Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming Read Online Free

sound. To the north, on rocky Devon Island, would be Observation Post 1. To the south, on glaciated Bylot Island and the adjacent Borden Peninsula, would be Observation Posts 2 and 3. The troops would hold the high ground for most of a week, scanning the Northwest Passage for invaders.
    This would all be preceded by a display of Canadian resolve: a mock interdiction. After watching the machine guns fire and the Maple Leaf flag flutter, I strolled up to the bridge and stood next to the Montreal ’s commanding officer. He and his crew had donned green helmets and green flak jackets. The radio crackled, and a Canadian approximation of the voice of a California surfer filled the bridge. It was the supposed captain of the Killer Bee, which in actuality was the Goose Bay, a 150-foot Canadian coastal-defense vessel that the war gamers had decided would be a rogue “American” merchant ship starting an unauthorized transit of the Northwest Passage.
    The Killer Bee was four miles away in the fog, sailing a course that would intersect with ours in an estimated fourteen minutes and forty-two seconds. It would not say where it was going. It would not say what was in its hold. “Merchant vessel Killer Bee, what is your cargo?” our radioman asked. “This is Warship 336. Again, what is your cargo?” The Killer Bee ’s answers were brief, rude, believably American in their tone save for the occasional slipup: “We’re aboot forty miles off the coast, which constitutes international waters. Are you sure you have the authority to be questioning me out here? Can you just tell me again why I’m being asked these questions? You guys are the almighty Canadian government, so I’m sure you can access this sort of information somewhere else.”
    The Montreal passed a message to the colonel running Operation Lancaster, asking for clearance to send over a boarding party and, if necessary, to initiate “disabling fire.” The sailors on the bridge peered into the mist off our port side. We informed the Killer Bee that we would be boarding it, and its captain replied that he wouldn’t be “too down with that.” The engine churned. We began to close the gap: seven hundred yards, six hundred yards, five hundred yards. The ship appeared, and we aimed our .50-caliber machine gun at it. “Bullying your way around the ocean is not a way to foster cooperation between our two countries,” the voice told us. We commanded the Killer Bee to remove all personnel from its top decks, and our gunners directed a barrage of tracer fire a thousand yards off its bow. The smell of gunpowder wafted through the bridge. The next barrage was five hundred yards off the bow. Finally, our 57-millimeter cannon swiveled toward the Killer Bee . There were five loud booms in quick succession, five puffs of smoke, and then, seconds later, a sixth round. The ocean in front of the Killer Bee erupted. Its captain relented. “I thought Canada was a nation of peacekeepers,” whined the faux American.
    For the next five hundred miles, we saw only water and fog and an occasional glimpse of the chutes and pinnacles of Baffin Island’s peaks. It wasn’t until 10:00 a.m. on the operation’s fourth day that a much-awaited announcement came over the loudspeaker: icebergs ahead. We rushed to the port-side deck where the officers normally gathered to smoke. We were at seventy-two degrees north, and there were three of them: two- and three-hundred-foot giants that towered over the frigate. The icebergs’ walls were riven by small waterfalls, and chunks of ice were falling off into the sea. The bergs were drifting south toward the Atlantic, bound for warmer waters, where they would soon melt into nothing. The Vandoos leaned over the railing and snapped photographs.
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    IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 2006, and drought-crazed camels would soon rampage through a village in Australia, a manatee would swim past Chelsea Piers in New York City’s Hudson River, and the