But how can a responsible adult bring kids into this world? I mean seriously. I remember in second grade the teacher sitting us down, like every other class of seven-year-olds on the planet, and showing us videos of the vanishing Greenland ice cap and the death of coral reefs across the entire southern hemisphere. I’ve seen ten thousand worse since then. Or if you really want to scare the shit out of yourself, take a look at the sky at noon. I’m no scientist, but that shade of viridian ain’t natural.

Sure, I’d love to have a baby. But how much time has the human race got? Fifty years? Thirty? Every report says the planet is past the point of no return.

I try not to think about it. Why bring innocent life into this world? So they can choke on CO2 or go under in a tsunami of refugee gooks, dinks, and slopes?

11

THE DOROT LIBRARY

MANNING COMES ONLINE the next morning at 0650. “Well?” he says.

He has finished his wrestling regimen and powered up his phone. The GPS pin on my screen locates him on foot, having departed the Midtown Athletic Club, trekking down Broadway toward Columbus Circle.

I tell Manning I’ve got twelve pages for him. They’re waiting on his desk right now.

I’m in the office already, ostensibly running research on Russian murder victim #2, Dr. Alexsandr Golokoff of Filvovsky Park, Moscow, per Manning’s (and Gleason’s) instructions, but actually bouncing back and forth between monitoring Manning as he moves and sneaking peeks at a ’28 TED talk on climate change given by the Israeli anthropologist and Rabin Prize winner, Amos Ben-David.

Moscow, the news says this a.m., is roasting at 111° in the hottest April on record. Wildfires are scorching the suburbs. Civilian brigades are being recruited to fight wind-driven blazes that by nightfall could be threatening the city center.

On my screen Dr. Ben-David paces a stage in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His talk, I remind myself, is from six years ago, so any impending climate calamities are likely to be considerably more imminent today.

BEN-DAVID

What would have to happen for the Earth to turn back from the brink? What would mankind need to do? First the race would have to reduce global population, currently 8.7 billion, to 4.1 billion, with the intention of decreasing it over time to a maximum planetary carrying capacity of 2.3 billion. Fifty to seventy percent of the land currently in use for agriculture would have to be taken out of cultivation and replaced either by reforestation or restored to native grasslands for CO2 recapture and sequestration. Use of fossil fuels (and every other energy source producing greenhouse gases, including methane from livestock) would have to decrease to no more than fifteen percent of the current rate and preferably to zero.