11-10-2013, 06:22 PM
World Warm One
2023
The river screamed and cracked as the winter ice was compressed then fractured by the force of the spring melt-water. The grey skies of winter still hung like smoke in the tree tops, swirling and fleeting through the green-black snow-dappled pines. The chill in the air was displaced now and then by peculiarly disturbing warm draughts which came without warning and left as quickly as they came. From a mile down river came a deep crashing and thundering as wood and water shared the log-flume ride down the three hundred metre drop into the beaver-dammed valley. The beavers had long since seen their ancient lodges destroyed by the flood waters, and barely had time to move to a safe side-stream before the waters came again. The rain had come early and heavy for the past three summers and each year the coming was earlier and heavier yet. Breath-snatching night frosts froze everything together, capturing the moisture in iron earth and brittle needles, bedecking the dead grass with glistening beads. Then the heat would come, liberating a billion, billion rain drops, all in one day. Every gully, stream and river boiled and seethed its way down to the open sea. There, the writhing torrents wrought immense devastation as trees, rocks and mud spewed out into the dark brown deep. For as far as the mist would allow a man to see, gnarled roots and branches bobbed, twisted and slowly gyrated in an obscene funereal procession, grotesquely and inexorably drifting out of sight of land.
The sun would not shine upon this sea again for three more decades. Above the suffocating mist, gulls cried their sombre song as they wheeled endlessly, searching for a solid surface and a resting place. Many would die this year. Their thin bedraggled bodies would sink to the bottom of the ocean where waterlogged trees hung eerily in the murky depths. Slowly pirouetting on limp extended wings, the birds would snag on the bare and broken branches, swaying in the currents until they decayed and fell to pieces. No fish would devour them, for the fish were already dead.
This was called the beginning of the end. No one could have foreseen how quickly it would all go wrong. It began with the rains, a year on year increase. Winters seemed to be a little less severe so most folk were content to balance out their seasonal concerns.... until ten years ago.
2013
In June '13 a hurricane blew up in the Caribbean. Cuba sat beneath the eye, but as the wind speeds picked up the system began to move. This was to be no ordinary hurricane. Slowly at first, it slipped south. The sea rose up as the pressure fell. Squalling and howling winds raised a mighty storm-surge which crashed into the southern coastal strip. In two hours a vast tract of land from the Gulf of Batabaho in the west to the Gulf of Guacanayabo in the east was subjugated by a watery dictator. As the pressure continued to free-fall the hurricane's direction reversed. Against all predictions it lurched north-west at one hundred miles an hour, crash landing in the Everglades. There was no time to evacuate. Wind speeds went off the clock at three hundred and fifty miles an hour as Hurricane Lazarus stormed vengefully into Florida leaving thousands dead and over a million injured and destitute. Tornadoes spawned by complex shear forces sucked the breath out of the land as they screamed across the southern prairies. Devastation was total. The western hemisphere was completely obscured by a nine thousand mile diameter cloud system. All eyes were on the satellite images which were beamed to Europe then sent by land-line back to the Americas. Radio communication between satellites and any point obscured by the cloud system was impossible, as vigorous electric storms raced randomly beneath the dark and sinister skies. Lazarus cast its deadly eye northwards for 500 miles, faltered, and returned to settle over the Gulf of Mexico, drawing strength from the warm sea. The whole world watched and waited but Lazarus was unmoved.
So it was that only a few western meteorologists spotted the beginnings of a contra-system developing in the south-west Pacific Ocean. The hook-like kink in the isobars over Papua New Guinea tightened the cloud-form into a knot. Two spiralling arms spun out from this vacuous centre as the pressure plummeted to a portentous 750 millibars. Cyclone! Within three hours of its initial detection by doppler-radar satellites, the estimated wind speed at sea level was 250 miles per hour and the pressure in the vortex had fallen to a record low of 720 millibars. On the ground, Australasia was looking up to witness the birth of Cyclone Helen. Helen was a precocious child. Before she was one day old she had killed over three thousand Papuans. The huge debris-flows which spewed down the mountain roads buried the coffee and cocoa plantations along 300 kilometres of the northern coastal plain beneath several billion tons of mud and rock. The Arafura Sea turned into an emulsion of thick, brown silt as churning, chaotic waves devoured the marshlands from Kokonau to Kerema. In tumultuous triumph the sea beat up against the mountain roots of Papua New Guinea, as it had once done aeons ago.
