Washington Deluge Foretold by Global Warming Book?

A rain of Biblical proportions strikes Washington, D.C. A moisture-thick weather structure, specifically a "stalled front," hangs over the city, dropping hour after hour of blinding rain -- more precipitation in a few days than the city usually sees in an entire spring. Weirdly the rain just keeps coming, as if a preview of the end of days. Floods paralyze the region. Government leaders are forced to accept that the everlasting downpour represents the first confirmed signal of human-induced climate change.

Postscript on the Noachian rains currently pelting the nation's capital? Maybe. But what I'm describing is the plot of Forty Signs of Rain, a 2003 novel about global warming by Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the renown Blue Mars sci-fi trilogy. In Forty Signs of Rain, sometime in the near future, a gigantic moisture-thick "stalled front" hangs over Washington for many days. Downpours come continuously, and eventually the city floods. Robinson, who is well-versed in science literature and whose fiction is often praised in technical publications, felt that sustained downpours, not melting ice, would be the first harbinger of artificially induced climate change. And a sustained downpour -- worst than the Great Storm of 1871, previously the city's worst-ever -- is ongoing in Washington at this writing.

Forty Signs of Rain isn't a thriller. Though informed and pensive, Robinson's prose can be flatfoot. Chapters are consumed by tick-tock descriptions of mundane aspects of a scientist's or congressional staffer's daily labors. Characters sound hauntingly similar -- all well-educated, conscientious, polite, shocked by current events. Divertissement is rare. In Forty Signs of Rain, everything is straightforward discussion of research protocols or Senate committee structures except for an Obligatory Sex Scene in which two strangers, caught in a stuck elevator, enjoy an interlude Janine Lindemulder would envy for pure physical creativity. The fun paragraphs above elevator bondage are followed by page upon page of complex emotional reactions by one of the participants. But it's the guy who proves emotionally torn by hot sex with an alluring stranger. Hey Kim -- a little realism please! Occasionally Robinson lets down his hair, and it's good when he does. Briefed on evidence that greenhouse gases are causing climate change, the President asks, "Who cares about the weather if the economy is good?"

A spate of extraordinary precipitation does not prove climate change, any more than a long frigid spell would disprove global warming. Individual weather events can be just random fluctuation, while no PhD. climatologist can say whether the skies of a warming world would be wetter or drier. Nonetheless it's spooky. Kim Stanley Robinson, one of our generation's most science-literate writers, several years ago wrote a book supposing that the first clear signal of global warming would be never-ending pelting rains in the nation's capital. At this moment there are never-ending pelting rains in the nation's capital. If you're planning any elevator sex, perhaps do it now while you still can.