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

need that from us to go forward.”



Back in his office, therefore, Frank would sit at his desk, staring at his list of Things
To Do. But all in a vain attempt to take his mind off Caroline.
Ordinarily the list would be enough to distract anyone. Its length and difficulty made
it all by itself a kind of blow to the head. It induced an awe so great that it resembled
apathy. They had done so much and yet there was so much left to do. And as more
disasters blasted into the world, their Things To Do list would lengthen. It would
never shorten. They were like the Dutch boy sticking his finger into the failing dike.
What had happened to Khembalung was going to happen everywhere.
But there would still be land above water. There would still be things to be done.
One had to try.
Caroline had spoken of her Plan B as if she had confidence in it. She must have had
a place to go, a bank account, that sort of thing.
Frank checked out the figures from the oceanography group. The oceans covered
about seventy percent of the globe. About two hundred million square kilometers,
therefore, and in the wake of the first really big chunks of the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet floating away, sea level was reported to have risen about twenty centimeters.
The oceanographers had been measuring sea level rise a millimeter at a time, mostly
from water warming up and expanding, so they were blown away and spoke of this
twenty centimeters’ rise as of a Noah’s flood. Kenzo was simply bursting with
amazement and pride.
Back-of-the-envelope calculation: .2 meters times the two hundred million square
kilometers, was that forty thousand cubic kilometers? A lot of water. Measurements
from the last few years had Antarctica losing a hundred and fifty cubic kilometers a
year, with thirty to fifty more coming off Greenland. So, now about two hundred
years’ worth had come off in one year. No wonder they were freaking out. The
difference no doubt lay in the fact that the melt before had been actual melting,
whereas now what was happening was a matter of icebergs breaking off their perch
and sliding down into the ocean. Obviously it made a big difference in how fast it
could happen.
Frank brought the figures in with him to the meeting of Diane’s strategic group
scheduled for that afternoon, and listened to the others make their presentations.
They were interesting talks, if daunting. They took his mind off Caroline, one had to
say that. At least most of the time.
At the end of the talks, Diane described her sense of the situation. For her, there was
a lot that was good news. First, Phil Chase was certain to be more supportive of
NSF, and of science in general, than his predecessor had been. Second, the salting
of the North Atlantic appeared to be having the effect they had hoped for: the Gulf
Stream was now running at nearly its previous strength up into the Norwegian and
Greenland Seas, following its earlier path in a manner that seemed to indicate the
renewed pattern was, for now, fairly robust. They were still collecting data on the
deeper part of the thermohaline circulation, which ran southward underneath the
northerly flow of the Gulf Stream. If the southward undercurrent was running strong,
they might be okay there.
“There’s so much surface pressure northward,” Kenzo said. “Maybe all we’ll have
to do from now on is to monitor the salinity and the currents. We might be able to
intervene early enough in any stall process that we wouldn’t need as much salt as we