Cooling salty water sinks more easily than fresh water. Trade winds sweep clouds generated in the Gulf of Mexico west over Central America to dump their rain in the Pacific, leaving the remaining water in the Atlantic that much saltier. So the cooling water in the North Atlantic sinks well, aiding the power of the Gulf Stream. If the surface of the North Atlantic were to become rapidly fresher, it would not sink so well when it cooled, and that could stall the conveyor belt. The Gulf Stream would have nowhere to go, and would slow down, and sink farther south. Weather everywhere would change, becoming windier and drier in the Northern Hemisphere, and colder in places, especially in Europe.
The sudden desalination of the North Atlantic might seem an unlikely occurrence, but it has happened before. At the end of the last Ice Age, for instance, vast shallow lakes were created by the melting of the polar ice cap. Eventually these lakes broke through their ice dams and poured off into the oceans. North America still sports scars from three or four of these cataclysmic floods; one flowed down the Mississippi, one the Hudson, one the St. Lawrence. These flows stalled the world ocean conveyor belt current, and the climate of the whole world changed as a result, sometimes in as little as three years.
Now, with Greenland’s ice cap melting fast, and the Arctic sea ice breaking into bergs, would enough fresh water flow into the North Atlantic to stall the Gulf Stream again?
Frank Vanderwal kept track of climate news as a sort of morbid hobby. His friend Kenzo Hayakawa, an old grad school housemate, had spent time at NOAA before coming to NSF to work with the weather crowd on the ninth floor, and so Frank occasionally checked in with him, to say hi and find out the latest. Things were getting wild out there; extreme weather events were touching down all over the world, the violent short-termed ones almost daily, the chronic problems piling one on the next, so that never were they entirely clear of them. The Hyperniño, severe drought in India and Peru, lightning fires in Malaysia; then on the daily scale, a typhoon destroying most of Mindanao, a snap freeze killing crops and breaking pipes all over Texas, and so on. Something every day.
Like a lot of climatologists and other weather people Frank had met, Kenzo presented all this news with a faintly proprietary air, as if he were curating the weather. He liked the wild stuff, and enjoyed sharing news of it, especially if it supported his theory that the heat humans had added to the atmosphere had been enough to change the monsoon patterns for good, triggering global repercussions; meaning almost everything. This week for instance it was tornadoes, previously confined almost entirely to North America as a kind of freak of that continent’s topography and latitude, but now appearing in East Africa and in Central Asia. Last week it had been the weakening of the Great World Ocean Current in the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic.
“Unbelievable,” Frank would say.
“I know. Isn’t it amazing?”
Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little room filled with file cabinets and copy machines informally called “The Department of Unfortunate Statistics.” Someone had started to tape onto the walls of this room extra copies of pages that held interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.
The oldest ones were headlines, things like:
WORLD BANK PRESIDENT SAYS FOUR BILLION LIVE ON LESS THAN TWO DOLLARS A DAY.
or
AMERICA: FIVE PERCENT OF WORLD POPULATION, SEVENTY PERCENT OF CORPORATE OWNERSHIP
Later pages were charts, or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles out of the scientific literature.
When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was, looking at the latest. It was another headline:
352 RICHEST PEOPLE OWN AS MUCH AS THE POOREST TWO BILLION, SAYS CANADIAN FOOD PROJECT
“I don’t think this can be right,” Edgardo declared.
“How so?” Frank said.
“The poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a big percentage of the world’s capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to match the top three hundred and fifty.”
Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belaboring the obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up a brief quote: “72.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.”
Frank, wanting to bug her, said, “What do you think, Anna?”
“About what?”
Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.
Anna said, “I don’t know. Seven magnitudes is a lot. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three hundred.”
“Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latest Forbes 500?”
Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world generally. He tapped another page. “The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.”
Anna said, “I wonder how they define surplus value.”
“Profit,” Frank said.
Edgardo shook his head. “You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created above and beyond the pay for the labor, is still there.”
Anna said, “There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1,950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.”
“Three weeks of vacation a year,” Frank pointed out. “Pretty normal.”
“Yeah, but average? What about all the part-time workers?”
“There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.”
“Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.”
“You work overtime.”
“Yeah but I don’t get paid for it!”
The men laughed at her.
“They should have used the median,” she said. “The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s”—Anna could do calculations in her head—“sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.”
“What’s the average income?” Edgardo asked. “Thirty thousand?”
“Maybe less,” Frank said.
“We don’t have any idea,” Anna objected.
“Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?”
“About ten? Or is it less?”
Edgardo said, “Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two-thirds of that and gives you one third, then you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it gets to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his much larger share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.” He grinned at Frank and Anna. “How stupid is that?”
Anna shook her head. “People don’t see it that way.”
“But here are the statistics!”
“People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.”