Peregrinus Orior

by Robertson, John

  Lourdes took his hands in hers, her eyes beaming up at his, her smile glowing brightly and said, “John, would you do that for me? How could I be uncomfortable around the man who just saved me from a horrible experience? I will cook you up a special dinner to show you how grateful I really am.”

  Knowing glances were exchanged among the rest of the group as Alyssa concluded “Well, that settles it then, we’ll check in with you two tomorrow morning.” Soon after there were just the two of them left at the power plant, though they wouldn’t have taken much notice of anyone else anyway as they strolled hand in hand toward the chicken barn.

  Chapter 32

  January 2036

  Washington, DC

  James Rushton was enjoying a few minutes of quiet reflection before his next meeting. He was seated at his working desk in his private study beside the Oval Office and connected to it by a small interior hallway. It was a place that he had grown very comfortable with over his many years of occupancy.

  Jim had easily won the presidential election in 2028, having yielded to the persuasive arguments of the leadership of the Democratic Party that he was best suited to lead America’s preparations for the arrival of Peregrinus. The country certainly had thought so, finding comfort in the face of a frightening future in the plans that he had initiated, and in a known, soft-spoken and businesslike leader. Having crossed that bridge, and grown increasingly comfortable in the role, it was an easy decision to agree to seek a second term, which had again been favored by the electorate, including continuation of Democratic majorities in both houses of congress. For a change, America was led by an individual who was well-liked and well-respected by people of most political persuasions, and who was often praised by other global leaders. America had a president to be proud of.

  James Rushton was not a man to beat his own drum and proclaim his many accomplishments. For one thing, he relied heavily on teamwork both to make decisions and to implement them, knew that credit for success was due to the efforts of many others and always acknowledged those contributions. It was partly why many government staff so willingly did their utmost to support him. Apart from that, it was just not his nature to be boastful. Nevertheless, he was mostly satisfied and privately proud of what had been accomplished during his presidency.

  The Russian bear had been declawed. Its military capability was greatly degraded, and its political leadership had passed into more moderate hands, now focused on the survival of its populace through peaceful and cooperative means. Elsewhere around the world the standard of living in many developing nations was significantly improving as their warmer climates became sought-after places for investment and immigration. Terrorism and civil war were much on the wane. With both Russia and China in a more cooperative posture in the face of rapid global cooling, the United States had succeeded in having the mandate of the International Court of Justice expanded to explicitly include prosecution of all crimes against humanity.

  On American soil matters were generally proceeding favorably, despite the cold. The economy was strong, largely because of heavy infrastructure investments in both energy and transportation by business and governments, but also with widespread stocking-up of consumer goods. Inflation was an inevitable result, but most needs were being met. Preparations were well advanced to maintain access to sufficient energy to keep Americans alive and, for the most part, warm, comfortable and well-fed. This included the development of new communities, industrial facilities and large-scale farms in preparation for the abandonment of much of the northern tier of the country. Some of these communities were already occupied, but the bulk of the relocations were yet to come. The new farms, generally drawing on the new national irrigation network, were already in full production, though, as crop production in Canada and the northern United States was rapidly shrinking. Not much more could be done to protect the country, and Jim felt he would be turning over a house in good order to his successor in a year. However, he knew he still had a few crucial decisions to make before he could pass on the baton of responsibility — decisions that likely couldn’t wait a year. He expected he would face some of these in the meeting he was about to join.

  The president’s Peregrinus advisory group stood as he entered the dining room beside his study. It was a small enough group that the dining room was big enough and Jim felt it was a little more relaxed and informal than the larger Roosevelt Room across the corridor, or the even more formal Cabinet Room. The group included the president’s chief of staff and science advisor, the chief of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, the secretary of the Department of Energy, the secretary of state and the vice president. This group met periodically with the president to update him on the status of preparations for global cooling and to put forward any decisions requiring his approval. Participation flexed up and down as required, coordinated by the chief of staff. The group was informally referred to as the Peregrinus advisory group, though Peregrinus had long since disappeared from the solar system. Jim motioned them all to be seated.

  The secretary of Energy spoke first, “Sir, I have been asked to start with a summary of the nation’s energy position if that is all right with you?” The president motioned him to continue.

  “Sir, we remain in good shape on all fronts. Our consumption of all forms of energy has significantly increased, of course. However, industry has continued to expand energy supplies supported by your tax incentives. We have had no need, yet, to draw on any of our strategic reserves and in fact we are continuing to construct and fill new storage reservoirs for crude oil, natural gas and propane. We are holding off for now on closing some of our most efficient coal plants. Production of fossil fuels from Canada and our northern states has held up reasonably well so far, though we are starting to see some climate-related curtailments. Production from the oil sands has increased considerably with the additional investment in facilities and pipelines that you encouraged. In fact, without that we’d be looking at running out of transportation fuels and heating oil much sooner.

