Back to the tower
Well back to the tower and try and find out why the world is heating and how to stop it. Back to the tower you go; all the books are where you left them, and you exactly recall your trains of thought, so you have no difficulty in picking up where you left off yesterday. There's no chance that you'll be able to find records of the actual levels of greenhouse gases; the best you can hope for, is to maybe find information about 'proxy indicators' -- cattle sales as a proxy for methane, for instance.
Maybe.
Try looking at the problem from a different angle: The rising water. How long has sea-level been going up? How fast is it happening? To find out you need to get a timeline of the villages that have gone under. This shouldn't be a problem, at least not if this world has as many seafaring cultures as Earth does; sailors definitely want to keep track of high-water marks!
You find a book in the shelf with the high water marks and find... hmmm... it seems to have begun about eight years ago. In that year, there was 1 cm. or so rise in sea-level; if you're reading these records properly, it looks like the sea is rising faster every year. Last year's rise works out to about two cm, as best you can tell! This is bad enough for places with normal tides; it could be disastrous for areas which have exceptionally large tides. And, yes, the records say that drowned village happens to be in one such area...
You'd like to be wrong about all this—the thought of a whole planet drowning by slow degrees is not pleasant—but the data, and that water-covered village, say otherwise.
Written by Catprog & Cubist on 30 September 2010
