The Cassandra Sanction

Chapter Forty-Seven

‘Don’t take my word for it,’ Catalina said to Ben and Raul. ‘Look at this.’ Returning to the computer, she clicked out of the graph they’d been looking at, and in a few deft moves brought up another.

‘Here we are.’ She stepped away from the screen to let them move closer.

The graph showed an exaggerated wavelike pattern of wild spikes that had been smoothed out into a single swooping up-and-down curve that stretched across a range of year dates starting in 1985 and ending at the present day, a little over thirty years. Ben immediately noticed that the line formed three distinct peaks, diminishing in size from left to right. The first covered the years 1985 to 1996 and was by far the tallest, surging all the way to the top of the graph. The middle peak covered the period from 1996 to 2007 and was far less pronounced, perhaps two-thirds of the height of the first. The third peak, for the years 2008 to the present, was much smaller again, no more than a third of the size of the first. Ben could clearly make out an eleven-year cycle in the pattern, but the overall trend was very obviously one of radical decrease. Decrease in what, he had no idea.

But he had a feeling Catalina was about to enlighten him.

‘This is a graph of sunspot numbers over the last three decades,’ she explained. ‘It’s based on my own research, but it’s virtually identical to what NASA have. You’d have to be blind not to see how the sunspots have declined dramatically during this period. Their numbers are falling through the floor. And now that you guys understand the connection between solar activity and climate, you should be able to tell what’s going on here, yes?’

‘You’re telling us we’re entering a new Solar Minimum,’ Raul said between gritted teeth.

Catalina shook her head. ‘I’m not telling you anything. This is not a matter of opinion. The scientific facts are more than able to speak for themselves. But you don’t have to study technical data to see what’s happening. All you have to do is look around you with open eyes. The truth is out there, if you’re prepared to find it.’

She turned towards the window and swept a slender arm westwards towards the horizon. ‘Look at North America, for instance,’ she said, gazing in that direction as if she had a commanding view for seven thousand miles from the top of the lighthouse, clear across the tail end of southern Europe and the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘Nobody who’s lived through the last few winters in the USA would be hard to persuade that it’s getting colder, year on year. Minus two degrees Celsius in Pensacola, Florida, last January, for God’s sake. Land of emerald golf courses, palm trees and white-sand beaches. Cut up the Eastern Seaboard to Boston, and you’ve got the all-time snowfall recorded there in winter 2015. Meanwhile, waves froze solid off Cape Cod and mini-icebergs landed ashore. In the same winter, ice cover on the Great Lakes reached over eighty-eight percent higher than the previous year’s already high figure. In April, fifteen cargo freighters became icebound on Lake Superior and had to be rescued by icebreakers. That’s a main commercial shipping route between the US and Canada. Unheard of, so late in the year. And for the first time ever in modern history, that month it was possible to walk for fifty miles across Lake Huron in Ontario. And it’s not just North America. Sweden is having its coldest winters in over a century. Britain has recorded its lowest temperatures in a hundred and twenty years. All over the world, glacial ice fields have started to grow again, something that’s been confirmed by NASA. Glaciers are growing on Mont Blanc. Signs of the same happening on Ben Nevis in Scotland. The Brüggen Glacier in Chile continuing to thicken. Antarctic sea ice expanding to record levels, despite our being told the icecap had reached a melting point of no return…’

‘Those aren’t exactly warm countries you just mentioned,’ Raul said. ‘Now who’s cherry-picking the facts?’

‘You want warm countries? Fine. How about South Korea? A subtropical climate that in 2011 saw record-breaking snowfall way beyond anything that they’d experienced for a century or more. The following year, snow fell in all nine provinces of South Africa on the same day, for the first time ever. Snow hadn’t been seen in Pretoria since the sixties. Needless to say, that incident wasn’t reported in much of the global media. Then the next year after that, snow fell in Cairo for the first time in, guess how long?’

‘A century, I get it,’ Raul said grudgingly.

‘While in Lebanon, the army had to be called out to distribute emergency provisions and blankets to freezing Syrian refugees as snow covered much of the Middle East. Winter 2015 was even worse. Freezing temperatures, snow and ice from Turkey to Jordan. Blizzards in Jerusalem. Babies freezing to death in the Gaza Strip. You could go sledging in the Sahara, or build a snowman in the Libyan Desert.’

‘All right, all right,’ Raul said, holding up his hands in submission. ‘You made your point. So it might get a bit colder for a while. Is it really such a big issue?’

‘You only have to look at history to answer that. Human populations are alarmingly vulnerable to even small drops in temperature. It doesn’t take much to seriously disrupt the fragile order of a society that’s become heavily reliant on mild climates and has come to take them for granted. Even a few degrees’ difference will expose all the weaknesses of our civilisation.’

‘But you said yourself, these things are cyclical,’ Raul said. ‘It won’t last forever. Pretty soon things will come back round to the way they were before. No?’

