CHAPTER 9
FRAURASIA
Chorley was angry. She was looking at a dismal land of ice and snow that seemed to be rumbling and growling. Very often she would see smoke plumes and flame flashing high into the sky. No one could live here, but she was wrong. As they sailed along the coast, she started to see many settlements inhabited by swine with heavy blond whiskers and light skins. They were brutes, strong but reasonably hospitable to strangers. She could see that they were burning a black honey for heat and light which disturbed her somewhat, but she was cold, and her piglets were hungry. A warm meal would be welcome, even if it was warmed by burning wood or oil. They disembarked and started the diplomacy with the inhabitants of Urasia. The northerners said that many millennia before Chorley’s arrival, their continent called Fraurasia had been much larger and teeming with animal life of all types. The swine of the southwestern lands, called Frahogs were smaller in most cases and did not have the light colorization of their northeastern kin, the Urahogs. Then there had been a major earthquake that split the continent in half. The western half drifted to the southwest while the eastern half started towards the northeast.
The Urahogs had lost touch with their relatives but did hear that they were suffering from the hordes of insects that had traveled along with the western half of the continent. The bugs were spreading pestilence among the population of the new Fraland. Many swine were falling ill with fever and chills, some were dying. Getting no assistance from their relatives in Urasia, the Fralanders sent an urgent request for help to the scientists in Laurasland. Chorley was alerted to the request by way of her spies in Lil Redhenny’s organization and immediately concluded that the Urahogs’ climate would be better for her family. Urasia would be her family’s home for a very long time.
There were many great scientists in Urasia. There was little else to do in this nearly always frozen country. The ice ages seemed to come and go, but always seemed to linger longer in the far north as far as they could determine. Of course, none of these scientists had traveled to the far south where they may have become even more confounded. But that didn’t matter. They could record their observations over time. Then, some wondered if they could develop the mathematical relationship of these climatic changes. In developing a theory to explain the ice ages, one of the senior scientists, Arrhenhog, used the basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) would increase the Earth's surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. His calculations led him to conclude that emissions, from burning wood, black honey and black rocks and other combustion processes, were large enough to cause global warming. He determined that the earth’s surface temperature would increase in an arithmetic progression when the CO2 content of the atmosphere increased in a geometric progression. He called this relationship the Earth Climate Sensitivity or ECS. His first calculations showed that a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 content would increase the average global temperature by 5 degrees C plus or minus 1degree C. But how could he prove it?
At that time, one of his most promising students was the young boar named Ansenhog, now serving as Chorley’s chief scientist. He had become keenly interested in the great Arrhenhog’s hypothesis when he was doing his master’s research. He had discovered that another great scientist, J. Charnswine, a Pigford University professor on the western coast of Laurasland, had published a set of equations that would describe the general circulation of the atmosphere by devising a series of increasingly sophisticated mathematical models of the atmosphere. Now Charnswine had determined that the ECS was 3 degrees C plus or minus 1.5 degrees C. Ansenhog was now back to his country of birth and would put these mathematical models to work.