The two weather systems were to dominate the planet for half a century and would bring terrifying extremes to all coastal regions. With the approach of winter in the northern hemisphere, never-before-seen effects occurred in the upper atmosphere as Lazarus and Helen touched tenuous feathery fingers one hundred thousand feet above the North Pole. Massive discharges of electricity were commonplace, as soft-edged glowing and pulsating colours covered the northern sky. One still and dark evening a shower of ice crystals, long and brittle, rained down upon the whole of Great Britain, Europe and northern Russia. By morning the total land-mass was buried to a depth of two hundred millimetres in transparent shards. Within two days the friable ice had melted away but the land was flattened and drenched, not a blade of grass nor a stalk of wheat was left standing.
In the newspapers a new phrase featured largely as headlines throughout the World proclaimed "Global State of Emergency"...... but in the mountains of Tibet all communications were down. Radio links with the lower regions were intermittent and even when faint signals were getting through the few stations which were receivable were garbled and nonsensical. The wind blew steadily at gale force for weeks on end, howling and wailing throughout the barely distinguishable days and nights. Snow filled valleys to a depth of a thousand feet. Born in and borne by the relentless wind, powder-snow plumed over the peaks then dropped in frangible layers night after night. Each day the surface melted to a glistening mirror as the temperature rose to tropical levels. But the sun never shone. The clouds which swirled unbroken above the low-lands were torn and shredded by the highest peaks, but only during the freezing nights. By day, the heat became trapped beneath the saturated air and warm winds blew ominously through the valleys. From the roof of the world, Tibet looked down upon a planet at war. At war with its own sun. World Warm One had begun.
The Warming Years-2028
The polar ice-caps had begun to break up eighteen years back; World Warming had become generally accepted by the turn of the millenium, principally because of the indisputable nature of the evidence. The floating continent of Antarctica fractured and frayed along it's shifting coastline, blinding-white bergs drifting off into the cold blue Atlantic. Land-bound ice over the northern hemisphere and the polar regions slipped seaward in vast glaciers, crashing and thundering in spume and spray at journeys end. City-sized chunks of blue-white ice cleaved and tumbled along thousands of miles of coastline causing sea levels to rise inexorably and predictably. As the ice-caps shrank in surface area, the dark oceans began to absorb radiant heat. The reflective ice-sheets retreated still further and a self-perpetuating cycle had begun. The South Atlantic had become a heat-source for the Gulf Stream which ran warmer by the year, deep thermals generating visible surface currents. In 2025 a silvery trail over two thousand kilometres long snaked north-eastwards from the Sargasso Sea, comprising of millions of dead fish, eels and krill floating on the Atlantic swell. In that year the down-blast storms began over Canada and up into Alaska. Rain fell in countless spouts from grossly overladen green-black clouds, deluging and scouring the land. Then, without warning, the Gulf Stream died, turned off like a tap by an unprecedented surge of fresh water pluming out of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The northern seas slowly succumbed to declining temperatures and platelets of sheet-ice began to wash-up on the once warm shingle beaches of north-west Scotland.
The Bahamas had been systematically and comprehensively demolished by a succession of ferocious storms beginning with Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and Floyd in 1999. The Central Americas finally succumbed to eradication from the map with the arrival of Hurricane Vincent in 2022. Bangladesh was lost to the Indian Ocean in the Great Storm of 2023 and eighty percent of Holland was submerged by '2024, following the breaching of over one hundred and thirty miles of dike. Great cities like London, New York, Rome and Leningrad had been devastated by inconceivably high tides. In 2025 Venice was declared no longer habitable, her bridges now linked sea to sea, looping out of green algae-thick water like the coils of a hundred serpents. The Arabian Sea permanently covered the dunes of Oman and the United Arab Emirates all the way north to what had been Bahrain. The global habitable land mass had shrunk by an estimated thirteen percent, though estimates varied depending upon whether ice-fields were taken into account. What was certain, however, was that in the three years up to 2018 sea levels had started to fall back as new accumulations of snow and ice-bound water on the Southern Continental land masses had begun to redress the balance.
