Forty Signs of Rain

[Aenlic]

Time for another global warming thread, I think, considering todays news from Washington, D.C.

D.C. flooding shuts down much of district

Anyone else read, Forty Signs of Rain, the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's new series dealing with abrupt climate change? (The second book is called Fifty Degrees Below and deals with what happens if global warming releases too much fresh water from the Arctic and Greenland ice onto the salinity dependent North Atlantic Conveyor current).

National Academy of Sciences report on surface temp reconstructions since 1600 AD

"There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, boreholes, retreating glaciers, and other "proxies" of past surface temperatures to say with a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years, according to a new report from the National Research Council."

[drone]

It's just God trying to clean out this town. He managed to shut down the IRS today, so I say "Let it rain"!

Starting Thursday night, we have probably gotten about a foot and a half of rain, and it's pissing down right now with no signs of stopping.

If I wanted it to rain everyday, I would have gotten a job in Seattle.

[Blodrast]

Hey, drone, I feel your pain, but look on the bright side: at least you don't go through 7 or 8 months of harsh, marrow-chilling, instantly-piss-freezing winter.

Aenlic: about the books, what's their general line, are they purely scientific, are they mostly SF with a bit of science, or the other way around ?...

[Aenlic]

Hey, drone, I feel your pain, but look on the bright side: at least you don't go through 7 or 8 months of harsh, marrow-chilling, instantly-piss-freezing winter.

Aenlic: about the books, what's their general line, are they purely scientific, are they mostly SF with a bit of science, or the other way around ?...

That's hard to say. Kim Stanley Robinson knows his stuff. Have you read the Mars series about terraforming Mars? Red Mars,Green Mars and Blue Mars? He tries t keep the science as exact and real as possible. I think they're less science fiction than speculative fiction projecting what we know into the immediate future.

In the case of the new series, he takes the current science views on abrupt climate change and projects them onto a story, set not so much in the future as maybe just in a couple of years. It also deals with the politics of science, not on a macro scale but at a very small scale. The internal workings of the way peer review works, especially at the National Science Foundation, and the workings of small start-up genetics companies. The global warming effects in the first book are only lightly covered and very initial. Washington D.C. flooding due to a perfect storm of a rain system colliding with a tropical depression and storm surge up the Potomac. There are also some scenes dealing with massive erosion on the coast of San Diego due to a sort of permanent super-El Nino.

The first book is laying the foundations. And I'm intrigued by the side-focus on genetic science. It's obviously going to play a major part in the later books; but how does that tie in with global warming? There are some tantalizing hints about genetic engineering of mitigation systems like forests which have a super-capacity to tie down carbon dioxide (one of the big greenhouse gases) from the atmosphere. There are also hints of the global warming causing a shutdown of the Atlantic Conveyor current, of which the Gulf Stream is a part, due to too much melted fresh water decreasing the salinity which allows the current to sink properly and turn south to warm up again. A lot of recent science blames the last ice age on exactly that happening - a shutdown of the ocean current which keeps the northeast of North America and northern and western Europe temperate.

And since the second book is called Fifty Degrees Below it's clear where he's going for that part of the series. But, the hints about genetics mean there's more to come after.

[Blodrast]

I see - thank you very much for the explanations, Aenlic.
The Mars trilogy is the only reason I'd known of KSR, and that's why I asked you about it, because I remember those were a mixture of SF and real science.