Copyright 2009 by madengineer3
I want to thank grylion for his excellent help in editing this story.
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This science based fiction is just fiction. It is, however, based upon good solid science, as opposed to the fluff popular scientific views. Some names are real, and their work is real, but are to be taken as stories based upon celebrities. No disrespect to any identified character is intended.
The "experts" had been wrong, as usual. Those of us in the colder climates of the world are familiar with waking up and finding six inches of "partly cloudy" in our driveways. Weather forecasting is still not an exact science.
I am only aware of the four of us left at this point. Forty years ago there used to be tens of thousands in our area. Now everyone was gone, all gone! Some migrated south, some were killed for their food and clothes, and some died of starvation or disease. When the real social upheavals came I resigned my job and moved my family to my hobby farm in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania.
My name is Ken. I am now left with my wife, Mary, and two daughters, Ruth and Gina. I am a physician and my wife has a Ph.D in Botany. Mary had worked extensively with North American plants becoming familiar with the flora that we would later use for medicinal purposes. With eight years experience as a military surgeon, I had spent the last ten years as the chief of surgery for our small hospital. I also hung up my shingle as a GP in our small town.
Our youngest, Gina, is nineteen and her older sister, Ruth, twenty-three. Ruth graduated from college as a mechanical engineer. (You can never tell what will interest a woman these days.) I think we may be able to hold out here for a few more years, but I'm not going to guarantee it.
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The problem that eventually led to our possible extinction was caused by the "Law of Unintended Consequences". Back in the late 1960s to early 1970s America had been at war in Vietnam. Instead of letting the military do its job, congress and the administration had added all sorts of political limits on what our military could and could not do. Such as, don't shoot at the enemy unless they shoot at you first. Stupid, you bet. Reality, you bet.
Anyway, there had been anti-war mobs, fighting in the inner cities, domestic terror, etc. As we know now, from papers released from the KGB archives, the old Soviet Union had been funding the radical activities of the Weather Underground, the SDS, and other such terror groups. The government needed a way to turn the radicals in another direction.
When Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring" some brilliant politician had a "bright" idea. Instead of trying the leaders of the radical scum as traitors, which many of them were, our government's idea was to shift the attention from the Vietnam war to something safe.
That 'something safe' was the, as of yet, almost non-existent, environmental movement. Department of Defense "black budget" items were earmarked to promote environmental awareness. One of the first big bombshells that helped kick off the nascent movement was the book "The Population Bomb" by Paul Ehrlich, published in 1968.
These new, internal propaganda tactics worked well beyond the wildest dreams of those who had decided to used the environment as a diversionary tactic. Now, let me say here that the people who wrote the books and formed the core of the movement didn't know that they were being used. But, used they were. Politicians, who could see a little bit ahead, staked out their fiefdom. They called it the Environmental Protection agency.
By the end of the twentieth century the environmental movement had gone through the ideas that we would be soon entering a new ice age, to the idea that all of England being dead from pollution by the year 2000, to the idea of Global Warming. It was the Global Warming crew that finally did us in. Their patron saint, Al Gore, assured us that climate change was going to kill us all by melting the polar ice caps, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
All of the clamor surrounding Gore's global warming finally led politicians to do something devastating. The idea was to reverse the effects of the greenhouse gas problem by forbidding the use of combustion as a means of heat or power. Not only did they go overboard with this, under a president with no true scientific training, they decided that they needed to do one more thing to "save the planet".
They decided to try reflecting away just a small part of the sun's light. The amount of reduction in solar energy absorption was planned to be about one hundredth of one percent. The gullible politicians from all of the Western hemisphere, the technologically advanced countries, agreed to fire missiles up to about a hundred miles above the earth and fire explosives to disburse colloidal sized particles of aluminum. This was to reflect some of the sun's light away from our earth.
On paper it sounded good. Anyone who disagreed was considered reactionary, lacking in vision, and was summarily dismissed as "Anti-Green" or "Anti-Environment" effectively ostracizing them from society.
If we had, truly, been going into global warming, it might have been a huge success. Unfortunately, the Russian climatologists, who the mainstream Western scientific community ignored, were proved right. Our heating, measured in the late 1980s through mid 1990s had been due to a peak in an oscillation in the sun's output that had a period measured in centuries. The sun had gone through its maximum heating and was now truly entering the new ice age predicted by the Russians.
Unfortunately, it was only clear that a new ice age was upon us by the year 2035. By that time the Western Hemisphere had fully outlawed heating or generating electricity by means of combustion of any material. All oil and gas wells were sealed to prevent any leakage from hurting the delicate environment. The oil refineries had all been disassembled. The larger coal mines had all been collapsed by use of explosives and their entrances filled in and covered over. The giant mining machines had been scrapped.
All power plants had been abandoned, except for a few ancient nuclear plants that were needed for the many times that there was not enough wind or sun light to generate the meager electricity that was available. Since aircraft had been flagged as one of the major polluters, they had been abandoned in favor of high speed rail and high speed ships that used the new fuel cell technology.
Unfortunately, the United States had been the source of modern electronics ever since the 8.9 Richter scale earthquakes had hit China, Taiwan and Japan. Those temblors had caused tidal waves that put the electronics industry in the Far East out of business. American politicians used this monopoly on electronics as a lever.
The European electronics manufacturers had been put out of business by the competition from the Far East. Our State Department used the heavy-handed foreign policy that refused to do business with any country that hadn't outlawed combustion for mechanized transportation and generation of electricity. As a result of this even Russia, China, and India had followed most of the idiocy of the "Green Parties" of the Western hemisphere. It was now the entire globe that suffered from the religious belief that politicians had placed in "global warming".
The first warning of the new ice age was heralded by the extension of the polar ice packs. At first, the "powers that be" indicated that the temporary cooling was simply the planet returning to its normal temperature. After ten years of steady cooling, they started to say that it was the result of a brief modification of the sun's output.
It was in 2052 that the disaster hit. There was a massive CME (coronal mass ejection) event from the sun. Nothing even near it had been seen since the beginning of the industrial revolution. All solar cells and electronics on satellites and on the ground were destroyed in the first few minutes. The electronic controls that allowed the power grid to work, died. Power distribution transformers shorted out due to ground current effects.