The Rationalising Years-2030
In 2028 the southern polar ice cap had unaccountably
to shrink. Scientists and meteorologists casting around for a theory decided that a refrigeration effect had been created by the modified flow of the upper atmosphere winds and the cessation of the Gulf Stream. Heat was being drawn up from the southern hemisphere and transported isothermally to the north in saturated water vapour. The return path for the heat energy was governed by the laws of thermodynamics. Condensation of water in the upper atmosphere continued to produce deluges in the form of down-blast storms. Warm rains fell daily, dumping the heat back into the oceans where complex convection currents surged and writhed as planetary rotational forces battled with the inertia of equilibrium.
The annual changing of the solstice had pronounced effects upon global weather, but the heat-exchange mechanism remained resolutely in place, jet-streaming tropical air up over the North Pole. Against all predictions, the steadily rising global temperature began to peak as the sea levels stabilised. From pictures revealed by distant satellites the Earth's albedo had increased by more than seventeen percent in the last nine years, due almost entirely to cloud cover. The initial increase in temperature brought on by the so-called "greenhouse" effect had caused a proportional increase in evaporation rates from the oceans. This in turn meant that the atmosphere was carrying an increasingly large amount of water. Once air temperatures began to rise the saturation point increased, permitting still more absorption. A limit had to be reached. When the global winds began, temperature variations brought about by sudden forced altitude changes caused torrential rains to condense out of the heavily laden clouds. It was accepted too late that it was only the arrogance of man which had led humanity to assume responsibility for the greenhouse gases. Increased volcanism in the decades up to the millenium had pumped billions of cubic metres of warm carbon dioxide thousands of feet up into the stratosphere. Humanity was busily banning, curtailing and cutting its minuscule contribution to the effect as the great drama commenced. The curtain fell on Act One without a speaking part for mankind and just as surely the show would go on with humanity in the wings.
2032-A New Stability.
The planetary surface weather became closely associated with the two counter-rotating systems and out of chaos a new kind of order emerged. By 2031 the Looting Wars had ended in a global dictatorship under the remnants of the latterly impotent United Nations and a conglomeracy of dispossessed military and religious leaders. America supplied the might. Whilst civilization teetered to an unknown future, pockets of disciplined researchers struggled with the problems of the new world order. Answers were few and questions many, and it was only the certainty of doom with failure that spurred their endeavours. A whole new category of scientific research was born with the creation of "stratospherology". Theories had varied enormously over the years but advances in radar techniques produced startling conclusions. In the upper atmosphere above the South Pole the rarefied air masses had become rotationally synchronised. Edge-turbulence effects locked them together as surely as gears engaging. Summer in the northern hemisphere became characterised by suffocatingly high daytime temperatures with low and persistent mist. Weeks could pass without a sigh of wind but daily torrential rain and freezing nights built up mirror-like ice sheets over immense tracts of land. In the southern hemisphere high cloud and ice showers dominated the weather charts. The sea froze around river deltas and ice extended out into tropical oceans as daytime warmth failed to melt the nighttime accumulation of fresh-water slush. Ice fields extended from Port Phillip Bay on the Australian south coast, west to Port Lincoln on the tip of the Spencer Gulf, glistening and slowly undulating in the long swell. Two hundred miles south of Melbourne, floating in a grey and icy slurry, the island of Tasmania recorded a night-day temperature differential of one hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit on the second of January 2032.
Winter in the north was a terrifying vigil. The screaming winds high above had only to dip down a mere thirty thousand feet to cause turbulent, buffeting Mega-Storms at ground level. As winter progressed, the winds would dip lower each day. Daytime temperatures fell to an average of 54 degrees Fahrenheit, paradoxically spawning families of tornadoes which raced across the North Atlantic ocean, stabbing forks of lightning crackling in great pyrotechnic arcs in their wake. Hail and ice-storms pummeled the Continents throughout the dark hours whilst at sea vast accumulations of ice-debris, often several metres thick blocked shipping lanes. When the winds turned landward, the whole grinding aggregation swamped coastal villages and ports beneath a super-cooled shroud. Ask any individual, in any corner of the planet, and the response would be the same…the fate of mankind was locked in an icy tomb.
To live long enough to prove the prediction wrong was the new spiritual spur. Yet the answer was there in the billions of bits of data, streaming in daily from every conceivable source. Highly specialized computer programs dedicated to spotting trends, slowly began to divulge the merging picture.
