On Monday morning, after Heather filled her plate with scrambled eggs, bacon, and melon slices, she noticed a free space at the table with Sam, George, and the new colonel. With only slight hesitation, she slipped into it.
“Good morning, Heather!” General Bo-seklin greeted. “How was your vacation?”
“Wonderful! I’m not sure who got the most sunburn, Ginny or me.”
The general laughed.
Heather noticed the new colonel paying close attention to the interactions.
“Where’s Malcolm today?” she asked.
“General Ko-fenral,” Sam said for the newcomer’s benefit, “had to take care of some business at the air base, so he grabbed breakfast there, but he wouldn’t miss this meeting for anything.”
“I was wondering . . .” Heather began as she broke a strip of crispy bacon in half, “. . . if you’d like me to help Maria during the meeting . . .”
“No, Heather, Colonel Bo-torin is joining the team, so you can stand up as its rightful leader.”
The colonel’s eyes opened wider. “You must be the voyant.”
Heather tried to suppress a smile of embarrassment, without complete success. “Not technically, but it’s close enough for now.”
“Almost time to start,” General Ba-kerga mentioned.
They all concentrated on their food, knowing more complete introductions would come soon enough.
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“Good morning everyone. I hope the vacation last week, for those of you who got one, was relaxing and refreshing.”
Most of the professors nodded.
“Our poor military staff worked their tails off.”
A few of them verified with smiles.
“We stand at an important moment in history,” Heather continued. “We have identified a bit of a . . . situation.”
Nervous chuckles coursed through the room.
“We have brainstormed up many possible solutions.”
Several people glanced around at the big sheets still pinned to the walls.
“The next step we should take is . . . unknown to me.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Sam, you have the floor.”
General Bo-seklin stood. “The security lamp has been off this morning so we could make proper introductions before our conversations went too many places. Corporal, you may switch it on now.”
The young security guard standing beside the stairs stepped into the outer office while pulling a key from his belt, and a moment later the green light came on.
“The political science team was here all last week, and it was no vacation for any of us in the building.”
Several people chuckled in sympathy.
“One of them sensed that this was not a hypothetical scenario, and asked to be on the team. We’ve been grilling the poor guy for two days . . .”
The new colonel smiled.
“. . . and he’s now gotten three or four tapes under his belt.”
“Four,” the colonel announced.
“Good,” General Bo-seklin said. “He has a list of six more, and I want Heather to look at that list this afternoon and add to it, while keeping the number reasonable.”
She nodded from her chair.
The general turned back to the team. “Colonel John Bo-torin, please tell us about yourself.”
He stood and looked around, carrying himself and filling his colonel’s
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uniform with confidence. “This is an honor. Usually the P-series programs are just the butt of jokes, and the S-Nine team I was on assumed the same thing . . . until we got here. We were greeted by a two and a three-star general, and fly-by-night P-series programs just do NOT get that kind of leadership. We were never told who was on your team, of course, but we assumed a couple of wacky wannabe professors with mail-order degrees.
Now, standing before you, I recognize most of you from televised debates, documentaries, and testimony before Congress. I don’t know if you realize it, but this is truly an elite team.”
Everyone in the room breathed in the compliment.
“I have a doctoral degree in political science, and as you can see, I am career military. I have a wife and three children, almost grown, and being on this team will not keep me away from them any more than my last assignment.”
He took a moment to make eye contact with most people in his audience.
“I have a reputation for being very blunt, and I think you need that right now.
I have promised Generals Ko-fenral, Bo-seklin, and Ba-kerga that I will not sugar-coat anything. I have all the reports from the S-Nine team that just assessed the political dimensions of your alleged problem and possible solutions, and the generals have asked me to present those to you this week.
It will be my honor to do so, but don’t expect to arrive at the end of the week feeling good about your suggestions.”
A rumble ran through the team as Colonel Bo-torin sat back down.
Heather stayed in her seat with a slight smile on her face as the rumble slowly died down. Finally she stood.
“Although every member of this team has hopes for one or more of the ideas on our lists . . .” With sweeps of her arms, she indicated all the sheets on the walls. “. . . we are ready to listen to any and all criticisms.”
Most members of the team nodded, some more quickly than others.
“I’d like you to start, Colonel, by telling the entire team the assumptions you were working under.” She returned to her seat.
He stood again. “The situation given was that in recent centuries, people began to burn fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas — and by so doing raised
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living standards and life expectancy, and thus the population grew. Nothing surprising about that, except that most people, even most scientists, are not aware of the direct connection between energy and population. It made sense the moment I heard it.
“Because of the increased burning, breathing, and deforestation, the CO2
level in the air began to creep up. In about the year 3700, signs of a heating trend in the global climate will be obvious. By 3710, the ice caps will be melting, and severe droughts, massive floods, and other unusual weather events will become quite common. Even before 3720, commercial agriculture will be collapsing and famine will follow. By 3730, the average global temperature will be four degrees Celsius above normal, with no end in sight, and the human population will be down to one-third its peak, and rapidly falling. At that point, our information fades. Did I leave out anything of substance?”
A long silence followed. Doctor Ko-silma’s hand came up slowly.
“Betty?” Heather called.
“Also by 3720, we’re looking at sea-level rise wiping out coastal cities, which only makes matters worse as refugees move toward inland agricultural areas.”
