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 did, 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 boast about, it was his sleep. A sound slumber for seven hours every night was what kept him really ticking in his intense research work, work that earned him deep respect from peers and experts and numerous accolades.

His mind hopped to his research work and then immediately back to the rain. It must have been 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 pitch 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 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 – the skies downloading an amount of water in a few hours that should have been done over a few weeks.

He had spent months modelling different scenarios with the above hypothesis. While it required no research to predict that flooding would be the result in case of such a dramatic increase in rainfall intensity, it was not clear the probability of such an event in the short term, and the likely ## to urban regions. Some studies made by his peers had predicted that, while cities in less developed countries south of the equator could be confronted with massive damages in the short term, Europe and North Americam cities had a decade before they could be overwhelmed due to the flooding from such torrential rainfall. Ron’s modelling had predicted something quite different – that such dramatic increases in rainfall intensity are likely to overwhelm the most advanced urban drainage and flood management systems right then.

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

Alarmist, his scientific peers had said in public about his inferences, and whose models had predicted that the city had at least a decade before it could face large scale risk from flooding. All the same, they asked their research teams to double-check many of their own inferences – such was Ron’s reputation in the research community that even his most ardent critic took a bow at times to many of his publications and scientific opinions.

The New York City administration had reviewed Ron’s hypothesis. The mayor, Tom Hopkins, even had a private audience with him during which Ron had clearly articulated his position. “It is all about likelihood,” he had said during the meeting, “and the probability that New York will face devastating floods in the short term is very high”. 

“What is short term, and what is the probability, Ron?” Tom, an erudite man who was torn between his respect for Ron’s expertise and the political pressures coming from both the Republicans and from his own Democratic party members to downplay the negative narration around climate change and global warming.

“Well, we are talking about a timeline as close as two years,” said Ron, “and with a probability of about 0.3”.

The mayor knew that 0.3 was not a small number – small perhaps in many trivial contexts, but unimaginably high if it is about losing a few hundred – let alone a few thousand – lives, and that too in the world’s most high profile city.

“That’s rather scary, Ron. But it could require over ten billion dollars to build the infrastructure that’s resilient to the kind of apocalyptic flooding you are predicting. I’m not sure we can raise even a fraction of that, given our already stretched budget for this year.”

Ron fully empathized with the mayor, someone he had known from his graduate days at Princeton, where Tom was a finance department faculty. Both of them had kept in touch since then, and had shared a mutual respect and appreciation for each other’s work.

“Well, I guess I will have to put my hopes on 0.7,” was the mayor’s parting words.

While the mayor had privately acknowledged the importance of Ron’s inferences, he had to wear a different hat in public. A public notice issued by the mayor’s office two days back, while acknowledging the dangers from climate change, confidently proclaimed that New York City had built all the necessary infrastructure after the September 2023 flash floods.

Post the mayor’s meeting, Ron had set his modest ego aside, put his head down ad tried to find any fault in his modelling that could have exaggerated the risks. He found none. Rather, he felt he had been quite liberal – in favour of a less harmful scenario – in all his inputs and assumptions, bowing to the pressures from the chairman of his research institute, Bill Hackman, who tried to convince Ron to make his model less conservative. Hackman had, in fact, concluded a meeting with Ron only the previous day with his words of wisdom: “Under the most conservative assumptions, Ron, you and I would be dead tomorrow”. Post that meeting, the word conservative and Hackman’s words kept reappearing in his mind, but in a somewhat different context – if the results were so shocking with liberal assumptions, what could they be under more conservative ones?

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

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

Top Hopkins, sitting in the mayor’s office, which he had reached practically wading through water, wrote 0.7 on a piece of paper, stared at it for a long time, and set it alight with a lighter. Bill Hackman, sitting in his reading room at his home, did the same to another piece of paper – on which was written the word “Conservative.”