by Les W Kuzyk
Chapter 15
Tamanna sank deep into her Sunday evening Air Deccan seat totally knackered, yet sparked by an underlying glow. This contract suited her quite well; just the schedule intensity got her. Near every contractor on site seemed not at all to catch the urgency of climate change—they needed only fill out terms of contract. That feeling prevailed here in Mali. The plane taxied down the Bamako-Senou runway, circled about and lined up between the rows of reflectors for takeoff.
When speaking with Nishat today she felt her heart sing along with large scale ideas that played tunes of potential. Solar power arrays spanning the Sahara, supplying carbon free energy from North Africa for Europe would create jobs everywhere. It just made so much cooperative sense. That message should totally satisfy political figures and their talk of employment. But pragmatic reality interfered when Nishat spoke on such issues as national security. What were people afraid of? For HICCC members, strategic interests revolved around waves of disruptive environmental refugees. Simply adapting to climate change would be such a brutal transition for most citizens of High Impact countries come to that. Their politicians had no time for grand global dreams.
Whoever suggested adaptation, ignoring mitigation, as anything of a solution should be strung up. High. The Bangladeshi government projected severe ocean flooding, and major food shortages. Extreme weather events including talked-of super monsoon rains brought plagues in a tumultuous aftermath. Millions in Bangladesh, having already lost their delta farmland to the sea, had moved to the slums of Dhaka. The challenge was to the world, yet reality kept that world divided into national interests. Horrid.
At Nishat’s direction Tamanna concentrated on how to message onsite project personnel. Different people heard in a different manner and needed be spoken to as such. One major wild card in predicting climate change outcome had always been climate sensitivity, a piece of cake to her. How much climate change comes from how much interference by what climatologists term as forcings. Tamanna knew a forcing to be an imposed perturbation of the planet’s energy balance, but how did one translate that into engineering language? Further to that, what version would communicate well to a non-scientific politician? The Asian engineers in Mali, and Mauritania before, had been a challenge, politely nodding at anything she said. She felt certain they got the numbers, but then showed no further interest in the broader climate change context. Meticulously following design instructions, their interest ended there. She’ll need keep numbers simpler for the politicians, as they’ll understand figures less than the engineers. And have political pomp as a part of their agenda. Nishat emphasized that.
She leaned back to rest, but could not. Out the window, she peered through the cloud free atmosphere at the semi-arid land below; such contrast with the rich green of Britain. The surface cover down there could have been that of another planet, or out of some long ago time on this planet. Planet Earth had passed through so many phases, many tumultuous for living creatures, people among them. The Paleographic history of climate had been written into her dissertation Volstok ice core among other records.
She loved the data held in the Pleistocene section of the Volstok core. Nestled within that paleoclimatic record lay confirming evidence for measuring climate sensitivity. And a simple measure too, for anyone to understand. A side by side comparison between the last glacial maximum, the Ice Age everyone knew of, and the most recent interglacial showed it all. Twenty thousand years back, planetary energy or temperature had been a constant deep freeze. But conditions were in balance, quite stable, unchanging as one would want in their kitchen freezer. Just as the also balanced and stable pre-industrial Holocene. The Holocene allowed civilization to develop under much balmier conditions, a gift to humanity being removed from the freezer. Animal domestication and predictable weather allowing agriculture brought about cities and ever advancing technology. Technology allowed such a convenience as a kitchen refrigerator. This Holocene—she liked NASA’s word gift—became climatically stable by eight thousand years ago. Though written history recorded freak weather and traumatic storm events—there had been the Little Ice Age in the middle ages—the Holocene actually was a period of measured climatic balance. Long before the industrial revolution...and noticeably warmer than the Pleistocene Ice Age.
The figure to know was five degrees Celsius—everyone could understand five degrees. The climatic forcing for each of the Holocene and the glacial deep freeze before were known, the difference in global average temperature was known, and from this, one could infer change in temperature dependant on change in forcing. The difference between Ice Age and the pre global warming times of the Holocene had been that five degrees. A surprise to most especially those from more temperate climates, this was much less than a day to night or seasonal variation in temperature. But this was climate measurement, not weather! With a glacial to interglacial difference in forcing of 6.5 W/m2, simple calculation showed that every watt of forcing gave you three quarters of a degree change in temperature. The maths were not difficult, but would a politician be able to follow? Her PHD dissertation argued in detail how the same numbers were confirmed by the Vostok ice core. These effects came only through fast-feedback processes, though, and the warmer or colder the planet got, the greater the sensitivity. But that was another topic. She had only so much presentation time for these science lessons. And they needed be sunk hard into other minds.
Turning her gaze from the window, Tamanna leaned her head back, closing her eyes. The Niger field test should be complete. Like the two cities before, she’ll gather Sahel climate model data in Niamey, and forward the reports via infogram to Jake in London and Nishat in Dhaka. After connecting with the Niger project professionals, she’ll send that special appraisal the way of Nishat. A time’s waste so far, but the Minister insisted on face-to-face evaluation on the type of person within each engineer. Nishat avoided full disclosure on the purpose of this contract task, but promised to reveal more over time.
Her head nodded as her thoughts blurred.