  “We are unfortunately seeing much reduced availability of hydroelectric power from Quebec and Manitoba as more and more of the typical spring run-off that fills their reservoirs is now remaining frozen in the far reaches of their catchment basins. Keeping the coal plants on line will help bridge us to the start-up of our own new nuclear fleet, which remains on track for a couple of years from now. Mr. President, eventually we are going to start to lose the oil sands and other northern sources of production, including the production of both oil and natural gas from Prudhoe Bay on the Alaska north slope. I don’t know how much longer we still have, maybe another five to ten years. With the preparations we have made we should be able to support the current level of energy consumption well beyond that time.”

  James Rushton replied, “Thanks for that update. I am glad to hear that we have a good margin of safety. Your report does appear to confirm our working hypothesis, though, that we are not going to be able to indefinitely sustain large population centers in the northern part of the country, especially if it continues to get colder. Who is up next?”

  General Isaac Montgomery spoke up, “Sir, that would be me I think, and my subject follows directly from your last observation. We are now in our seventh winter following Peregrinus. I don’t want to steal Eli’s thunder, but it is very cold in our northern states and appears to be getting still colder. December and January have been averaging about ten degrees Fahrenheit colder than before Peregrinus, and we are told this differential will continue through the spring and summer, before widening further next winter. In places like Bismarck, North Dakota, and Helena, Montana, it won’t start to thaw until the end of April and won’t be snow-free until late May, then they’ll see snow again by early October. That’s already barely long enough for winter wheat. Fairbanks, Alaska, is experiencing an even greater decline in average temperature and will likely be snow-free for only July and August this summer. Midwest cities like Chicago and Detroit are warmer but will still be mar
ginal in a few more years if the current trend persists.

  “Sir, it’s not that people can’t survive in these temperatures. With modern clothing and homes, no one is going to freeze unless their car breaks down on a back road. It’s more a question of logistics and of the local economy. On the logistics side it becomes more and more difficult and expensive to keep urban roads, as well as state and interstate highways, open. In the end, this always comes back to energy. Then, as you’ve already noted, there is the increased direct consumption of energy for heating homes and workplaces. Next is the local economy with many of these communities dependent on farming, which is withering in the face of shorter and shorter growing seasons for food crops and silage. Last is the psychological impact of cold temperatures and long winters. It wears on people’s morale.

  “The bottom line is that we are going to need to start evacuating the north before too much longer, which is of course why we have been busy developing new communities in the south. We have a number of those communities ready to go and, with a gradually phased relocation, if we get started soon, we will be able to handle the logistics of it all. We have already had a fair bit of voluntary relocation from smaller towns and villages and from a segment of the population of the larger urban centers, and these early movers are settling in well. From what we are seeing, about 20 percent of the population will relocate with just a little encouragement, about 70 percent will go if they are told that they must, and about 10 percent will strongly resist.

  “We don’t intend to drag anyone out of their homes, but they will be told that all services, including garbage, police, fire, schools and hospitals, will be shut down. We are planning to maintain skeleton utility crews to keep the power and natural gas infrastructure operating, but the water will be turned off. We’ll give people lots of opportunity to change their minds, and most eventually will. Sir, with your permission we plan to issue the evacuation order for Fairbanks presently, to be implemented over the summer.

  “The Canadian government has already pulled in the majority of the population of its northernmost hamlets and towns and will be evacuating the capitals of its northern territories this summer – Whitehorse, Yellowknife and Iqaluit. Next year they will shift the bulk of the population of their western provinces. We can likely wait another year or two before having to evacuate our state capitals in the northwestern states, and then a couple of years after that it will be Chicago and Detroit, unless the cooling trend abates. Sir, I believe we are ready.”

  “Thank you, Isaac,” the president said, “I think we have known since the beginning that it would likely come to this, the only question being how much of the north we will have to abandon. I am glad we are ready for it. We would lose a lot of people and maybe even face a civil war if we had an unplanned sudden exodus from the north. Now, I understand that you are last on the agenda this morning, Eli, and I have this feeling that the strategy here is to save the bad news until the end. I hope I am wrong.”

  “Mr. President, I don’t think you are wrong very often and I am afraid that this isn’t one of those times. Your intuition is correct for the most part,” answered the president’s science advisor. “I have been working closely with Dr. Wellington and Dr. Holmes in studying our global temperatures as they trend post-Peregrinus. I have also been consulting with climate experts in Canada and the United Kingdom. I could tie our own experts in to this meeting if you wish, sir, or I can summarize for now and arrange a separate, more detailed briefing for you.”

  “Let’s stick with the summary for now,” the president directed.

  “Yes, sir,” Eli Wayman responded. “Here’s the picture as it now appears. You probably recall from your first briefing on the climatic effects of Peregrinus that we estimated an eventual decline of twelve degrees Fahrenheit in global average temperatures over a long period of time. That was based on a 10 percent increase in the Earth’s albedo, from 30 percent reflection of the Sun’s energy to 33 percent, as a result of more snow and ice in northern latitudes. That was an educated guess because we have mostly theory and not much actual data on variations in wide-area albedo from which to establish a more reliable figure. It was described then as a best-case scenario, absent intervention, and it is becoming increasingly evident that such a best case is unlikely.