In the two hundred years prior to the millenium the average temperature of the planet had risen by two thirds of a degree. At the close of 2010, a mere decade, meteorologists reported that the average global temperature for the year was one point two degrees higher than at the turn of the millenium. At the close of 2029 that figure remained unchanged. The plateau had been reached.
2070-Recovery begins.
There had been a fascination with the sky since 2040. Notwithstanding the perilous state of mankind, old eyes still turned heavenward in forlorn hope and unfocussed prayer. Though millions were rescued from starvation by the conversion of the Central Australian Desert into wheatlands, bread alone could not lift the spirits of a world in search of its lost Gods. Disease and pestilence on a biblical scale had dulled the life-force in humanity, either by direct effect or by the constant reporting of one great tragedy following on another. Faith, which for centuries had been the foundation of hope in all religions, had become weakened and diluted by persistent reality. The tremendous significance of the concept of Heaven had become too difficult to sustain when neither sun nor moon nor star could be seen through the cloud cocoon.
Zealots, fanatics, lunatics and extremists had all seen the predicted end of the world come and go, and as each date passed another Order dwindled into insignificance, until all that was left was quiet acceptance. Mankind was muted and traumatised by the evisceration of belief and thirty years passed in spiritual deprivation.
Without Gods, the sky had become the theological horizon and so it had not gone unnoticed that by 2055 the permanent high cloud cover had begun to thin out. Fragile hope was reborn as during both winter and summer, in northern and southern hemispheres, the brightening of the skies became more pronounced as the years passed.
Meteorological observation balloons recorded rapid temperature transients in the stratosphere as the terminator rushed silently by. The rakish rays of the sun glanced tangentially off an orbiting shell of ice-crystals whilst below, the world waited for the day when unimpeded, heat and light would flood down onto upturned faces. As dawn broke over Moscow on the 5th. July 2069, the by now tenuous clouds spontaneously dissipated and the sky turned blue.
From Stratosat1892, images of the uncloaking of a planet amazed and overwhelmed the collective conscience of mankind. Fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, children too young to have ever seen the sun, all were overcome by the beautiful significance of the naked Earth... and mankind wept with joy, uncertainty and fear. World Warm One came to an end, and with its ending came a new beginning.
Tectak 2009
2023
The river screamed and cracked as the winter ice was compressed then fractured by the force of the spring melt-water. The grey skies of winter still hung like smoke in the tree tops, swirling and fleeting through the green-black snow-dappled pines. The chill in the air was displaced now and then by peculiarly disturbing warm draughts which came without warning and left as quickly as they came. From a mile down river came a deep crashing and thundering as wood and water shared the log-flume ride down the three hundred metre drop into the beaver-dammed valley. The beavers had long since seen their ancient lodges destroyed by the flood waters, and barely had time to move to a safe side-stream before the waters came again. The rain had come early and heavy for the past three summers and each year the coming was earlier and heavier yet. Breath-snatching night frosts froze everything together, capturing the moisture in iron earth and brittle needles, bedecking the dead grass with glistening beads. Then the heat would come, liberating a billion, billion rain drops, all in one day. Every gully, stream and river boiled and seethed its way down to the open sea. There, the writhing torrents wrought immense devastation as trees, rocks and mud spewed out into the dark brown deep. For as far as the mist would allow a man to see, gnarled roots and branches bobbed, twisted and slowly gyrated in an obscene funereal procession, grotesquely and inexorably drifting out of sight of land.
The sun would not shine upon this sea again for three more decades. Above the suffocating mist, gulls cried their sombre song as they wheeled endlessly, searching for a solid surface and a resting place. Many would die this year. Their thin bedraggled bodies would sink to the bottom of the ocean where waterlogged trees hung eerily in the murky depths. Slowly pirouetting on limp extended wings, the birds would snag on the bare and broken branches, swaying in the currents until they decayed and fell to pieces. No fish would devour them, for the fish were already dead.
This was called the beginning of the end. No one could have foreseen how quickly it would all go wrong. It began with the rains, a year on year increase. Winters seemed to be a little less severe so most folk were content to balance out their seasonal concerns.... until ten years ago.
