He wasn’t entirely sure when the rain started. Must have been a good hour ago as he could hear the steadily increasing patter-patter in his sleep.

Ron looked at the grandfather clock that still did sterling service – as all old things seemed to, he mused as he got up from his bed. As he did, he was surprised he could have heard the rain in his sleep. If there was one thing about his health he was prone to boasting about, it was his sleep. A sound slumber for seven hours every night was what kept him really ticking in his intense research work.

His mind hopped to his research work and then immediately back to the rain. It must be raining really heavily for someone like him to hear it in his sleep.

He went to the window, and even before he could fully open it, he could feel the combined fury of the rain and the wind. It was dark outside, but sound needed no light to express itself. Nor did water.

He shut the window immediately with a shudder. It was not just pouring, it seemed to him that the sky was draining itself with an unprecedented aggression.

He went back to bed, and this time his mind anchored around his research. This was precisely the future that all his research in the intersection of climate change and rain was forecasting. Rains that were enormous downpours, at unexpected times of the year. Rather than the total amount of rainfall in a year, his analyses had predicted that a key characteristic of the rains due to climate change would be the intensity with which the downpour happened within a short time – typically a couple of hours. His modelling had predicted that such a dramatic increase in intensity could overwhelm the most advanced urban drainage and flood management systems.

He had specifically studied his city of New York in this context, and predicted that such torrential downpours could flood the whole of NYC within an hour and result in thousands of deaths.

Alarmist, his scientific peers had said of his inferences. The city administration, while acknowledging the dangers from climate change, argued that they had built the necessary resilience in the city after the September 2023 flash floods.

All these were swirling in his mind as Ron drifted off to sleep, still hearing the patter-patter.

The next day, of the 3000-odd people who were declared dead from drowning in the massive flooding that had happened the previous night, the city’s scientific community especially mourned the death of a young climate scientist with a brilliant future.