PETER MAY on The Inspiration and Research behind A WINTER'S GRAVE

The CO‰P26 climate conference in Glasgow

I read and watched the coverage of The COP26 climate conference with a growing sense of disbelief. Just three months earlier the IPCC (the United Nations Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) had published their scariest prediction yet - that on current carbon emissions we were set to reach a 1.5º Celsius increase in global temperatures within the next two decades, leading to catastrophic environmental disaster.

Disbelief turned to anger as governments from around the world caved in to commercial interests and failed to set the required targets to avoid the unthinkable. The kind of short-termism that would have appalled our ancestors, who planned cities and their infrastructure, cathedrals and other building projects that would take generations to complete. Our current crop of politicians was selling out the future of our children and grandchildren for profit today.

Little wonder, then, that the conference chairman, Alok Sharma, fought to hold back the tears as he apologised for the abject failure of the world to act.

CLIMATE CHANGE

I felt I needed to know more about climate change - what was causing it, why did some people doubt it, what the world would be like in thirty years if we didn’t act now.

So employing all the skills I had learned as a journalist in another life, I embarked on a major research project. It took me three months. I read countless reports, watched hundreds of videos, interviewed a leading light in the IPCC, and endeavoured to keep as open a mind as possible.

But what I learned not only scared me and filled me with sadness for the future of our species and our planet, it infused me with a fury I find hard to describe.

Because the very people who are poisoning our atmosphere - the fossil fuel industry - know exactly what they doing. They have known about the effects of burning fossil fuels since an Exxon scientist in 1981 revealed the truth in a report that rocked his company. Not only did Exxon endeavour to bury his findings, they convened a conference to determine a strategy for casting doubt on the scientific evidence behind it.

THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

The big energy companies are making staggering amounts of money extracting fossil fuels from our planet, refining and shipping them to every corner of the earth. Unfortunately, they are also poisoning us.

In the second quarter of 2022, Exxon Mobil made a profit of $18 billion. Shell and Chevron each made nearly $12 billion. Others have also reported record figures. The war in Ukraine has only served to drive energy prices higher, making those companies even more profitable.

For the past 50 years the oil industry as a whole has made profits of more than $1 trillion a year. That’s nearly $3 billion a day. Enough money to corrupt politicians, cause wars, and shape public opinion through massively funded propaganda campaigns - sowing doubt through fossil-fuel funded junk journalism, and financing right-wing think tanks to produce reports that pour skepticism on scientific evidence.

As a result, many people have been persuaded that climate change is scaremongering by the Left, even a hoax by the Chinese. They have been told that the move away from fossil fuels towards renewable energies is going to destroy their way of life - a way of life shaped and fuelled by oil and gas. And large swathes of the population are now so determined to protect their “way of life” that they are only too eager to ignore and dispute the very thing that actually threatens it most - climate change.

A CLIMATE CHANGE PRECIS

Climate change, in its detail, is a complex subject, but in essence is quite simple. Human activity is pumping greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon and methane, into the atmosphere at a rate which the planet simply cannot re-absorb. These gasses trap the heat of the sun, like a greenhouse, and are increasing the temperature of the globe. As the air warms, more of our oceans evaporate, and the subsequent water

vapour in the atmosphere escalates the greenhouse effect. The ice at the poles melts in increasing quantities, reducing the covering of snow and ice there which serve to reflect the heat of the sun away from the planet. It’s a vicious cycle, a positive feedback loop, that will only get worse unless emissions are reduced and the Earth is given a chance to rebalance.

The skeptics will argue that human activity accounts for much less Co2 than is naturally produced by the planet itself. Which is true. Natural land and ocean processes produce far more. But they also reabsorb it, a system that was in balance until the industrial revolution came along, powered by the burning of fossil fuels.

A NEW BOOK?

The more I learned, the more alarmed I became, and realised that this was something I had to write about.

But I’m a crime thriller writer. And I didn’t want to preach to my readers, or bombard them with endless figures and scary predictions. So how to write about this? That was the question that I found myself wrestling with.