2013
In June '13 a hurricane blew up in the Caribbean. Cuba sat beneath the eye, but as the wind speeds picked up the system began to move. This was to be no ordinary hurricane. Slowly at first, it slipped south. The sea rose up as the pressure fell. Squalling and howling winds raised a mighty storm-surge which crashed into the southern coastal strip. In two hours a vast tract of land from the Gulf of Batabaho in the west to the Gulf of Guacanayabo in the east was subjugated by a watery dictator. As the pressure continued to free-fall the hurricane's direction reversed. Against all predictions it lurched north-west at one hundred miles an hour, crash landing in the Everglades. There was no time to evacuate. Wind speeds went off the clock at three hundred and fifty miles an hour as Hurricane Lazarus stormed vengefully into Florida leaving thousands dead and over a million injured and destitute. Tornadoes spawned by complex shear forces sucked the breath out of the land as they screamed across the southern prairies. Devastation was total. The western hemisphere was completely obscured by a nine thousand mile diameter cloud system. All eyes were on the satellite images which were beamed to Europe then sent by land-line back to the Americas. Radio communication between satellites and any point obscured by the cloud system was impossible, as vigorous electric storms raced randomly beneath the dark and sinister skies. Lazarus cast its deadly eye northwards for 500 miles, faltered, and returned to settle over the Gulf of Mexico, drawing strength from the warm sea. The whole world watched and waited but Lazarus was unmoved.
So it was that only a few western meteorologists spotted the beginnings of a contra-system developing in the south-west Pacific Ocean. The hook-like kink in the isobars over Papua New Guinea tightened the cloud-form into a knot. Two spiralling arms spun out from this vacuous centre as the pressure plummeted to a portentous 750 millibars. Cyclone! Within three hours of its initial detection by doppler-radar satellites, the estimated wind speed at sea level was 250 miles per hour and the pressure in the vortex had fallen to a record low of 720 millibars. On the ground, Australasia was looking up to witness the birth of Cyclone Helen. Helen was a precocious child. Before she was one day old she had killed over three thousand Papuans. The huge debris-flows which spewed down the mountain roads buried the coffee and cocoa plantations along 300 kilometres of the northern coastal plain beneath several billion tons of mud and rock. The Arafura Sea turned into an emulsion of thick, brown silt as churning, chaotic waves devoured the marshlands from Kokonau to Kerema. In tumultuous triumph the sea beat up against the mountain roots of Papua New Guinea, as it had once done aeons ago.
The two weather systems were to dominate the planet for half a century and would bring terrifying extremes to all coastal regions. With the approach of winter in the northern hemisphere, never-before-seen effects occurred in the upper atmosphere as Lazarus and Helen touched tenuous feathery fingers one hundred thousand feet above the North Pole. Massive discharges of electricity were commonplace, as soft-edged glowing and pulsating colours covered the northern sky. One still and dark evening a shower of ice crystals, long and brittle, rained down upon the whole of Great Britain, Europe and northern Russia. By morning the total land-mass was buried to a depth of two hundred millimetres in transparent shards. Within two days the friable ice had melted away but the land was flattened and drenched, not a blade of grass nor a stalk of wheat was left standing.
In the newspapers a new phrase featured largely as headlines throughout the World proclaimed "Global State of Emergency"...... but in the mountains of Tibet all communications were down. Radio links with the lower regions were intermittent and even when faint signals were getting through the few stations which were receivable were garbled and nonsensical. The wind blew steadily at gale force for weeks on end, howling and wailing throughout the barely distinguishable days and nights. Snow filled valleys to a depth of a thousand feet. Born in and borne by the relentless wind, powder-snow plumed over the peaks then dropped in frangible layers night after night. Each day the surface melted to a glistening mirror as the temperature rose to tropical levels. But the sun never shone. The clouds which swirled unbroken above the low-lands were torn and shredded by the highest peaks, but only during the freezing nights. By day, the heat became trapped beneath the saturated air and warm winds blew ominously through the valleys. From the roof of the world, Tibet looked down upon a planet at war. At war with its own sun. World Warm One had begun.