Catalina shrugged. ‘Assuming we can rely on the cycles endlessly repeating themselves in the same old way, then maybe. Yes. But we can’t. It’s not that simple.’

Raul looked at her. ‘It’s not that simple?’

‘No, because that would require that all the factors in the equation remain constant, forever. And that’s simply not the case. There’s a problem. Quite a big problem, for us.’

‘What problem?’

‘The sun,’ Catalina said, pointing upwards. ‘Events are happening up there that we’ve never seen before. I believe that’s why we’re seeing this disturbing decline in the solar cycles.’

‘But you told us that it was normal for sunspot numbers to vary up and down,’ Raul said.

‘I know I did,’ Catalina replied, going back to the computer. ‘But that isn’t the whole picture. Let me show you another graph.’

‘Please, not another graph,’ Raul groaned.

‘Are you a moron?’ she asked him.

‘No,’ he said, stung.

‘Then you’ll understand it just fine. It’s really not that difficult. Now look.’ She clicked a few more times, then waved them closer to show what had come up onscreen. The scientific graph was labelled ‘Estimated Planetary K Index’. It was a black grid crisscrossed by broken white lines, with the last four days’ dates along the bottom and the numbers one to nine vertically up the left side. Unlike the others, instead of zigzags or waves this one had only a row of bright green bars, like stunted high-rise buildings in a line, some higher than others but none reaching higher than the number 2 mark on the vertical axis.

Like the others, it was incomprehensible to Ben.

Catalina quickly explained, ‘This is data compiled from the magnetometers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. I preferred to compile my own data, back in the days when I still had the facilities…’ She sighed. ‘But these folks are close enough to the mark to provide good working figures. Anyway, as you can see, this is very fresh data. Don’t worry too much about the readings, just look at these little green bars here. They should be way up the graph, but they’re down here.’ She shook her head, as if she was surveying the aftermath of some terrible disaster. ‘It’s been like this for a while now. We confirmed the findings with our own Zeeman Effect research. That’s when you use a spectrometer to split up the spectral lines on the sun. The stronger the magnetic field, the wider the separation of the lines. All we could see were lines so close together they were almost touching.’

‘Wow, that made sense,’ Raul said.

‘And you’re saying all this is unusual?’ Ben asked Catalina.

Catalina gave Ben the same solemn look she’d given them before. ‘That would be something of an understatement. It’s unprecedented. And it’s very, very bad news.’

‘Elaborate,’ Ben said. He had the feeling that, after having led them through the logical process step by step, Catalina was finally ready to get to the nub of the matter.

‘Haven’t we elaborated enough already?’ Raul muttered.

Catalina ignored her brother. ‘Let me boil this down for you. We have two processes happening at once, closely interlinked. One, as I’ve explained, is that sunspot numbers are declining. Which could be normal, as Raul pointed out. The second, which this graph and other research consistently show, is that while the sunspots are becoming much fewer, they’re also becoming much weaker. Their average magnetic field strength is rapidly declining, by about fifty Gauss per year if you want to be specific about it. And with them, the entire magnetic field strength of the sun is dwindling. Which is definitely not something we’ve seen it do before, but is in keeping with its age. You see, our sun is a middle-aged star. Past its prime. It’s gradually becoming weaker, losing its power.’

‘Stars become senile now?’ Raul said, half grinning.

‘It’s perfectly natural,’ Catalina explained. ‘When a star like our sun gets older, just like a living organism it begins to experience physical changes. For one, it begins to rotate more slowly. Some scientists believe that rotation and activity might decrease with the square root of a star’s age, a theory I happen to agree with. If you think of it as a giant electromagnetic dynamo, you can imagine how a slowdown in its rotation would lead to a loss of energy. And when the process begins to happen, it can take a hold quite quickly. A lot of stars similar to our sun have suffered a significant loss of luminosity in just a few years. Tau Ceti and 54 Piscium are two examples of that happening.’

Ben recognised the names from her research notes. ‘And that’s what ours is doing, too?’ he asked. He looked up at the sun, and had to shield his eyes with his hand. It looked pretty damn bright to him. But then, what did he know?

Catalina nodded. ‘I’m afraid so, yes. Another way we can tell when the sun is entering a very quiet phase is when there’s an increase in GCRs, or galactic cosmic rays, which come from faraway parts of our galaxy and perhaps from other galaxies as well. When the sun’s energy dips, solar wind decreases—’

‘Solar wind?’ Raul interrupted, still in facetious mode. ‘Wind from the sun? I never felt anything.’

Catalina shot him a look. ‘It’s not really a wind, that’s just what we call it. It’s a stream of electrically charged particles that make up something called the heliosphere, which we’re right in the middle of and which interacts with Earth’s magnetic field causing electrical phenomena like auroras. When it decreases in strength, it allows more of these galactic cosmic rays to enter our atmosphere, which causes all kinds of disruption. Screwing up satellites, for one. Right now, GCRs have reached the highest levels ever recorded. NASA has reported having more single-event satellite upsets than ever before. Then there’s the data from the GSCB.’