I ran many scenarios through my mind, and they all kept leading me back to the same solution. Rather than writing about climate change alone, I would write a classic thriller, set in my home country - Scotland. But I would set it almost thirty years from now, in a world transformed by a changing climate. It would be the background to story.

The scenario I chose as the climate background for the book almost certainly goes against the grain of expectation. But it is one of several possible futures faced by the planet, and on the basis of my research, one of the most likely.

Remember my book, “Lockdown”, written 15 years before Covid? I predicted a world living with a viral pandemic, and 15 years later was shown to have got almost every detail of it right.

In writing a book set 30 years in the future, I faced other problems - primarily in predicting the advances in technology that would affect our daily lives. Transport andcommunications were top of the list.

TRANSPORT

The future of transport will almost certainly be driven by electricity and green hydrogen (hydrogen produced with renewable energies). I was intrigued by the development of what have become known as eVTOLs - electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles. In other words, grown-up drones, or electric helicopters.

The first prototypes have already been produced. There are one-and-two-person private vehicles. And an array of much larger passenger drones. The eVTOL in the book, which is called “Eve”, was based on an air-taxi produced by an American company, Joby Aviation (https://www.jobyaviation.com). It has six rotors that swivel from the horizontal to the vertical and can seat five. Producing zero emissions it is fast, quiet and reliable and is already achieving a flight range of 150 kilometres, which can only grow over the coming decades. Many other companies are producing similar.

COMMUNICATIONS

Likewise, phone companies are working on the next generation mobile phones, which are moving away from handheld devices to communicators we wear like spectacles, allowing us to receive and send videos as well as audio. Some companies are even developing prototypes that function purely by the power of our thoughts. https://www.androidauthority.com/amp/future-phones-927528/

If this were possible, using smartphones would be a lot faster. You would no longer have to search for an app to open it, or tap a screen. You could perform any task in a heartbeat just by thinking it. Motorola is even developing phones that can recharge themselves simply by being in proximity to a charging transmitter.

In “A Winter Grave”, police have just been issued with the latest in mobile communications - the iCom. It is voice rather than mind controlled, is worn like glasses, sends and receives video and audio and can identify anyone you direct your gaze at with facial recognition software.

VIRTUAL FLIGHTS

I chose a location I already knew - Kinlochleven, at the head of Loch Leven in the West Highlands of Scotland. As I developed my story, I wanted more intimate details about the location up high which I couldn’t reach, so I had drone footage shot of the area.

I also used a Microsoft Flight simulator (https://www.flightsimulator.com) to programme passenger drone flights that myprimary character makes in the book - from Helensburgh to Mull, and through Glencoe to Loch Leven. The simulator uses Bing satellite maps to get a realistic contour map and surface details for the flights, and in that way I was able to experience them for myself (in winter conditions), fully immersed in a VR headset. I was even able to fly to the top of the mountain that dominates the loch, Binnein Mòr, and swoop down into the north-facing corrie where the body is found at the beginning of the book.

MY CLIMATE SCENARIO

Air and sea temperatures are generally distributed around the globe by a circulation of surface and deep-sea currents known as the Thermohaline Circulation.

Warm water from the Gulf of Mexico moves up the east coast of America before heading off north-east across the Atlantic. As it moves east its heat is dissipated to the surrounding areas, i.e. Europe, making the near continent much warmer than it should be. Without it, Scotland, for example, would be much colder, sharing similar weather to Alaska which is at the same latitude.

THE CHIMNEYS

The Gulf Stream moves 100 million cubic metres of water per second, and when it becomes too cold and salty all that water starts to sink. It sinks down around four kilometres in what are known as chimneys - each of which is about 15 kilometres wide. Once there it starts to travel south, touring the world’s ocean beds and taking anything up to 1500 years to return to the surface - the Thermohaline Circulation.

The process of sinking water in the North Atlantic is know as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. And this is a process that will continue as long as the two driving forces involved remain in balance - temperature and salinity.

