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Quote by Kirsten McDougall

“I knew that my ambivalence about the emergency annoyed her. The problem with emergencies was that the longer they went on, the more they just felt like normal life.”

Quote by Kirsten McDougall

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She's a Killer

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Kirsten McDougall

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“The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen.”

“The Amazon forests?” Webb asked, opening the medicine box. He looked at the label, then put a med patch on his arm. “Yes, yes, the forests. Mostly gone, turned into savannah and gold mines and palm oil plantations and beef ranches. Oh yes. The natural moisture pump is gone, don’t you know? Far more moisture gathers out over the sea instead, along with the growing heat, and that increases wind shear. And then . . . then . . . Why, the Gulf Stream weakening as the ice caps melt . . . Of course, that’s a good way north of here but it’s all one system, domino effect of weather cells, do you see . . .” His eyes lost focus; his voice drifted away.”

“You haven’t been here that long. Just wait. I don’t go for it either, but who’s in charge of Stormland, really? The perpetual storm system is! We crawl around under it hoping it doesn’t stomp us. These people feel like they’ve got to appease it. Easy to get superstitious in all that. Desperate people can go for magical thinking pretty easily, Webb.” After a thoughtful pause, he went on, “A lot of folks around here believe that one day the storms will pass. From what I’ve heard, it might take a century for the cycle to finally stop. The storm system here is—it’s like the red spot on Jupiter, with what we’ve done to the planet. The big storm had to settle somewhere.”

“While we ate, mostly in silence, I marveled at how the world worked today. Here a woman could worry about her husband cheating on her while just two hundred miles inland there was a mass exodus of disaster refugees headed north to a Canada that might take them in. A “sanctuary” where aquifers and other water sources were drying up. In the Midwest, privatized security forces were brawling with protestors in the streets of small towns. Disease outbreaks had lead to mass slaughter of affected livestock. While stocks remained bullish about the future even as the window for reversing climate change had shrunk to an unreachable dot.”