The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Forty-Five

Catalina led Ben and Raul from the palatial ground floor of the converted lighthouse and up a galleried inset iron stairway that corkscrewed up the curving inner wall of the tower like the rifling cut into the inside of a gun barrel, passing from one floor to the next all the way to the top. Each successive level was as luxuriously furnished as the last, the circular rooms diminishing slightly in width as the lighthouse tapered towards its roof. Porthole windows followed the line of the stairway, offering an increasingly dizzying ocean vista the higher they went.

‘I’m sorry for the climb,’ she said as they made their way up the endless steps. ‘Austin said installing a lift would have spoiled the all-around views. It’s actually pretty good exercise, running up and down. All forty-nine metres of it.’

Ben had to agree. Stair-running was one of the best ways he knew to stay fit. Raul didn’t seem so pleased. ‘Where are we going?’

‘To my quarters,’ she said. ‘I live right at the top.’

‘And what is it you want to show us there?’ Raul asked irritably. Maybe he was still fuming about the polar bears, Ben thought.

‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘Oh, by the way, this level here is the guest floor you’ll be quartered in, for as long as you want to stay here with us. It’s divided into two separate bedroom apartments. Austin has the next floor up. The one above that is mine.’

As she trotted up the last few steps ahead of him, it was hard for Ben not to notice the athleticism of her slim figure, nor to be reminded of why the mainstream media had taken her so much to heart. Being sexy and beautiful probably didn’t do much to make you a better scientist, but it certainly couldn’t hurt when it came to fame and star power. ‘Here we are,’ she said, opening a door and showing them through it.

Catalina’s quarters were bright and modern, an open-plan design that was essentially one large circular room with part of the circle closed off to make a bathroom area. The curved walls were lined on all sides by high windows, and topped by a glass dome that made it feel as if they were standing on top of a mountain, dwarfing the island below them. From up here, Keller’s sailing yacht in the distance looked like a model ship.

‘The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1908,’ she explained. ‘It was just a ruin before Austin salvaged it, so there was no need to replace the original parabolic reflector lamp. He installed the dome instead, and a little roof parapet where I climb up and look at the night sky. It used to be his room, but he moved out to let me have it.’

Ben wondered just how soon Austin was secretly planning on moving back in.

‘And this is my new office. Not quite as well appointed as the old one, but I get by,’ she said, motioning towards one end of the room where a small desk had been set up facing west. For the sunset, Ben imagined. There would be some spectacular ones to view from up here. He noticed the laptop and stack of notes that had been removed from his bag and were now sitting on her desk. He was noticing other things, too. Like the expensive-looking tan leather travel bag lying open at the foot of the bed, at the other end of the room. It was full of clothes, all neatly folded and packed. After all this time, Catalina still hadn’t fully moved into her new environment. It looked as if she was living out of her suitcase, like a person ready to leave at any time. It was just a detail, but to Ben it stood out, and he wondered about it.

‘It’s very nice, Catalina,’ Raul said, looking around the room. ‘But you didn’t bring us up here to admire the view, did you?’

‘I told you I was going to show you what this is all about,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘And there it is, right there.’ She pointed upwards.

Raul followed the line of her finger towards the bright sun, whose light was pouring down on them through the rounded glass of the dome. He shielded his eyes from the glare and blinked at it, then looked at his sister in puzzlement.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said, gazing up through the dome.

For a moment, Ben was beginning to wonder if this was Catalina’s idea of a joke, though she looked perfectly serious.

‘It’s just… the sun,’ Raul said, frowning. ‘We’ve seen it before. This is what you brought us up here for? How about you stop talking in riddles and tell us what the sun has to do with anything?’

‘Don’t be silly, Raul,’ she replied. ‘That’s like saying “What do we need oxygen for, or food, or water?” The sun is everything. It’s the basis of all we are, all we have. Why else do you think the ancients worshipped it in so many deity forms through the ages? Because without it, human life on Earth could never have existed. Of all the gods in the history of human culture, that big guy up there is still the most compelling and substantial, by a huge margin.’ She sighed. ‘All those years I spent studying it, thinking I understood. But I was just stuck in a box, too focused on one narrow field, just like all the other solar scientists. None of us were getting the bigger picture.’

‘I see,’ Raul said. ‘So you brought us to the top of this ridiculous tower to give us a lecture on the sun. What is this, some kind of withdrawal symptom from having to give up teaching?’

