Tuilaepa looked down at the planet. As always, the swirling mass of weather systems held her at the window – this view, the ultimate prize for her six-year, double degree in Meteorology and Planetary Sciences, her application and successful recruitment into Australia’s arm of the International Climate Institute, further years of post-graduate study and research, and finally the pay-off, selected to serve a twelve-month stint aboard the Aristotle international met station.
She had flown from Woomera, with a week spent adjusting to weightlessness at the International Space Station, then the tricky wire transfer across to the Aristotle, involving a mathematically precise alignment of the two orbits, followed by astronautical gee wizardry.
Her tasks involved monitoring, recording and reporting Earth’s increasingly unstable weather patterns. Her three companions shared a common background, all Climatologists, all rostered to compile the three-hourly observational log, the information transferred down simultaneously to the twenty, planetary-based met stations, used to direct and coordinate PESA, the Planetary Emergency Services Agency, in their never-ending confrontations with climate-induced catastrophe.
Tuilaepa reflected often upon the stories she had heard from her grandmother, about the Pacific nation of her forebears. That time before the Water-Terrors, that time when tidal surges moved across her country, drowning the villages, whole families, the gardens; that heralded forced migration, a resettlement into Far North Queensland, and labelled taunts of ‘reffos’. Other low-lying populations had fled to New Zealand, some to China, others to the US.
It was a resettlement carrying significant social disquiet, met in many quarters with antagonism, violence, and disputation, as their new ‘homelands’ meant displacement for others. History’s pages were littered with similar upheavals.
The world stage had been turned on its head. Almost all of the large, coastal cities suffered inundations, catastrophic dislocations of infrastructure, and major social upheavals. It was continuing to impact hundreds of millions of people. Coastal farmlands had been lost to saltwater intrusion. The pressure on elevated land for new residential and commercial development had become intense. Food security was one of several new battlegrounds.
The water wars of last century have transmogrified into bitterly contested Elevated Territorial disputes. The concept of national governments had largely dissolved into racially-identified, vigilante cohorts, heavily armed terrorist groups, organised and with the unofficial backing from industrial oligarchs.
The polar caps, the Greenland ice sheet and most of the planet’s glacial topography had gone a generation ago, a geopolitical map of the 2200 planet, now looked like large mice had been chewing the continental coastlands of yore. There were expanded estuaries along the major river systems, most of the Amazon Basin had gone, Sydney’s Vaucluse was now on an island, and a new Gulf of Mexico coastline offered sea views along Baton Rouge’s esplanades.
The Planetary Government, formed after the collapse, last century of the United Nations, was taking a belatedly keen, some would say desperate rear-guard action to salvage humanity’s wherewithal. Their sponsorship of the work that Tuilaepa did, just one of a number of initiatives being adopted to try and generate planetary-warming’s reversal.