling
people it’s coming?”
Not much; or nothing. Even if they somehow managed to lower the level of
atmospheric carbon dioxide, and therefore the air temperatures, the already-rising
ocean temperatures would be slow to follow. There was a continuity effect.
So they couldn’t stop the WAIS from detaching.
They couldn’t lower the rising sea level that resulted.
And they couldn’t de-acidify the ocean.
This last was a particularly troubling problem. The CO 2 they had introduced into the
atmosphere had been partially taken up by the ocean; the absorption rate now was
about three billion tons of carbon a year into the ocean, and one estimate of the total
uptake since the industrial revolution was four hundred billion tons. As a result, the
ocean had become measurably more acidic, going from 8.2 to 8.1 on the pH scale,
which was a logarithmic scale, so that the 0.1 shift meant thirty percent more
hydrogen ions in the water. It was felt that certain species of phytoplankton would
have their very thin calcium shells in effect eaten away. They would die, a number of
species would go extinct, and these very species constituted a big fraction of the
bottom of the ocean’s food chain.
But de-acidifying the ocean was not an option. There were fairly arcane chemistry
reasons why it was easier for sea water to become more acidic than to become more
basic. A Royal Society paper had calculated, for the sake of estimating the scale of
the problem, that if they mined and crushed exposed limestone and marble in the
British Isles, “features such as the White Cliffs of Dover would be rapidly
consumed,” because it would take sixty square kilometers of limestone mined a
hundred meters deep, every year, just to hold the status quo. All at a huge carbon
cost for the excavations, of course, exacerbating the very problem they were trying
to solve. But this was just a thought experiment anyway. It wouldn’t work; it was an
unmitigatable problem.
And that afternoon, as they went down Diane’s list together, they saw that almost all
of the climate and environmental changes they were seeing, or could see coming,
were not susceptible to mitigation. Their big success of the fall, the restarting of the