The Warming Years-2028
The polar ice-caps had begun to break up eighteen years back; World Warming had become generally accepted by the turn of the millenium, principally because of the indisputable nature of the evidence. The floating continent of Antarctica fractured and frayed along it's shifting coastline, blinding-white bergs drifting off into the cold blue Atlantic. Land-bound ice over the northern hemisphere and the polar regions slipped seaward in vast glaciers, crashing and thundering in spume and spray at journeys end. City-sized chunks of blue-white ice cleaved and tumbled along thousands of miles of coastline causing sea levels to rise inexorably and predictably. As the ice-caps shrank in surface area, the dark oceans began to absorb radiant heat. The reflective ice-sheets retreated still further and a self-perpetuating cycle had begun. The South Atlantic had become a heat-source for the Gulf Stream which ran warmer by the year, deep thermals generating visible surface currents. In 2025 a silvery trail over two thousand kilometres long snaked north-eastwards from the Sargasso Sea, comprising of millions of dead fish, eels and krill floating on the Atlantic swell. In that year the down-blast storms began over Canada and up into Alaska. Rain fell in countless spouts from grossly overladen green-black clouds, deluging and scouring the land. Then, without warning, the Gulf Stream died, turned off like a tap by an unprecedented surge of fresh water pluming out of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The northern seas slowly succumbed to declining temperatures and platelets of sheet-ice began to wash-up on the once warm shingle beaches of north-west Scotland.
The Bahamas had been systematically and comprehensively demolished by a succession of ferocious storms beginning with Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and Floyd in 1999. The Central Americas finally succumbed to eradication from the map with the arrival of Hurricane Vincent in 2022. Bangladesh was lost to the Indian Ocean in the Great Storm of 2023 and eighty percent of Holland was submerged by '2024, following the breaching of over one hundred and thirty miles of dike. Great cities like London, New York, Rome and Leningrad had been devastated by inconceivably high tides. In 2025 Venice was declared no longer habitable, her bridges now linked sea to sea, looping out of green algae-thick water like the coils of a hundred serpents. The Arabian Sea permanently covered the dunes of Oman and the United Arab Emirates all the way north to what had been Bahrain. The global habitable land mass had shrunk by an estimated thirteen percent, though estimates varied depending upon whether ice-fields were taken into account. What was certain, however, was that in the three years up to 2018 sea levels had started to fall back as new accumulations of snow and ice-bound water on the Southern Continental land masses had begun to redress the balance.
The Rationalising Years-2030
In 2028 the southern polar ice cap had unaccountably
to shrink. Scientists and meteorologists casting around for a theory decided that a refrigeration effect had been created by the modified flow of the upper atmosphere winds and the cessation of the Gulf Stream. Heat was being drawn up from the southern hemisphere and transported isothermally to the north in saturated water vapour. The return path for the heat energy was governed by the laws of thermodynamics. Condensation of water in the upper atmosphere continued to produce deluges in the form of down-blast storms. Warm rains fell daily, dumping the heat back into the oceans where complex convection currents surged and writhed as planetary rotational forces battled with the inertia of equilibrium.The annual changing of the solstice had pronounced effects upon global weather, but the heat-exchange mechanism remained resolutely in place, jet-streaming tropical air up over the North Pole. Against all predictions, the steadily rising global temperature began to peak as the sea levels stabilised. From pictures revealed by distant satellites the Earth's albedo had increased by more than seventeen percent in the last nine years, due almost entirely to cloud cover. The initial increase in temperature brought on by the so-called "greenhouse" effect had caused a proportional increase in evaporation rates from the oceans. This in turn meant that the atmosphere was carrying an increasingly large amount of water. Once air temperatures began to rise the saturation point increased, permitting still more absorption. A limit had to be reached. When the global winds began, temperature variations brought about by sudden forced altitude changes caused torrential rains to condense out of the heavily laden clouds. It was accepted too late that it was only the arrogance of man which had led humanity to assume responsibility for the greenhouse gases. Increased volcanism in the decades up to the millenium had pumped billions of cubic metres of warm carbon dioxide thousands of feet up into the stratosphere. Humanity was busily banning, curtailing and cutting its minuscule contribution to the effect as the great drama commenced. The curtain fell on Act One without a speaking part for mankind and just as surely the show would go on with humanity in the wings.
2032-A New Stability.
