Work Text:
I closed my email to take a lap around the floor. There was no way they actually funded my proposal. No fucking way my first big-girl proposal got funded. And with the Petrova line? There had to be a mistake.
But when I got back to my computer and reopened my email, it was still there, that automatic email from the interagency panel that had been set up to understand the Petrova line.
This was going to make for great news at dinner! Ryland had ended up pretty happy switching to teaching after his postdoc exploded spectacularly a few years ago, and I loved hearing about his kids. On the other hand, I had extended my own postdoc before landing a DOE gig, wherein I promptly switched to bemoaning how hard it was to get project funding every time we met for dinner. Being in a position that was a mixture of salary and soft funding was great for ensuring I consistently had benefits like health insurance, but sucked when your car broke down between projects and none of your colleagues needed an extra data analyst.
I looked at the email in more detail. Attached to it was something I didn’t expect though. Some sort of additional letter specific to this call, to my proposal. I opened it and read.
Dear Dr. Marissa Summers,
Congratulations on your proposal’s selection in this special call. While the Petrova Interagency Effort (PIE) is actively committed to open science, due to the sensitive nature of research associated with the Petrova line and the related potential impacts, this grant award comes with additional stipulations beyond normal, which are detailed below. Should you agree to these conditions, negotiation of your award with your institution will proceed as normal. You may also decline to abide by these additional conditions, which will forfeit the award but have no other consequences on other proposals you may have under review with any participating agency.
I reread the paragraph. What did ‘additional stipulations’ mean? Yeah, it was a special call for the Petrova line, but I was still proposing pretty basic science.
When rereading the first paragraph didn’t yield any answers, I kept reading.
Until peer reviewed by the science team consisting of other awardees from this call, all methods and results should be considered confidential and should not be shared beyond the science team unless you obtain prior approval.
I felt my chest deflate as I read that paragraph. I had finally gotten a grant award as the lead PI, but I’d barely be able to tell anyone about it. I had no doubt that the project managers had good reasons for this. There were bound to be other proposals that needed careful handling. It still sucked that I wouldn’t be able to talk about my work.
By the time I next met Ryland for dinner, I had decided against telling him about the award. It just wasn’t worth the questions I knew I’d get from him about it that I wouldn’t be allowed to answer.
The next few months were a flurry of research and meetings. Turned out PIE was part of a bigger intergovernmental initiative, but I could never get the full story out of my project manager. I just knew we were getting data not just from NASA but half of the world’s space agencies. For all the paperwork we had to do confirming that we’d keep our science within PIE, PIE got us a lot of data from other countries that had set up similar initiatives to try to find out what the Petrova line was and what it was doing.
That’s how I ended up on a video conference at midnight when JAXA had data they wanted to announce to all of our Petrova-researching partners. We took turns with which time zones got shafted by these global conference calls, and this time it was the Americas’ turn. I was just glad that this meeting was only scheduled to be an hour. Since joining the video conference was work, I was entitled to come into the office late the next morning, but I knew that it would throw off my next day no matter what.
The conference call went normally at first. Representatives from different countries gave their updates, which were mostly routine. Then it was JAXA’s turn to share their results. With input from all of our international partners, they had reoriented a probe to get better measurements in the region of the Petrova line. The science projects originally depending on the Amaterasu probe weren’t happy, but such is life when there’s unexplained phenomenon in your celestial backyard. And really, we were extremely fortunate that there was already a probe with relevant instruments out there in space, so that we wouldn’t have to build a new probe from scratch right away.
“Please ensure that there are no unauthorized individuals listening in to this call,” the speaker said. “The following data are highly preliminary, and have not been quality controlled. However, we found them concerning enough that we are sharing them with you now in an attempt to find a reasonable explanation.”
Concerning data? Reasonable explanation? What was going on?
I learned what was going on quickly enough. JAXA’s preliminary data from their Amaterasu probe showed that the sun was dimming while the Petrova line was growing brighter. And the rate of dimming wasn’t linear. The data they had so far was better explained by an exponential fit.
