The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut, #1)(26)

Listening to the rolling, authoritative tone of his speech, it became much easier to remember why he had become something of a celebrity after we launched the satellites.

“Many people fear that another meteor will strike. It’s a natural fear, and why we’re buried in this bunker. But … but the chances of another strike occurring are astronomically small. The danger represented by this equation is not only much greater, but certain.” He gave a rueful smile and shrugged. “For decades, scientists have wondered what happened to the dinosaurs. Why they all died off. This … this might explain it.”

He walked to the chalkboard with my equations on it. “I won’t expect you to follow the math here, but I will say that it has been checked by top people in geology, climatology, and mathematics.”

That last one was only me, but I didn’t interrupt him. Nathaniel paused and surveyed the room, gathering their attention. The golden light from the faux window brushed his cheeks, picking out the small scars. Under his dark gray suit, his bruises had faded, and he stood with easy confidence, as if he had never been injured.

Taking a breath, Nathaniel tapped the board. “The problem is, gentlemen, that the Earth is going to get warmer. The dust that the Meteor kicked up will clear from our skies. The water vapor … that’s the problem. It will trap heat, which will cause evaporation, which will put more water vapor into the air, which will, in turn, make the Earth hotter, and kick off a vicious cycle that will eventually make the planet unfit for human habitation.”

A plump, sallow man on the right side of the table snorted. “It’s snowing today in Los Angeles.”

Nathaniel nodded and pointed to him. “Exactly. That snow is directly linked to the Meteor. The dust and smoke that got kicked into the atmosphere are going to cool the Earth for the next several years. We’ll probably lose crops this year, not just in the United States, but globally.”

President Brannan, bless him, raised his hand before speaking. “How much will the temperature drop?”

“Elma?” Nathaniel half-turned toward me.

My stomach lurched into my throat, and I flipped through the papers in my portfolio to find the one I wanted. “Seventy to one hundred degrees globally.”

Toward the back of the room, someone said, “Couldn’t hear.”

Swallowing, I lifted my head from the papers and faced the room. This was no different from shouting over the engine of an airplane. “Seventy to one hundred degrees.”

“That doesn’t seem possible.” The man at the back crossed his arms over his chest.

“That’s just for the first few months.” They were focusing on the wrong thing. The temperature drop would be unpleasant, but was short-term. “Then we’ll have three to four years of a global climate that’s 2.2 degrees cooler than average, before the temperature begins to rise.”

“2.2? Huh. So what’s the big tizzy over?”

President Brannan said, “That’s more than enough to severely affect crops. Growing seasons will shorten by ten to thirty days, so we’ll have to convince farmers to plant different crops and at different times of year. That’s not going to be easy.”

As the former secretary of agriculture, it wasn’t surprising that he intuitively understood the trouble with a change in climate. But he was still focused on the wrong thing. Yes, we had a mini–Ice Age to get through, but none of them were considering the eventual rise in temperature.

“Farm subsidies.” Another man, maybe the one who’d said he couldn’t hear, leaned across the table. “It got farmers to change their crops during the Great Depression.”

“All of our resources are going to be tied up in rebuilding.”

As they argued, Nathaniel stepped back to me and murmured, “Will you chart the temperature rise?”

I nodded and turned to the board, grateful to have something concrete to do. The chalk slid across the surface, shedding shivers of dust with my upstrokes. The notes in my portfolio were there, in case I lost my place, but I’d stared at this chart so much over the past couple of weeks that it was etched on the inside of my eyelids.

Unseasonable cold for the next several years, then a return to “normal” and then … then the temperature kept rising. The line was slow at first, until it reached the tipping point, and suddenly spiked upward.

When I hit that on the board, Nathaniel stepped forward, to the end of the conference table, and stood with his hands clasped in front of him. The conversation quieted.

“In 1824, Joseph Fourier described an effect that Alexander Bell later called ‘the greenhouse effect.’ In it, particles in the air cause the atmosphere to retain heat. If the Meteor had struck land, the winter would have been longer. The fireball would have been larger. We thought it was fortunate that it struck water, but it’s worse. The Earth is going to come out of winter and get hotter. In fifty years, there will be no snow in North America.”

The pudgy man who had complained about snow in California laughed. “Coming from Chicago, I gotta say this doesn’t strike me as a problem.”

“How do you feel about one hundred percent humidity and summers with a low of one hundred and twenty degrees?”

“Still. Weathermen can’t predict if it’s going to rain tomorrow. Fifty years is a long time out.”