Chapter 19
Vince sat alone in the newly arranged office space at the Agadez storage site, fist bumping lightly on the desk. Aahil had taken Brad off to the distant mountains to pay a visit to Aahil’s relative, Aksil. “Why?” Vince muttered. Why a world with such scarce food here when back home provisions flowed from the grocery stores. His fist beat harder. People! To reclaim a piece of the desert for pasture was a brilliant idea, especially for local food production. And Aksil might soon work less at that reclaiming process, if the rains came back to the Sahara. He smashed his fist into the desk, too hard; he rose quickly. He couldn’t think; he needed focus—on something, on anything.
Hands grasped tight behind his back, he stared at the morning light spread across the yard. This inexplicable anger, this rage, this part of him. Such dissatisfaction with the world. What, fractal angel, what? You want me to refashion society’s operating manual?
After a moment he took a deep breath and sat again, grabbing his jPad. Focusing on sketching a tanks layout for the yard, yet his mind still drifted. That childhood tree house design; he’d sketched that out on paper—he felt his father’s approving pat on the back. Over the idea of sketching, not the content. Turn your mind to something practical, son, I’ll get you design work from the office.
Vincent had been born angry, yet what did this anger need? He knew of clues, like mulling anger turning to rage whenever he made a mistake. His grandfather had raged, then his father—he’d watched his father’s anger, the lump in the throat, the fist pounding on the table.
His father may have had that fractal moment, but any added concern for others never came about. More like a reversal actually. At his moment of epiphany, his father made a decision—to ignore it completely, to harden his nose in tradition. Had fear been his deciding factor? Fear of change. Fear of being wrong. The non-traditional could always be cast as wrong. Mistakes were not allowed. Tradition allowed you to gloss them over, to ignore them, to pretend they never existed. Psychology said anger hid behind many fears.
What was he to do with these inner knowings? The overall sense that, not what they traditionally scoffed at as intuition, but mathematically, things being out of alignment. The out-of-sync sensation now was increasingly tied to what people were doing to their planet. All this shit from the past had piled up on itself and brought him to where he was today. Out beside some mountain range in the middle of the Sahara desert, working on a project that would change the color of the sky.
He touched send on the jPad for the sketches with basic dimensions. The Calgary office would create detailed design drawings, an efficient way to have it done. He grabbed a coffee, touching his global icon cup. Like his Calgary office cup, with a kindergarten photo embossed of his daughter. He turned back to his jPad which peeped out a list of options. A background review caught his attention and he picked his project supplied infogram guide.
The guide connected him back in time to the dated Fifth Assessment Report, the AR5, and numbers associated with the four RPCs, Representative Concentration Pathways. The real on the ground situation they were dealing with could easily be tracked back to the predictions of the original ‘A1F1—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change worst case scenario. God, why were people so dense—why did they not listen and learn then. Okay, he knew his wife well enough—one for sure who would be the last to hear. The ‘A1F1’ was superseded by the AR5 RCP 8.5 radiative forcing scenario. Yet both older reports had agreed; based on strong economic growth and high fossil fuel use their predictions as the most likely scenarios translating into a 3 degree temperature rise. Which, the guide led to further evidence, had become the de facto truth. Three degrees! What had Brad said about that 4 degree map? Jesus Christ, why hadn’t anyone done anything back then? Why didn’t he know this already? His mind reviewed his life those AR5 years—Fort McMurray tar sands had been booming on high oil prices and his father’s business was expanding.
Sweat trickled down his forehead, dripping on his screen and a hunger stirring. He clicked on the fan, and grabbed some packaged food to munch on as he switched infogram to soft absorb mode for the early afternoon. Then he reconnected.
The subsequent AR6 and AR7, and early releases on the impending AR8 fell in line with those earlier predictions. The world was closely tracking the RPC 8.5 representative concentration pathway by all indicators, expecting an 8.5 watts per square meter climate forcing by 2100. These later Assessment Reports had distinctly improved their definitions of Shared Socio-Economic Pathway, in the AR6 and then especially in the AR7. He could not hold his excitement down—he couldn’t disconnect from what the reports termed as common but differentiated responsibility. Shared Pathways carried story, real people story, and the projections of key socio-economic factors wrapped his attention into a tight bundle.
