The year is 2027.
The temperature of the earth has fallen 3 degrees overall as a new ice age dawns. With the demise of the UN, the IPCC has gone the way of all things, but one figure is shambling up a snow bound street dressed in old sacks with plastic bags on his feet.
We pan in, its the ex-director of the IPCC, James Hansen.. A few cars whine slowly past, with blacked our windows and motorcycle escorts down the Zlin lanes of Washington. James stumbles up to a McRoboCafe and reaching a grubby hand into his pocket slaps a $500 coin on the counter "Gimme a coffeee, bitch" he growls to the androide "And a fondlehat: I wanna check the noos".
Dragging his luke-warm synthetic beverage over to the warmest booth in the joint, he slips the headset over his eyes and rapidly pages to what he has been looking for, the results of the latest computer ruin of the international academic charities global distributed climate model that runs on everyone's computer cores in any thing they have, that clocks a megaflop..
"Global Climate scientists manage to predict the present!" screams the headline..he reads on "After 27 years of trying, models are now accurate enough that we can predict what today's climate is like from the historical data we now have" gushes the worlds top climatologist, "Our model is the most sophisticated ever, incorporating no less than 37,268 independent variables and 4.2 billion partial differential equations that link them, I mean I think we are really getting close to a model that really does map to the real climate".
"Gosh" says the interviewer "That's friggin far out, man! So what does that tell us about the climate in the next ten years?" "Well it tells us two things, two really important things that we think justifies the whole project, firstly that we will be able to tell you what the climate will be like in ten years, in.." and he grabs an ancient fondleslab "exactly nine point two three five oh seven years time! This is the first time we have been able to bring the prediction of climate change AHEAD of the actual change. At the current rate of progress in another fifty years time by using a computer slightly larger than the entire earth, we hope to be able to swing that out to as much as ten years in the future, with only a one sigma uncertainty!" "Wow, that's SO COOL" gushes the pneumatic blonde androide on Faux News, "and what is the second thing?" "Well we have identified the absolute sensitivity to the whole climate to random singular data points: like its really chaotic, innit? So something as simple as some old tramp spilling a cup of synthocoffee in a booth in a Washington RoboCafe could make the difference between Snowball Earth and Desert Earth, y'know!" .
James is startled - Jesus! This context sensitive tailored syntho broadcasting has gotten better than he thought. His trembling hand knocks over the cup of coffee.."Some old Tramp, huh" he mutters "BITCH. I INVENTED Climate change" But then his attention goes back to the screen "And what about that old Retro Chestnut, Carbon Dyed Oxhide, we were told back when you could still sunbathe naked in Florida" (Cheers from the synthetic audioambience as the 'droide slips a shoulder strap temptingly) "that that was going to make us all live in an eternal warm climate where plants and stuff still grew, right? "
"Well, and indeed of course that's in the model, and of course it makes a real difference! We calculate" - his fingers fly over his antique fondleslab, "that without Carbon Dyed Oxhide at its current level of twice what it was in 2000, the tundra would extend as far south as Chicago, instead of stopping at Milwaukee! All other things being equal, which of course they aren't - which is why we have so many variables."
James gets up and slams his fist on the table, spilling yet more coffee," There Bitch!" he screams, spittle flying out of his mouth "I told ya that CO2 was the thing, I was right ALL ALONG" and he shambles out towards the last remaining nuclear powerplant on the Potomac, hoping to find a warm place under a cooling outflow to catch forty winks in the pale August sunshine, before he begins the long trek back to CanCun to overwinter ...