That, of course, jolted me awake. I was no heliophysicist, but what the hell sort of scientist would I be if I didn’t recognize that the sun dimming was a Big Fucking Problem.
It got the attention of everyone else on the call as well, and suddenly there were twenty arguments in five languages happening across the video call, the call’s chat, and at least two Slack workspaces.
While the chaos felt like it lasted for minutes, in reality it only took about thirty seconds for the lead JAXA rep to get the video call back in order, which she did by muting everyone and then forcing everyone to raise their hands or put their questions in the chat.
“We know that this is concerning if the data verify,” she said. “That is why we bring this data to you all, to see if any of us can find a more reasonable, less concerning explanation. Your agency leads will receive directions for accessing our data repository, which they will distribute according to your agency’s policies.”
I stared at the graph that was being screen shared as the litany of questions began. Engineers wanted to know how well calibrated the instruments were (very). Most scientists wanted to know the margins of error (tolerable).
My hands hovered over the keyboard, scared to type my question.
Then I got a Slack DM from Abby, an NCAR scientist on the PIE team who I often bounced ideas off of. Are you thinking what I am?
I fired back immediately. That we need to get some climate modelers on this ASAP?
We had both been looking at if there was anything about the Venusian atmosphere that contributed to the Petrova line, and between us we had to have enough contacts to get a basic model running for how a dimming sun would affect the Earth.
Like, yesterday. Abby concurred.
Encouraged that I wasn’t overreacting, I started typing in the video call’s main chat.
How quickly can we determine if/how this affects the Earth’s climate system? I wrote, my pinkie finger hovering over the enter key in hesitation. I reread the message a few times and then I hit enter. It felt like I was tossing a live grenade into the chat.
Unfortunately for most of the Petrova researchers on the call, they were astronomers and physicists. They all knew that a dimming sun could be problematic, but only had concepts of a plan for how they might quantify the effects on Earth. By comparison, Abby and I were climate model experts.
Unfortunately for me and Abby, our comparative expertise meant that we were suddenly responsible for getting a model running, even though neither of us had the depth of experience with climate modeling that would be needed to simulate not only the current emissions projections but also JAXA’s exponentially dimming sun data. How would the two different forcings interact?
Though nobody was happy with the preliminary data JAXA had shared, enough of the participants on the call had other meetings to get to when our hour was up. Abby and I had tried to deflect as much as we could for a timeline to get a model run for how the sun’s reduced output would affect Earth, but in the end more important participants gave us a week.
Tired and terrified, I closed my laptop and tried to get some sleep.
*****
I rolled into the office at 9:30 the next morning and immediately started firing off emails to everyone and anyone I knew who might be able to help me and Abby and wouldn’t ask too many questions. From the Slack messages Abby sent throughout the morning, she was doing the same. By lunch, we had a two-pronged plan. The various PIE leaders and their international counterparts had given us a week to report back something, but they didn’t say our results had to be final. Abby and I figured that if the JAXA data wasn’t final, our climate model results didn’t need to be either. So we’d run the simplest possible model in the next week while setting up a more complex one to hopefully run in the following month. It was still a ridiculously fast timeline for getting anything done, but this PIE stuff was the only project either of us was affiliated with at that moment, so we could devote all of our time to it. It would be terrible for my stability once the funding ran out and I went back to begging colleagues for a pay period’s worth of funding, but it was fortuitous in the present moment.
Climate models became my life. I became intimately familiar with how different models nudged their initial and boundary conditions to simulate different scenarios. I looked at more radiative transfer equations than I knew possible. I overcame my fear of being a nuisance and bugged JAXA for their data on the rate of the sun’s dimming so that we could get the full model properly tuned.
By the end of that first week, we had confirmed the basic physics. Ignoring human emissions and holding everything currently in the Earth system in a steady state, even a very slight reduction in solar output would cool the Earth within a few decades. It made perfect physical sense. If there was less energy coming in from the sun and the Earth continued to reflect or absorb it at the same rates as it presently did, we’d be receiving less energy, which the laws of thermodynamics dictated would result in a cooling planet.