‘You people have more acronyms than the military,’ Ben said.

‘It stands for Great Solar Conveyor Belt. A huge circular current of very hot plasma within the sun. Consisting of two branches, one north and one south. Each of these takes about forty years to complete one circuit. It’s thought that the turning of this belt controls the sunspot cycle. Normally, the belt should rotate at one metre per second. I could show you more graphs—’

‘No,’ Raul said.

‘—Which illustrate how the belt’s motion has decelerated by up to sixty-five percent. NASA data confirms that it’s slowed to a record crawl. In fact, they’ve known about it for some time. They held an emergency conference in 2008 that confirmed it. Now, as the solar conveyor belt slows down, the solar wind will get weaker and weaker. One thing leads to another. More galactic cosmic rays will enter our atmosphere, and as well as damaging satellites they’ll also produce more cloud cover, which in turn will make the climate colder. A vicious circle, in effect. The more our star slows and weakens, the less of its energy reaches Earth. Are you following this? I’m making it as simple as I can.’

‘Go on,’ Ben said.

‘There’s nothing we can do to stop the process. Like a battery running down. Once its energy is sapped, you just have to replace it. Except that we can’t replace the sun’s energy, and that’s why we can’t simply rely on the ages-old cycle coming round again. Like I said, this is an unprecedented event, with serious implications for us all. As serious as it gets.’

‘You’re saying the sun is dying?’ Raul burst out.

‘Everything has to die some time,’ she replied.

‘Okay, everyone knows it can’t last forever. But that doesn’t happen for billions of years.’

‘One billion, give or take,’ Catalina said. ‘In its final stages the sun will give out one last great gasp of energy. It’ll become brighter and bigger, scorching the Earth to a cinder and boiling the oceans away to nothing. Then as it swells up even more, becoming a Red Giant, its mass will swallow up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, the nearer planets in the solar system, or what’s left of them. Then its core will collapse as it finally dies. Ultimately it’ll end up as a lifeless, cold lump of carbon that we call a Black Dwarf.’

‘Right, so we still have a very, very long time,’ Raul said, waving his arms around. ‘You said yourself, millions and millions of years are just a blink of an eye in the big scheme of things. Who knows what amazing technology we could have by then, so we could escape this solar system and go and find another one that still has plenty of life left in it?’

Catalina gazed at him sadly. ‘That’s just a wishful fantasy, Raul. The sun will go through many, many stages of evolution before any of that happens. What may be about to happen will be just one of them. And if I’m right, that could be all it takes.’

He blinked. ‘All it takes for what?’

‘All it takes to finish us,’ she said. ‘To bring about the end.’

Raul’s jaw dropped. ‘The end? The end?’

‘I’m not talking about the transient periods of cold climate that resulted from historical solar cycles. I’m not even talking about something like the last major Glacial Period, twelve thousand years ago. We came through that and survived. No. I’m talking about the very real possibility that the current solar cycle could be about to lead us into an ice age of the kind that hasn’t happened for an extremely long time. It could be a repeat of the Cryogenian Glaciation eight hundred million years ago, when the whole planet was covered in a layer of ice up to two kilometres thick. Snowball Earth, we call it. A super ice age lasting perhaps thousands of years. Certainly spelling the demise of human civilisation as we know it. Very probably, the end of human life altogether.’

There was a silent lull in the room. Ben could hear the distant crashing of the breakers. Now he could understand why Catalina had built up to it so gradually. This kind of revelation wasn’t something you could feed to the uninitiated in one bite.

Raul stared at his sister. ‘Have you lost your mind? This is crazy talk.’

She shrugged. ‘We wouldn’t be the first species to become extinct as a result of catastrophic climate change.’

‘When? How soon?’

‘Projected timescale? I can’t say for sure,’ she replied. ‘Based on the scientific facts, it could be as soon as a hundred years from now.’

‘A hundred?’ Ben said.

‘Or even less,’ Catalina replied, in absolute earnest. ‘Of course, it wouldn’t happen overnight. It’s not as if we’d all waken up one day to find glaciers popped up in our front gardens, out of nowhere. The change will be gradual, taking over the planet bit by bit, degree by degree. Winters will start to get longer, summers shorter. There’ll still be sunny days. But slowly, even those will disappear. That’s when the bad times will really begin.’

Nobody spoke.

‘Christ, you’re really serious about this, aren’t you?’ Ben said after a long moment.

‘And I’m not the only one who takes it seriously,’ Catalina replied. ‘Someone out there knows it’s true and will do anything to stop it getting out. That’s why they want to shut me up. That’s why they want me dead.’