The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3052 by Angharad Copyright© 2016 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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Diane and I managed to get the paperwork up to date but she told me that Hancock had phoned twice while I was out. “I nearly gave him your mobile number.”

The look of pure hatred I offered her made her giggle and blush. “You hair looks nice.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, Simon rang to remind you of the directors meeting tomorrow.”

“I hadn’t forgotten,” I lied. “See it’s in my diary.” I waved it around, it wasn’t in there at all but it would be as soon as Miss Clever Clogs went back to her own desk.

“So you know about the report?”

“What report?”

“The environmental one for the meeting.”

I had that awful sinking feeling in my gut. Since when did I have to do a report? I sent her to make some tea and while she was out I altered my diary inserting the meeting, I also phoned my assistant. She confirmed that I was due to make a report to the board. Shit—what do I do? Flash of inspiration. I got her to check if we were doing anything with foreign governments in South America. She phoned me back half an hour later and promised to send me an email with the details.

It was three o’clock and I had to go and collect the urchins from school, I’d also have to do the report. Back at the house I annoyed the girls by not giving them much attention. Jacquie was home from her classes early so she gave them drinks and a biscuit and also made me some tea while I rushed to my study and booted up the computer.

The stuff from the office was just what I needed. It appeared we had loaned so much to Brazil but were contemplating another loan of a hundred million pounds. The interest they were paying was good but the new loans were being requested for dam building.

There are 191 dams finished and another 246 in progress or being planned for the production of cheap hydroelectric power. I found several papers via the university library which gave some idea of the environmental damage these dams were causing and gave some list of the species affected and how the problem could be improved by encouraging them to invest in solar and wind power. A paper in Biodiversity and Conservation quoted figures of the official costs but then gave the actual costs of some of the dams, which were frequently double the projections and produced less electricity than they were planned to do.

The damage in terms of loss of endangered or vulnerable species was catastrophic and while I understood how much they wanted the relatively cheap electricity, the mining, especially for aluminium ores and gold, were going to add even more pollution to both the atmosphere and water—both use large amounts of water as well as energy.

Dams apparently also add methane to the atmosphere, one of the most active greenhouse gases, presumably because the still water above the dam causes rotting of vegetation and of course the flooding in the reservoirs to power the turbines in the dams.

The flooding also causes what was forest to split up into small islands of vegetation which are isolated and thus over a period become unable to sustain themselves in terms of the mix of animals and vegetation. The reduced flows also means things like dusky swallows, who nest behind waterfalls will have nowhere to breed and many water species from fish to dolphins will be affected too. Some fish only breed in one specific area of the river, sometimes in rapids. With 80% of the water flow reduced, it certainly doesn’t bode well.

I wrote the paper quite quickly and sent it off to Henry’s secretary, my conclusions were essentially did we as a bank want to become associated with such catastrophic damage to Amazonia? The decision wasn’t mine but the board’s as they had to approve the loans as they were so big. Me, I’d be voting against, but I’m an ecologist not an economist. I also feel more sympathy for the planet than I do for the shareholders.

The basic problem is there are about five billion too many people on the planet for it not to be at further risk by future population figures rising. It will mean more wars for resources especially as water will become scarcer as will food as global climate change continues to rise towards the 15C point.

I explained what this meant. The solar energy we receive from the sun is pretty constant and is used as a constant in calculating how the global temperature is made. Basically, apart from a small amount of geothermal energy, which is virtually negligible, all the heat comes from the sun. Some of it reflects back off the land, the sea and the ice caps and how the greenhouse effect happens is that carbon dioxide and the other gases deflect the reflection back from the atmosphere to the earth. Without any atmosphere the mean surface temperature of the earth would be -18C, so clearly some atmosphere is essential for most things to live or we’d be living in a frozen snowball. During the ice age, the albedo—the amount of energy reflected back from the earth was 0.8 current rates are 0.3, the highest reflections coming from the ice caps and least from the oceans, which is not good as the earth is 80% covered in water.

So we have energy coming from the sun which is radiated back from the earth and much of which is then reflected back to the earth by the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, water vapour, ozone and nitrous oxide which effectively act like a glass house retaining the heat taking the mean surface temperature of the earth from -18C to +15C. If it gets much hotter, then the ice caps will melt and thus reflect less heat back, the seas will rise flooding low lying lands and the cycle of increasing heat will worsen because the sea temperatures rising will liberate massive amounts of methane currently stored below them, there will also be methane from melting of permafrost in places like Siberia and weather cycles will become more chaotic with flash floods or prolonged droughts. Also places like the North American prairies are likely to dry out and so food production will be affected not to mention national economies.

A major volcanic eruption would pause the mechanism for a short while, as would a nuclear war by creating a nuclear winter with dust in the atmosphere but unless we reduce the greenhouse effect future generations are going to be severely hampered by chaotic climate and probably chaotic politics as well as nations go to war for basic resources. It certainly doesn’t bode well for humanity in the next century.

The cause is carbon in the atmosphere and the fact that it’s happened so quickly shows it’s anthropogenic. Somehow, despite my impassioned presentation to the board I’ll bet they still vote to loan the money to Brazil—after all money is much more important than life, isn’t it? Doh.