‘I’m trying to explain. You see, modern science has generally held that the solar irradiance — that is, the sun’s energy, which averages 1,336 watts per metre squared, by the way — is too insignificant to have any kind of major effect on Earth’s climate. Meaning, basically, that the sun is the sun and the Earth is the Earth, two separate independent systems, and our planet’s climate is internally regulated. I was one of those scientists. To my shame, for years I simply accepted that prevailing orthodox view. It was William Herschel who made me see everything differently. That was where this all began.’

‘With sunspots and the price of wheat in 1850s England?’ Ben said.

‘It seems so irrelevant, doesn’t it? I dismissed it at first, thinking it was just some quirky historical curiosity. But it wouldn’t go away. That tiny seed of an idea implanted itself into my mind, and grew, and grew. Two hundred years after William Herschel failed to convince the Fellows of the Royal Society of the links between sunspot activity and Earth’s climate, I started becoming obsessed with whether he might actually have been right. Soon afterwards, I discovered that I wasn’t the only scientist out there thinking along the same lines.’

‘Sinclair, Lockhart and Ellis?’ Ben said.

‘Dougal and Jim had only slowly started coming to these conclusions in recent years, through their separate research. But Steve Ellis has been heavily involved in the whole thing for decades. Even though he retired officially back in the nineties, he still wrote a blog, The Weather Report, which has over two million followers. That was how I first contacted him. Over time, the four of us shared ideas by email, and eventually agreed to team up. Of course, this was never an official research programme. More a private journey of discovery that just kept going deeper and deeper, until we began to realise the full extent of what we were dealing with. Except Steve, who I think knew it all along.’ She went quiet for a moment as she reflected on her lost colleagues, then looked up at Ben. ‘What do you know about sunspots?’

‘About as much as your brother here apparently knows about global warming,’ Ben said, drawing a filthy look from Raul.

‘They’re those dark patches that you can see if you reflect the sun’s light onto a sheet of paper,’ she said. ‘Of course, with a dedicated solar telescope we can see them much better. They’re basically magnetic in nature, with a much greater field strength than the rest of the solar surface, and are formed when very intense magnetic flux tubes erupt from the sun’s interior and keep cooled gas from circulating back inside. Simply speaking, the more sunspot activity there is on the sun, the more energy it radiates to Earth. The less activity, the less energy. Meanwhile, the sun goes through cycles of fluctuating energy output. At its peak, it’s called the Solar Maximum. At its lowest, the Solar Minimum. With me so far?’

‘I’m with you,’ Raul said. ‘I just don’t see the point.’

‘Be quiet and listen. Our research was to statistically collate any and all links, past and present, between sunspot activity and the Earth’s climate. And our conclusion was that Herschel had been right after all. The initial findings confirmed that wheat prices in England during that period did indeed fluctuate in line with solar activity, being higher at Solar Minimum than at Solar Maximum, suggesting that the crop was more difficult to grow when sunspot activity was at its lowest. Then, when we broadened our research, we realised that the same pattern held true all through history. During the last thousand years or so, there were five important periods of Solar Minimum, which each came to be named after a different astronomer. The so-called Oort Minimum lasted from 1010 until 1050, and was followed by the Wolf Minimum, 1280 to 1350. After that came the Spörer Minimum, 1460 to 1550; then the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715, and lastly the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1820.’

A memory was rekindled in Ben’s mind at the mention of those dates. He’d come across them before, while trying to make sense of Catalina’s notes back at the inn in Germany, and he’d thought about them several times since with no greater understanding. But now he recognised the sequence 1010–1280 — 1460–1645 — 1790 as the start year of each of these historic Solar Minimum periods, and he was able to start piecing other segments of the puzzle around them. ‘So the Medieval Warm Period must have happened in between the Oort and the Wolf?’ he said.

Catalina smiled at him. ‘You’re getting it. That’s right.’

‘So, if I understand what you’re saying, these Solar Minimum phases must have been intervals of much colder weather?’

