HUNGER

[ Preemptive proviso: This story is not actually about Climate Change ]

"I believe I've discovered that the cause of climate change and the runaway greenhouse effect we are seeing is not what people presume. In fact, it may be, in a sense, the opposite."

"Uh, what do you mean?"

"Well, I went back and read all of the original data sets the climate models were built upon. I read the source material everyone is citing. And, well, their conclusions seem more than just a little off."

"What do you mean? Like what?"

"It's pretty difficult to get into. I mean, if you haven't also read all this stuff. And we don't have it here in front of us to refer to."

"I'm sure, but just give me the Coles Notes version."

"So it looks to me that, given the numbers they had at the time, the best fit for a cause of temperature rise was increasing atmospheric CO2. CO2 and temperature seemed convincingly correlated. And so it makes perfect sense they went with that and drew the conclusions they did."

"Okay. And?"

"Well, when you don't just look at the numbers but look at how they were attained, I mean, what for and, critically, how those numbers were understood at the time, well, I mean, you're forced to conclude that we're not using the same measures."

"That's problematic."

"Couldn't be more problematic, actually."

"You've found another, a better correlation or more likely cause, have you?"

"Yeah. And I know it doesn't seem to make sense. And it'll probably make less sense when I try to explain it. But when I look at the whole picture, in light of this new interpretation, I just can't accept the popular understanding. Fuck, it's ugly, man."

"Sounds like it."

"I don't like it at all. And I want to destroy all of my notes. Seems everything would be better and easier, certainly for me, if this wasn't a thing."

"So, what you're not saying is that climate change, at least as we have come to know it, isn't happening, right?"

"Oh no, no no no. Ha."

"'Because that would be interesting."

"That would probably be better in some ways."

"Oh dear."

"I'm tellin' ya, it's ugly."

"But how bad could it be?"

"I'm effectively going to argue to you that apples are oranges. Not that the pile of round redish-orange things you can see in that painting, tiny, across the room, pretty ambiguous, are not one but the other; but, rather, that the fruit with waxy, dimpled skin, that sprayed you in the eye with its juicy citrus oil as you peeled it, whose softly and loosely skinned segments you tore open to reveal sweet plump cells, like candy tear drops... is not Citrus sinensis, or even anything in the genus Citrus, but is, in fact, a crab apple (Malus tschonoskii). Like, as I see it with this, either I'm completely delusional (which is bad) or everyone else is, (which is, obviously, much much worse.) I mean, if I'm correct I don't know how you reverse this or walk back from it. I don't know, it feels like we're all fucked. And if I'm wrong I will have, at the very least, demonstrated that I've not just lost the plot but attempted to sink the boat and drown the crew and thereby, at best, committed career suicide."

"But why?"

"It's complicated."

"It can't be that complicated."

"Well, if I'm right then by default I'm pointing out that all of these very serious scientists, all with very serious backgrounds, all doing their very serious work, were actually derelict. As in ignorant with a dangerous amount of not giving a shit. And that's so messed up, and not even the fact of it but just my considering as much. And, like, you don't know these people. Many have built their careers, whole departments and schools, and careers for generations of others around what I'm labelling a fundamentally (and rather obviously) senseless interpretation. It's fucking messy, man."

"But if you are in agreement in terms of the effect, that the planet is warming as a result of human activity, then who cares, right?"

"It's true that the symptoms are the same but the cause, and remedy then, are entirely different."

"I still don't really see."

"Like–"

"I mean, if we agree that my car has a flat tire, whether the tire was punctured by a roofing nail or a deck screw is hardly going to ruin my day and it won't impact the how quickly or where I get the tire fixed or the cost of that."

"Right. But now think in biological terms. Imagine that you and your spouse and your family doctor and I all agree that you have a fever. Fine. But now you're all convinced it's the flu while I have other information. Still on a travelling high from our recent trip to the DRC, I'd been reading the local news and am convinced you were exposed to Ebola when you took that day-trip to that little town. The town went into full lockdown only after our return home. As a result, you and your people think you need fluids and sleep and I'm suggesting you take these drugs immediately and get yourself to the hospital without contacting anyone else. Worse, these drugs I'm offering may kill you if it's just the flu and not Ebola; yet if you act as though you have the flu, and what you really have is Ebola, then I probably have Ebola and your family does too, and maybe your doctor now and his staff and anyone who passed through the clinic the same day you did, and we need to quarantine the whole damn town – and there's some chance half of all the above will be dead inside two weeks regardless of the measures taken. So, making a proper diagnosis is absolutely critical, here. That feels different than the flat tire analogy, right? I think its more analogous as well. I'm telling you, it's messy."

"So, what are we actually talking about?"

"Do you really want to get into this?"

"Why not?"

"Well, okay. For any of this to make sense I'll have to send you my work and then you can walk through the details and see how it all pieces together. In the meantime, and to make a long story short, I used this huge volume of new satellite data from NASA you may have been hearing about, monitoring the forest canopy around the world. If you haven't heard, it's been all over the news and you'll find it easily doing a quick search. What makes it significant is that it's both by far the most complete and highest resolution image set to date but is also entirely open to the public. All of this landed just as I was going through a pile of climate data someone wanted me to look at. So just for fun, and because of the tremendous volume and it was all available with one click, I mapped NASA's data over my re-jigged global temperature numbers using that software Tableau. You know? I thought I'd not done it, that I'd done something wrong, because the two overlays I'd set up were identical. I assumed I'd somehow told the software to clone one or the other rather than generate different maps for each data set. I looked and looked and couldn't find any problems. Knowing a data visualization guru, who actually did a PhD in this stuff, I asked her if she'd look at what I'd done and point out my error. But I got a phone call just a few hours after I'd sent her the link and she told me it looked clean."

"And, so what does that mean?"

"Well, I've sent my work to two others, my friend's husband, who's a oceanographer, and an old prof of mine who's a historian in real life but a chemistry nerd on the side, who dabbles in and is up to date on all the climate science stuff, so we'll see what they have to say."