But human activity is messing with both those things on a global scale. Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, and other factors, are causing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere to change, pushing up the temperature of the earth. Warmer air temperatures at higher latitudes make the water there warmer, too. And therefore less dense. So the water in the AMOC doesn’t sink as readily in the chimneys. But also, warmer temperatures mean melting ice, and as ice in the Arctic Ocean and Greenland melt, they flood the North Atlantic with huge quantities of fresh water, lowering the salinity even further, and making the water even less likely to sink.

For the conveyor belt of ocean currents to work, the waters of the North Atlantic must be cold and salty. But climate change is making them warmer and less salty, slowing the circulation of water - and, in the worst case scenario, causing it to shut down. A study published in 2015 showed that the Thermohaline Circulation has slowed by 15 to 20 percent in the last two hundred years.

If the AMOC were to end, or drastically slow down, there would be no more giant waterfalls, no more warm water heading north-west across the Atlantic. The heat around the equator would tend to be retained there, making it hotter than it is now. There would be droughts, storms. Agriculture would be devastated. By contrast, without ocean currents carrying warm water north, the higher latitudes would become much colder.

In my scenario, rapidly rising temperatures in the Arctic, which are increasing at four times the rate of the rest of the world, have melted the Greenland Ice Sheet more quickly than anyone predicted. As a result the Gulf Stream has ground to a halt, or at the very least drastically slowed down, causing tumbling temperatures in the most northerly parts of Europe.

THE JET STREAM

The Jet Stream - an air flow created by warm air from the south colliding with cooler air from the north - has been deformed into peaks and troughs by

extreme temperatures rising from the Equator. The peaks pull up hot air creating heatwaves and unstable, stormy weather in southern Europe, while the troughs drag down ice cold air from a donut of freezing air circulating high above the Arctic, known as the Polar Vortex, creating icy conditions in the north.

Remember the “Beast from the East”? That was caused by a trough in the Jet Stream, dragging Arctic air down over northern Europe.

SEA-LEVELS

In “A Winter Grave”, Scotland is experiencing much colder, wetter summers, and freezing winters, with more snow and frequent ice storms, while at the same time the Equator and sub-Saharan Africa have become uninhabitably hot.

Sea levels have risen by a metre and more, and combined with storm surges, have created devastating flooding around the world.

To predict exactly how Scotland might be affected by this in 2051, I used an online coastal risk screening tool, which allowed me to enter factors, including date and Co2 emission forecasts.

In truth, Scotland escapes relatively lightly because of its topography. Large parts of England are not so lucky, and many other parts of the world are completely submerged.

Imagining the rise in sea levels at a global level (largely due to melting ice), raised the question of what would happen to the populations in all those coastal cities and settlements. Around 40 percent of the world’s population live within 100 kilometres of the sea. And it is estimated that expected coastal flooding could displace 2 billion people or more.

That’s a lot of homeless people to be on the move. Mass migration into countries already struggling to feed their own populations because of an agriculture devastated by climate change, will almost certainly lead to immigration wars. It is a topic explored in an excellent book by Dr. Parag Khanna, “Move: How Mass Migration Will Reshape The World And What It Means For You”, with Dr Khanna recently interviewed and the book reviewed in The Herald.

Finally…

CARBON BOMBS

A carbon bomb is an oil or gas project which will result in at least a billion tonnes of Co2 emissions over its lifetime.

There are currently 195 such projects in the works, with the dozen biggest players in the fossil fuel industry planning to spend at least $103 million a day on exploiting new oil and gas fields. Together they will produce around 646 gigatons of Co2 (a gigaton is one billion metric tons). New fracking projects in the US alone will release 140 billion metric tons of planet-heating gases over their lifetimes - which is four times more than the entire world produced in 2021.

These people have to be stopped. And if our politicians won’t do it, then it is up to us, if we want any kind of a future for our children and our grandchildren.

I felt that I couldn’t write a book set in a future affected by climate change without fully understanding the scientific rationale behind it. I know this is a lengthy document, but I hope it goes some way to explaining the solid science behind my fiction.

I don’t claim that my prediction for 2051 will come to pass, only that it might. Many scientists believe we have already passed the tipping point, beyond which there will be no going back for our planet or our species. I take the view that if we take drastic action now, it might not yet be too late. It’s why I wrote the book.

A WINTER GRAVE