Catalina’s eyes glowed. ‘Exactly. When the sun is at a low ebb in terms of energy output, and sunspots are at their fewest, the Earth gets cold. We’re talking about periods when the temperature dropped very rapidly and suddenly, maybe over the course of a few years, which in Earth terms is overnight. Soon after the start of the Wolf Minimum in 1280, three hundred years of balmy weather in Europe came to an abrupt end, bringing hard winters of snow and ice and summers of endless cold rain. Life became incredibly hard. In northern latitudes, some places became uninhabitable — like Greenland, which as we know the Vikings had to abandon. Further south and across Europe, crops were ruined, famine and disease followed and a quarter of the population died off. If anyone thinks that those gruesome old folk tales like Hansel and Gretel, about child abandonment and cannibalism, were just the result of a writer’s warped imagination, they’re not looking at the historical context. Parents actually abandoned or murdered their children at that time because there wasn’t enough food to go round. And it wasn’t just in Europe that the changing climate caused devastation. In China, millions of people drowned when the Yellow River flooded as a result of the extreme rainfall. There was nobody left to bury them, so the bodies were just left lying around. That caused a huge boom among the rat population, which was a major factor in the outbreak of bubonic plague. The contagion spread across China, and eventually came to Europe because the starving Europeans were being forced to import grain from any place they could get it.’

Catalina paused and walked over to the desk to turn on the computer. ‘Let me show you. Okay. Here we are. Now look at this graph.’

Ben and Raul both stepped closer to peer at the screen. ‘I hate graphs,’ Raul said.

The chart Catalina was showing them was marked horizontally with year dates spanning several centuries, and vertically with temperature gradations in degrees centigrade. From left to right, a jagged red line spiked up and down at intervals, tracing a zigzag like the serrations of a shark’s teeth.

‘The red line represents cycles of warming and cooling through history,’ she explained, running her finger along it. ‘See how it fluctuates? With the end of the Wolf Minimum in about 1350, the temperatures shot up again as the sun’s energy output increased, but only for about a century until the start of the Spörer Minimum. Up, then down. Once again, many parts of the world were plunged into the deep freeze.’ She ran her finger along the line on the screen, to the point where it began to rise towards its next peak. ‘Then up we go again. See that sharp peak some time before the year 1600? Now look what happens next.’

‘It drops all the way down,’ Ben said. Where Catalina was indicating, the red zigzag dropped from its previous peak and plummeted straight down into a trough deeper than any of the others on the graph.

‘This is where we hit the Maunder Minimum, marking the beginning of the Little Ice Age that lasted for three hundred years, from the middle of the sixteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth. This was the last great cooling event in our history to date. Within a decade, the temperatures dropped so low that birds fell from the sky, frozen solid. All over Europe, seas and rivers turned to solid ice. The coastlines of France, Britain and the Netherlands became almost unapproachable by ship because of the ice sheet that extended for miles out to sea. In London, it became traditional to hold fairs on the frozen River Thames, which for months at a time could support the weight of thousands of people, horses, carts, stands and side-shows. By 1690, northern Europe had got so cold that Eskimos were forced to move south to Scotland, while native Scots had to leave their homeland in search of warmer climates. While across the Atlantic, New York harbour froze so solid that people could walk over the ice to Staten Island.

‘A hundred years later, all of Europe was still struggling with intense cold. France suffered its iciest winter of the eighteenth century in 1788, causing massive crop failure and starvation. The famines caused chaos and panic as hungry crowds flooded into Paris demanding affordable bread. Everyone knows Marie Antoinette’s famous response to that, “Let them eat cake”. But what most people don’t know is that the crisis was climate-related. Just a year later, France exploded into violent revolution, and it wasn’t long before about a dozen governments elsewhere in Europe collapsed. Only after 1850 did the sun finally start to make a real comeback, resulting in a period of relative warming that’s lasted, with a few minor blips, right until the present day.’

Ben was remembering that there was one more date in the sequence in Catalina’s research notes that hadn’t been mentioned yet.

It was the year 2016.

‘What about now?’ he asked her.

‘Nothing stops these natural cycles from turning,’ she said. ‘And remember that a thousand years, or ten thousand, or a million, are just the blink of an eye to the vast forces that govern us. What happened in history will continue to happen in modern times, now and into the future. For instance, we can link the extremely cold European winters of 2010 and 2011 to low solar activity affecting the North Atlantic Oscillation. We know that solar ultraviolet radiation influences the position of the jet streams on Earth, and hence controls much of the climate. Any small change in the intensity of the sun can have a major effect. It’s got nothing, I repeat nothing, to do with CO₂. And at this point in history we can’t say it has anything to do with global warming, either. Because the world isn’t warming. It’s getting colder. And it’s going to continue getting colder for a very long time.’

Catalina paused. There was a solemn look in her eyes that made Ben narrow his. She hadn’t finished yet. Something more was coming. Something worse.

‘… How much colder?’ Raul asked after a beat.

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ Catalina said.