Alexander: Come Again Some Other Day
Jul. 7th, 2011 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteHap and Gladys are CIA intelligence analysts—but with a big difference. Instead of analyzing the same old spycraft stuff, they focus on climate and associated economic and social parameters in a world after climate change has hit big-time. The United Nations has become even less effective than usual, with new alliances forming and dissolving and global corpocracy overtly flexing its muscles; the European Union has been replaced by Eurocorp, for instance, and the political news channel is funded, at least in part, by anti-Israel and anti-U.S. smear advertisements. As Alexander describes the turmoil, with each side looking out for its own selfish interests and to hell with the rest of the nations: “Watching the U.N. is more fun than watching your dog after you give him a mouthful of peanut butter. Like the General Assembly, he just stands there and smacks his lips a lot, then makes a mess on the floor a while later.” The rest of the tone is equally arch, sly, cynically misanthropic, satirical—and outright funny at times.
[Spoilers] The problem with climate change has always been the complexity of the physical system being studied and modeled, which leads to a high degree of seeming randomness that therefore seems to dilute the relationship between cause and effect; as Alexander notes, the correlations between causes (humans dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than ecosystems can remove it from the atmosphere) and effect (warming and wild weather) are clear to scientists and mathematicians, but far less clear to everyone else. (This is a potentially serious problem for scientists. See, for instance <http://www.geoff-hart.com/articles/2011/languages.html>.) As Alexander notes (though in a different context), “No offense to mathematicians, but most of them don’t have a sense of rhythm.”
Given that one problem with the conventional greenhouse dogma has been the seemingly weak correlation between cause and effect, Alexander takes that notion, does a delightfully Ruckeresque sidewise leap of logic, and turns the notion on its head: What if the real problem is not complexity, but the source of the weather? Gladys reveals the source of the story’s title: the childhood rhyme that begins “Rain, rain, go away”. Just precisely where does it go? That leads to the suspicion that someone from the future is sending their climate problems back to us so they won’t have to deal with them. Indeed, this proves to be the true source of the problem, and armed with this insight, it’s not long before the CIA sets up its own cross-time climate management program. Soon, Gladys and Hap are shifting bits and pieces of bad climate from around the world into the past, thereby saving the world but also creating such historical anomalies as (for example) the unexpectedly sudden end of the previous ice age. (In this story, it results from excess heat from the present being dumped there.) Of course, the law of unintended consequences sometimes intrudes, leading to occasional collateral damage, such as sending a series of category 5 hurricanes into the U.S. east coast and accidentally shutting down the Gulf Stream and plunging Europe into a new ice age. (On the plus side, polar bear migrations become a popular tourist attraction, and Eurocorp is lobbying hard not to restart the Gulf Stream to protect their new business interests.)
Of course, all SF readers know that when you tamper with time, you also tamper with causality, and here, the unintended consequences include a rapid rise in the frequency of improbabilities, such as the Tsar of Russia (!) converting to Orthodox Judaism (!!!). This is the clue that sets Gladys on the path to a solution: if the problem is that the improbabilities are accumulating in *time*, then perhaps the solution is to cut them out of time and let them accumulate in *space*. As Alexander notes, it’s one of those “headslapping moments” (“facepalm” moments if your one of my younger readers), where the solution is obvious in hindsight. So the two propose a trial, the government accepts, and suddenly the surplus warm temperatures are on their way to Mars, creating an ad hoc terraforming project. Of course, the law of unintended consequences will not be denied, and one can only imagine what will await humanity when we finally reach the Red Planet. (I’m betting on Tars Tarkas on a thoat, which reminds me that it’s time to re-read my Burroughs Mars stories, which make for delightfully light and “retro” summer reading.)