The planetary surface weather became closely associated with the two counter-rotating systems and out of chaos a new kind of order emerged. By 2031 the Looting Wars had ended in a global dictatorship under the remnants of the latterly impotent United Nations and a conglomeracy of dispossessed military and religious leaders. America supplied the might. Whilst civilization teetered to an unknown future, pockets of disciplined researchers struggled with the problems of the new world order. Answers were few and questions many, and it was only the certainty of doom with failure that spurred their endeavours. A whole new category of scientific research was born with the creation of "stratospherology". Theories had varied enormously over the years but advances in radar techniques produced startling conclusions. In the upper atmosphere above the South Pole the rarefied air masses had become rotationally synchronised. Edge-turbulence effects locked them together as surely as gears engaging. Summer in the northern hemisphere became characterised by suffocatingly high daytime temperatures with low and persistent mist. Weeks could pass without a sigh of wind but daily torrential rain and freezing nights built up mirror-like ice sheets over immense tracts of land. In the southern hemisphere high cloud and ice showers dominated the weather charts. The sea froze around river deltas and ice extended out into tropical oceans as daytime warmth failed to melt the nighttime accumulation of fresh-water slush. Ice fields extended from Port Phillip Bay on the Australian south coast, west to Port Lincoln on the tip of the Spencer Gulf, glistening and slowly undulating in the long swell. Two hundred miles south of Melbourne, floating in a grey and icy slurry, the island of Tasmania recorded a night-day temperature differential of one hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit on the second of January 2032.
Winter in the north was a terrifying vigil. The screaming winds high above had only to dip down a mere thirty thousand feet to cause turbulent, buffeting Mega-Storms at ground level. As winter progressed, the winds would dip lower each day. Daytime temperatures fell to an average of 54 degrees Fahrenheit, paradoxically spawning families of tornadoes which raced across the North Atlantic ocean, stabbing forks of lightning crackling in great pyrotechnic arcs in their wake. Hail and ice-storms pummeled the Continents throughout the dark hours whilst at sea vast accumulations of ice-debris, often several metres thick blocked shipping lanes. When the winds turned landward, the whole grinding aggregation swamped coastal villages and ports beneath a super-cooled shroud. Ask any individual, in any corner of the planet, and the response would be the same…the fate of mankind was locked in an icy tomb.
To live long enough to prove the prediction wrong was the new spiritual spur. Yet the answer was there in the billions of bits of data, streaming in daily from every conceivable source. Highly specialized computer programs dedicated to spotting trends, slowly began to divulge the merging picture.
In the two hundred years prior to the millenium the average temperature of the planet had risen by two thirds of a degree. At the close of 2010, a mere decade, meteorologists reported that the average global temperature for the year was one point two degrees higher than at the turn of the millenium. At the close of 2029 that figure remained unchanged. The plateau had been reached.
2070-Recovery begins.
There had been a fascination with the sky since 2040. Notwithstanding the perilous state of mankind, old eyes still turned heavenward in forlorn hope and unfocussed prayer. Though millions were rescued from starvation by the conversion of the Central Australian Desert into wheatlands, bread alone could not lift the spirits of a world in search of its lost Gods. Disease and pestilence on a biblical scale had dulled the life-force in humanity, either by direct effect or by the constant reporting of one great tragedy following on another. Faith, which for centuries had been the foundation of hope in all religions, had become weakened and diluted by persistent reality. The tremendous significance of the concept of Heaven had become too difficult to sustain when neither sun nor moon nor star could be seen through the cloud cocoon.
Zealots, fanatics, lunatics and extremists had all seen the predicted end of the world come and go, and as each date passed another Order dwindled into insignificance, until all that was left was quiet acceptance. Mankind was muted and traumatised by the evisceration of belief and thirty years passed in spiritual deprivation.
Without Gods, the sky had become the theological horizon and so it had not gone unnoticed that by 2055 the permanent high cloud cover had begun to thin out. Fragile hope was reborn as during both winter and summer, in northern and southern hemispheres, the brightening of the skies became more pronounced as the years passed.
Meteorological observation balloons recorded rapid temperature transients in the stratosphere as the terminator rushed silently by. The rakish rays of the sun glanced tangentially off an orbiting shell of ice-crystals whilst below, the world waited for the day when unimpeded, heat and light would flood down onto upturned faces. As dawn broke over Moscow on the 5th. July 2069, the by now tenuous clouds spontaneously dissipated and the sky turned blue.
From Stratosat1892, images of the uncloaking of a planet amazed and overwhelmed the collective conscience of mankind. Fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, children too young to have ever seen the sun, all were overcome by the beautiful significance of the naked Earth... and mankind wept with joy, uncertainty and fear. World Warm One came to an end, and with its ending came a new beginning.
Tectak 2009