Many of the old grand rooms in Noordeinde had too much historical value to be kitted out with modern office gear, but one room had been brought reasonably up to the standards prevailing in the early twenty-first century and so Alastair plugged his gear into that. Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.
Willem decided to make some practical use of the resultant delay. “Now that we have finally gotten past Budget Day and all that,” he said, “I have been taking a look at your schedule for the next few weeks.”
“And what do you think?” the queen asked.
“Well, it’s a bit sparse. Just because we’ve been too distracted to pack in a lot of events. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Alastair did remark that there is an unusually high tide coming up three weeks from now. Could cause problems if it happened to coincide
with bad weather. If you aren’t averse to adding some new items to your schedule, then I’d suggest we emphasize disaster preparedness.”
She smiled. “No one can ever criticize the queen for taking a bold stance in favor of disaster preparedness.”
Charlotte produced an eye roll. The target, however, was not her mother. “They will criticize you for anything. You should see—”
Frederika gave her daughter an appraising look. “Been reading the comments, have we?”
Charlotte looked as if she’d been caught red-handed in the liquor cabinet.
“We’ve talked about this,” Frederika said.
“I know. Reading the Internet will drive me crazy.”
“People will make fun of me for being a predictable Goody Two-Shoes if I advocate for disaster preparedness,” the queen agreed. “But it is a natural segue from the Scheveningen disaster. And it will flush Texas and Pina2bo and Martijn Van Dyck out of the news cycle.” She turned her gaze toward Willem as she said this and gave him a nod.
“Very well, I’ll begin looking for such opportunities,” Willem said. “Given the usual lag, it might take a couple of weeks before this gets into full swing.”
Suddenly the AV system sprang to life and the coat of arms of the House of Orange appeared on the royal flat-screen. Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia’s breeding took over as she found a way to compliment the technician on his brilliance without making him look bad for not having had the thing ready in the first place.
Three-dimensional augmented-reality globes might actually have been useful in this case, but the software Alastair had been using was no-nonsense academic research code that liked to plot simple flat rectangular maps. So that was what they were going to be looking at. He’d made hard copies too, which he distributed to Willem and the queen. He hadn’t known Princess Charlotte was coming, so she had to share her mother’s copy.
“I’ll get right to it,” he said. “If Pina2bo continues to operate as planned, it’s good for the Netherlands. That is the most salient information I can give you during this meeting.”
The queen, who’d been leafing through the handout, crossed her arms and looked at him. Lotte looked like she’d been biting her tongue. She drew the handout toward herself and perused it as Alastair went on:
“Many of the negative effects and heightened risks that climate change has inflicted on your country—and mine, as it happens—in recent decades will tend to be reversed. In some cases the speed of that reversal will be dramatic. Temperatures will drop noticeably. The amount of evaporation from the ocean’s surface will be reduced and so we won’t see as much torrential rainfall. Ice caps will stop melting. This reduces the possibility of a sudden change in the North Atlantic Current, which truly would be a catastrophe for all of Europe.”
“That’s the thing that would make us like Siberia if it happened?” Charlotte asked.
“Yes, Your Royal Highness.” In Texas Alastair had gradually lapsed into the habit of addressing “Saskia” informally. But a couple of weeks’ re-immersion in Britain, combined with the grandeur of Noordeinde Palace, had put him back on his best behavior. “It would give us the climate we, in a sense, deserve for living so far north. Not the much more moderate one that we have enjoyed for all of recorded history. You appear to be familiar with the concept already, so I won’t—”
“Mansplain it?” the queen put in.
“Yes, but since the princess brought the topic up: it is hard to overstate what a nightmare that would be for all Europe. The melting of Greenland makes it more likely, Pina2bo makes it less so. Anyway—setting all that aside—page 4 shows predicted effects on polar ice. Because the melting of the ice caps would be slowed, sea level rise would eventually stop.”