“Oh, yes, that was in there, too,” Colonel Bo-torin admitted.
The room remained silent as both the colonel and Heather looked around.
Eventually she said, “With the sea-level bit added, that’s a good summary.”
“Okay,” he went on. “The other four political scientists believed it was all hypothetical, and will probably go to their graves thinking that. My intuition told me otherwise. That’s why I’m here.”
“In a very real sense, none of that is a problem, and you need to understand why. Human beings are very adaptable, and all throughout pre-history and history, have shown the ability to adapt to major changes in their environments, including climate changes.
“But they can only do so once the change manifests clearly enough for them to see. The saying Monkey See . . . the rest is unimportant . . . contains the word see for a reason. We humans only accept certain kinds of data as valid information. If we can see it, touch it, taste it, it’s real, we accept it and
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do something about it. To a human society, an intuition, which brought me to this team, is NOT valid information. The pronouncements of a voyant, which warned this team of the coming climate change, is about as far from valid information, to a human society, as you can get.”
Heather could see Susan nodding.
“The
situation may be climate change and population crash. The problem is the time lag in the situation because of the planetary scale of it. I’ll go through your suggestions one by one in more detail, but in general, there is no way to get the world to concern itself, in 3670 or 3680, with a disaster that won’t manifest clearly until 3710 or later.”
For the rest of the morning, Colonel Bo-torin proceeded to shred their precious lists of ideas.
All those suggestions that required the passage of laws were completely impossible, politically, because of the powerful web of special-interest groups that always held a tight grip on Congress. Laws only got passed that benefited at least one large and powerful group, or a coalition of smaller ones, and offended no one.
Ideas that required the president to adjust the rules concerning pollution, even if a sympathetic president was in office, would barely get written down before that president was out, and the new president would immediately undo those same rules.
The colonel tried not to laugh, but couldn’t suppress a smile at those suggestions that relied on people, individually or in groups, to take voluntary action.
As noon approached, Heather knew Colonel Bo-torin wasn’t finished, but could see that the team was emotionally exhausted. She stood up, and the colonel deferred.
“We’ll continue on Wednesday. It’s time to drown our sorrows — I mean nourish ourselves — with Maria’s good cooking.”
About half the room smiled, and a few even chuckled. Under the circumstances, that was about all Susan could hope for. Even before rising from her chair, she knew she would need to hang around for several hours and listen to team members express their frustrations.
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Wednesday was no different.
Proposed treaties and international agreements were studied to death, Colonel Bo-torin explained, and ratified so slowly, even when they were ratified, that the deadline, 3680, would be far in the past before anything was done.
Geo-engineering projects, like seeding the atmosphere with sulfur compounds to create a cooling effect, would involve such a huge risk of unintended side-effects, that international conflicts could easily spring up if anyone felt wronged.
Eventually, as eleven o’clock was passing, Colonel Bo-torin looked at the team with a steady gaze. “There was one suggestion that we couldn’t find any reason to fault, although it may not be a complete solution.”
A hopeful sparkle returned to many eyes in the room.
With a straight face, he continued. “It had something to do with peace symbols on military vehicles . . .”
Doctor Po-selem the physicist burst out laughing.
Many others shared in the moment of lightness as Colonel Bo-torin stood by the blackboard smiling.
Heather and Susan looked at each other while grinning, both thankful for any help they could get with team morale.
After a short break, the political scientist cleared his throat.
Everyone found their seats and fell silent.
“I have finished summarizing the reports of the S-Nine team. I want to leave you with something useful, instead of the complete negativity I’ve had to dump on you so far.”
Some faces in the room became slightly less dejected.
“One useful way of looking at the world is that it’s composed for four kinds of people. Unfortunately, only two of them are represented on this team.
“Military people are good at dealing with hard, cold reality, and that’s why this program has been, in one sense, successful under the Department of Defense. Military people are smart enough to understand the warning that Heather brought us, and they are used to applying command and control
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systems to effectively solve problems. If the military had a free hand, I believe we could lick this thing. Many people would not like the actions we would have to take, but they would, someday, appreciate that human civilization wasn’t wiped out in the 3720’s and 30’s.”
“But since this is a democracy with civilian leadership,” General Ko-fenral interjected, “we do not have a free hand.”
“Right,” Colonel Bo-torin admitted. “The second group represented here is academia. They are motivated by noble and honorable ideals — truth, efficiency . . .”
“Elegance, tradition, clarity,” Doctor Bo-leden the philosopher added.
“Right. But, alas, neither of these groups runs our civilization. Two other groups do. The common people have control of a democracy by their votes.
They mostly want to be left alone to pursue their economic, social, and religious lives. They are not fond of being taxed or told what they can and can’t do, unless it clearly benefits them.
“The other controlling group is the big money and power people. Their biggest concern is positioning themselves to profit, money or power-wise, from any event. Disasters are no exception, and the bigger the disaster, the bigger the opportunity for profit. It has not entered their darkest dreams that there could ever be an event so dangerous, that they should help solve it, instead.
“The values and thinking habits of both controlling groups are going to cause them to fight, tooth and claw, against any effort that we, the military and academia, might propose for dealing with the coming climate change and population crash. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the bottom line.”
The room remained very quiet as Colonel Bo-torin returned to his seat.