The math had been simplified into easy to scrawl on the back of a napkin measurements. The units spoke volumes, radiative forcing in watts per square metre. Watts were simply a standard measure of energy. And they knew the area in square metres of the planet. A bright high school student could calculate this and a first year engineering student should grasp the radiative forcing expression. The concept was simple. A change in balance between incoming and outgoing radiation to the atmosphere was caused primarily by changes in atmospheric composition. So picture a greenhouse, his daughter could do that. Greenhouse gases insulated the earth so more watts came in than went out.
Radiative forcing as a simple engineering concept had always been the type of thing so easy for him to understand, yet boring, dreary on its own. But, yes super big but, these numbers could also be translated from climate forcings into people forcings, into cultural outlooks and political views. The Nigerien national sulphur they were planning to dump would keep more watts blocked, but that would only give breather space for the politicians to get their shit together. And climate forcing created by people, whether by carbon or by sulphur, had to translate into a crisis they could rally around. A people forcing. A reason to shift culturally. A reason to get politically active. They just needed to know about the crisis. Somehow.
More connections informed him the driving forces causing carbon equivalent gases to increase in the atmosphere could be simplified too. And they needed expression as human forcings. Simplified to three, they were economic development, population growth and technology. Different combinations of these forcings created different emissions scenarios or RPCs. You could have rapid economic development or slow, that was a choice. Did people what to work harder or have more quality family time? You could have quick population growth or slow and associated affluence—highly influential on carbon footprint—depending which country and what social status of the children’s birth. You could have a rapid switch from hydrocarbon based technology to alternate and more efficient technologies or you could lag along like Alberta and keep digging into the tar sands. Or like Brad said in America, keep mining out that coal.
He felt an excited tingle rush through him. That fractal presence on a rare positive visit. The anger held at bay for now. He could influence these human forcings in a real way. And now he understood better the target so easy to keep in mind. The numbers he could keep background except for other engineers, analysts, scientists. To completely avoid the RCP8.5. They had to, for his daughter, for her life and definitely for her future family, they had to shoot for the RCP 3PD. The radiative forcing would peak at about 2 W/m2 before the end of century and decline due to ambitious mitigating efforts. To get the CO2 equivalent ppm back down to 350—many people got that number. Many more would get temperature, so to keep the temperature increase below 1.5 degrees. The High Impact countries would be relieved and yes, his daughter could live in a potentially happy world, a least not a stressed out carbon trashed garbage dump.
Come evening, he had decided to build a global information database. He stayed up late, building a map model of carbon in a geographic cloudware, tagging each country with what database information he and the guide coul
d find, and grouping each country by its various associations. The most intriguing thing was the global aspect of the project. Pretty much a no brainer when you thought for a moment, that the atmosphere was a global issue. The tingle returned—brotherhood of man. Even though the land base and parts of the ocean were divided up politically into countries. There were the OECD, the G7 and G20 and now the HICCC. He found total annual carbon emissions for each country, and then with population, the guide stressed tons per person emitted. Some countries had large populations with low emissions, while some have small populations with high emissions. So that came down to a for-each-person measure to be accurate. And real. And informative.
Back home, each Canadian had quite a stack of carbon tons, like 20 on average, but that varied by province and by lifestyle. Each Canadian set beside each Nigerien showed a whopping three hundred times difference in carbon dumped into the atmosphere for each resident. A pattern quickly developed—high carbon emitters clearly were not members of the HICCC. One would think a place like the Netherlands would be quite impacted by a rising sea level, but as it turned out, wealth allowed a country to adapt. So a lack of wealth and bad geographic luck highly motivated HICCC membership. He was almost satisfied, when the guide took him to risk index analyses. The climate change vulnerability index was calculated by more than one source, and adding that column to his geographic cloudware model, he stayed awake well into the morning. HICCC membership would also be highly motivated by vulnerability risk.
Exhausted, yet satisfied, he leaned back. Brad and Aahil would be staying overnight in the mountains so his infogram map creation needed await discussion. The infogram map of the world as it was danced back and forth, highlighting the divisions between the HICCC countries and the OECD. The two world segments held no overlap, no true intersection, except perhaps in climate crisis risk. His anger began its familiar surge but the fractal tingle diverted it, and held it back. This model before his eyes connected him to at an excellent global summary of the problem and he knew he had to do something. Now what to do was still the question.