  “As expected, global average inland temperatures dropped relatively quickly by about six degrees Fahrenheit but colder than that in the northern hemisphere with our now-longer winters occurring when the Earth is at its most distant from the Sun within its new orbit. The average has continued to slide downward every year since, again as expected, as ice and snow build up in the north. The slide was quite gradual at first, 2033 only very slightly colder than 2032, but the curve has since steadily steepened. This year is nearly a full degree colder than last year, bringing us to a global average which is about eight degrees colder than before Peregrinus.

  “The decline has been even more rapid the further north you go. So, at the equator it is still not much more than the initial decline of six degrees, whereas at the forty-fifth parallel, which runs through our northwestern states, it is a full ten degrees, and at the sixtieth parallel and further north it is at least twelve degrees colder. There’s less and less surface area contributing to the global average in these higher latitudes, so below-freezing temperatures lasting into late spring and beginning in the early fall don’t cause the global average temperature to drop as dramatically, but those are the latitudes where snow and ice are persisting for a longer and longer portion of the year.

  “Sir, you may recall from when I first briefed you on global warming that the Earth has experienced considerable variations in temperature in both directions from what we now think of as normal. In particular, there have been several ice ages in which our northern states would have been covered in glaciers, thousands of feet deep. Many climatologists think that during at least one of these ice ages, either the Sturtian or the Marinoan glaciations of the Cryogenian period, these glaciers extended most and possibly all the way to the equator, the so-called Snowball Earth scenario.

  “The mechanism that is thought to have brought about a snowball Earth, starting from a more benign initial temperature drop, is called the ice-albedo feedback loop. The initial drop results in more snow and ice in the northernmost and southernmost latitudes, which increases the local albedo and reduces the temperature even more, causing the ice to last longer and spread further from the poles. With more extensive ice, the albedo rises more, and the cold intensifies and spreads even further. This sequence continues in a vicious cycle until an equilibrium is reached at a latitude where the angle of insolation and corresponding solar heating balances the cooling. Depending on how substantial the initial cooling is, this equilibrium might not be reached until ice has encroached on the equator from both the north and the south.

  “Mr. President, we do not yet completely understand what it would take to kickstart a Snowball Earth scenario, how long it would take and what it would initially look like. However, the temperature declines that we are seeing in the northern latitudes are more pronounced than we originally expected, and the rate of decline in the global average is higher than we thought it would be. The temperature decline appears to be resulting from persistent and expanding ice cover in the north and the resulting local albedo increases. This is mainly a northern hemisphere issue. The southern hemisphere is experiencing a cooler but longer summer with only a moderate increase in ice cover and albedo surviving each summer.

  “Sir, even if we aren’t facing a northern hemisphere Snowball Earth scenario, and we probably are not, it wouldn’t take a much greater southern extension of our original forty-second parallel permafrost line estimate to make our current challenges much more severe. Just a couple of degrees further south would put New York City into year-round ice. If the ice extended as far south as the thirty-fifth parallel, we would be left with only the Deep South, and even that would be pretty cold. We’d also lose all of Europe and even the Mediterran
ean coast of North Africa, as well as Japan. We might have a couple of decades before things would reach that point but probably not much more. The modeling that’s been done suggests that the ice-albedo feedback cycle evolves quite rapidly compared with other climatic trends.”

  James Rushton absorbed this latest information and thought, so much for the orderly house I was going to turn over to the next president. However, as bad as it sounded, he doubted his science advisor would just drop a problem this big in his lap without also bringing some sort of solution. He said, “Eli, I am sure it has been hard on you and our climate experts to have to abandon the previous best-case scenario and now be bringing this message. However, you mentioned that this is the picture unless humans intervene. I am pretty sure you have something in your back pocket, so let me off the hook. How can we preempt having our country freeze over?”

  “Thank you, sir. Yes, it hasn’t been easy to accept what the data is starting to tell us and then to have to lay it on you. After everything you’ve done to preserve our way of life, you deserve a better outcome. We all do. You are right, there are some possible options to halt the spread of ice, or at least slow it down, though they all have some hair on them.

  “All of the options we’ve thought of so far could possibly serve as a long-term counter to global cooling, but they are more likely to be successful as a temporary bridge. They may be able to hold back the ice-albedo feedback loop until our carbon dioxide emissions reinforce our greenhouse effect to the point where it offsets the reduction in solar energy from our slightly increased distance from the Sun. At our present rate of carbon dioxide emissions, this will eventually happen as long as we can last long enough before our global population, economies and emissions begin to falter. We are currently at an atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of about four hundred parts per million and, despite the Paris Agreement, still rising.