Some part of us hoped that the full model would show that the rate of cooling would be slight, an offset to the warming we humans had induced since the industrial revolution. Neither Abby nor I wrote it in any of our emails or messages, but we feared that such a balance was too optimistic, too convenient. No, we feared that this was a much bigger crisis.
The major problem with the JAXA data, the one that left us with a sliver of hope, was that we were extrapolating the sun’s dimming. We had no way of knowing if the exponential model was correct, or if reality would end up closer to a less dire function. So once we were pretty sure we had our model running, we brainstormed various scenarios. Ones that would look exponential in the preliminary data but ended up being something else.
The PIE leads loved it. We were attempting to answer questions they hadn’t even thought of. So when Abby and I came to them at the end of our second week requesting additional compute resources to run our ensemble of scenarios, they didn’t stop with American supercomputers. They called in favors with our international counterparts to get us extra core hours anywhere that could spare them. People were going to question the Amaterasu probe and JAXA’s data. We didn’t need further questions about the implications of the data. A robust ensemble of potential outcomes would go a long way to lend confidence to the actions other teams would be recommending world governments take, from additional space probes to further climate modeling focusing on ecological impacts to other governmental actions.
I tried to keep work stuff at work, except for the odd middle of the night conference call, but when we reached crunch time before various world leaders were coordinating press conferences to announce the Petrova Problem, I had to bring it with me everywhere. Abby and I were leading a manuscript on the projected climate impacts, which would be the cornerstone of an additional set of publications on the social impacts. Our paper would be submitted immediately after JAXA made their data public, and then the others would cascade after us, the PIE leads and their international counterparts promising to pull strings to get the whole collection peer-reviewed as quickly as possible.
I was putting the finishing touches on the conclusions section the day before everything was scheduled to go public when I was meeting Ryland for our weekly dinner and catch up. I had gotten frustrated with the wording of a paragraph, so I had printed the nearly-final draft and left the office early to make sure we had our usual table. The place wasn’t fancy by any measure, but it had been a popular spot when we were grad students because of how cheap it was without giving anyone food poisoning. The servers were usually pretty good at saving us our table, but every now and then, usually when there was a new server, someone else snagged it. It might have been superstition, but something always went wrong when we didn’t get our table. I figured the few minutes of break to drive home and walk to the restaurant would give me fresh eyes, I’d be able to finish my wordsmithing by the time Ryland arrived, and that we’d have dinner as normal, complaining about our respective jobs, discussing that week’s Jeopardy! champion, and knocking back a drink. After dinner, I’d get those last changes back into the master document, ask Abby to look it over, send the final final document to the PIE lead, Aaron–even though I was DOE and Abby was at NCAR and funded through NSF, it was NASA who wanted the preprint on their servers as soon as the press conferences ended–and then try not to panic.
Ryland was able to read my stress as soon as he arrived. I guess that’s what you get for meeting a friend for dinner every week for multiple years. I still don’t know what made me do it, but I showed him some of the key figures in the paper. He was no atmospheric scientist, but he knew enough about how life on Earth depended on the sun to know that the JAXA data and my modeled changes to the Earth system were potentially catastrophic.
We both had an extra drink that night. I had two, even though I knew my tolerance wasn’t what it used to be and that I’d regret it in the morning. One of the senior scientists down the hallway from me had tried to order me to take a day off, but Aaron had been very clear that Abby and I would need to be available for interviews in the afternoon after all of the international press conferences wrapped.
I compromised, showing up to the office at 8am sharp and immediately requesting a day off for the following pay period. I could sleep when the interviews were done, the paper submitted, and the world reeling with the implications of what was happening to our Sun. But first, I needed to plaster on a smile and not sound like someone who had just shown that the world as we knew it was possibly ending.
The press conferences went better than I expected. Twenty years is a blink of an eye in the world of climate, but for journalists on the 24-hour news cycle, that would be forever. Aaron took most of the questions about what the US government was planning to do about this potential crisis, touting human innovation and pointing out how far we had come in the previous twenty years. Abby and I just had to give a few details about our models, simplified enough for the viewers at home to understand.
And then it was done. It was Friday, and the world was ending.