Glass Sky Read Online Free Page A

hand, traps heat evenly over the planet. The result is a geographical imbalance between cooling and heating. It’s like putting on warm clothing and then cooling yourself by rubbing ice on your stomach. Your average temperature may stay the same, but it’s not very pleasant.”
    “This is so much easier than explaining it to politicians,” said Molari. He leaned across the table, his face twitching with excitement. “What if we could control the disks?  Not just block the sunlight, but aim it!”
    Tania blinked at him in astonishment.
    Aim sunlight?
    A rush of possibilities. Like she’d found a room in her house that she’d never noticed before. The earth spun in her head, the atmospheric physics so familiar from her PhD. Sunlight baked the tropics, raising steaming thermals which arced towards the poles, pushed by the column rising behind. Then, as the air left the equator, it cooled, losing moisture over Brazil, Congo, Borneo, nourishing what was left of the once great rainforests. Eventually the air fell, dry now, warming as it lost altitude, creating the vast rings of desert that banded the earth from the Sahara to the Colorado Plateau, the Great Victorian Desert to the Namib. Hadley circulation. Just one of a hundred exquisite weather patterns. All powered by sunlight dancing on an earth-sized canvas.
    And now Molari was saying this sunlight was controllable.
    “You’ve run this through simulations?”
    Molari beamed, a father showing off his new baby. “Beijing Climate University did the work. Ten years ago. We were hoping to do the same thing with targeted sulfur releases, but the upper atmosphere disperses the particles too quickly so it didn’t work in practice.” Another bite of his biscuit. “But the atmospheric physics works. We can control the weather, Tania. We can bring back the monsoons.”
    “And tame tropical storms,” said Tania. She pictured a hurricane, a malevolent maelstrom of stunning white beauty. And then a shadow fell over its center sucking away the thermal energy. The edges became ragged, the eye unstable, and it evaporated into the ocean.
    She chose her words carefully, balancing Molari's enthusiasm with an appropriate note of caution. “This sounds amazing. But it’s not full weather control, obviously. Sunlight is just one driver. There’s geography. And Coriolis forces. And ocean currents. And the poles are dark half the year so we’d have no sunlight to play with there.”
    Molari sat back, adjusting the silk leg of his trouser. “There are limits of course. And we’re only working with theoretical models at this stage.” He eyed the two remaining biscuits.
    Tania pushed the plate across the table toward him. “And what about side effects?” she asked. “Rain that falls on China can’t also fall on Mongolia. The disk array is going to require a degree of international cooperation that we’ve never seen. And the cost? How do you get the Council to pay for it?”
    “It’s already approved,” said Molari. “It’s been in the works for weeks. Your predecessor, James Wong, worked out the funding.”
    “Wong?” Tania asked, feeling a sudden unease. “I’m surprised. I thought he twisted everything he put his hands on.”
    “Your worries are probably justified,” said Molari, his face sagging into a frown. “That’s why Tengri brought you here. This hasn’t quite gone the way we had hoped.”
     
    ***
     
    Tania sat in a warm pool of sunlight atop the stone steps leading into the General Assembly Building, savoring the fresh New York air. During James Wong’s disastrous tenure, she’d had nothing but contempt for the UNBio Director. But now it was she who would be running UNBio. Her staff would be monitoring the state of the planet. She would be providing scientific advice for UN climate policies. Her teams would be coordinating the hundreds of interventions, from invasive species removal, to species balancing, to artificial watering holes, which protected