The story is based on a classical SFnal premise: “What if [insert unlikely thing here]”? Having established that premise, Alexander then explores it rigorously. The premise doesn’t bear overly close examination from a scientific standpoint, but the only real slip is that in a world undergoing such international conflicts, it seems unlikely the CIA wouldn’t immediately weaponize this technology and start using it against their perceived rivals and enemies instead of allowing Hap and Gladys free reign to save the world. Possibly the most delightful moment in a story filled with delights comes when scientists who have begun finding strong evidence about the alarming rise in improbabilities sound the alarm. Having learned nothing from global warming, the world governments ponder the cries of alarm for a moment, then (predictably) suggest that the situation needs “more study”. It’s a pungent insight into human psychology, and fully consistent with an entertaining satire about our current problems.
[Spoilers] The problem with climate change has always been the complexity of the physical system being studied and modeled, which leads to a high degree of seeming randomness that therefore seems to dilute the relationship between cause and effect; as Alexander notes, the correlations between causes (humans dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than ecosystems can remove it from the atmosphere) and effect (warming and wild weather) are clear to scientists and mathematicians, but far less clear to everyone else. (This is a potentially serious problem for scientists. See, for instance <http://www.geoff-hart.com/articles/2011/languages.html>.) As Alexander notes (though in a different context), “No offense to mathematicians, but most of them don’t have a sense of rhythm.”
Given that one problem with the conventional greenhouse dogma has been the seemingly weak correlation between cause and effect, Alexander takes that notion, does a delightfully Ruckeresque sidewise leap of logic, and turns the notion on its head: What if the real problem is not complexity, but the source of the weather? Gladys reveals the source of the story’s title: the childhood rhyme that begins “Rain, rain, go away”. Just precisely where does it go? That leads to the suspicion that someone from the future is sending their climate problems back to us so they won’t have to deal with them. Indeed, this proves to be the true source of the problem, and armed with this insight, it’s not long before the CIA sets up its own cross-time climate management program. Soon, Gladys and Hap are shifting bits and pieces of bad climate from around the world into the past, thereby saving the world but also creating such historical anomalies as (for example) the unexpectedly sudden end of the previous ice age. (In this story, it results from excess heat from the present being dumped there.) Of course, the law of unintended consequences sometimes intrudes, leading to occasional collateral damage, such as sending a series of category 5 hurricanes into the U.S. east coast and accidentally shutting down the Gulf Stream and plunging Europe into a new ice age. (On the plus side, polar bear migrations become a popular tourist attraction, and Eurocorp is lobbying hard not to restart the Gulf Stream to protect their new business interests.)
Of course, all SF readers know that when you tamper with time, you also tamper with causality, and here, the unintended consequences include a rapid rise in the frequency of improbabilities, such as the Tsar of Russia (!) converting to Orthodox Judaism (!!!). This is the clue that sets Gladys on the path to a solution: if the problem is that the improbabilities are accumulating in *time*, then perhaps the solution is to cut them out of time and let them accumulate in *space*. As Alexander notes, it’s one of those “headslapping moments” (“facepalm” moments if your one of my younger readers), where the solution is obvious in hindsight. So the two propose a trial, the government accepts, and suddenly the surplus warm temperatures are on their way to Mars, creating an ad hoc terraforming project. Of course, the law of unintended consequences will not be denied, and one can only imagine what will await humanity when we finally reach the Red Planet. (I’m betting on Tars Tarkas on a thoat, which reminds me that it’s time to re-read my Burroughs Mars stories, which make for delightfully light and “retro” summer reading.)
The story is based on a classical SFnal premise: “What if [insert unlikely thing here]”? Having established that premise, Alexander then explores it rigorously. The premise doesn’t bear overly close examination from a scientific standpoint, but the only real slip is that in a world undergoing such international conflicts, it seems unlikely the CIA wouldn’t immediately weaponize this technology and start using it against their perceived rivals and enemies instead of allowing Hap and Gladys free reign to save the world. Possibly the most delightful moment in a story filled with delights comes when scientists who have begun finding strong evidence about the alarming rise in improbabilities sound the alarm. Having learned nothing from global warming, the world governments ponder the cries of alarm for a moment, then (predictably) suggest that the situation needs “more study”. It’s a pungent insight into human psychology, and fully consistent with an entertaining satire about our current problems.