Paris

Paris is the birthplace of the climatologist François Leclerc, a lifelong environmental activist who was recruited by Eva Stratt to model the catastrophic climate effects of the Astrophage crisis and who later, under Stratt's authority, ordered the nuclear detonation of Antarctic ice shelves to release methane as a desperate stopgap measure to buy humanity time.

Leclerc's Background and Recruitment

François Leclerc was born in Lyon and spent his university days in Paris, where he developed into an unapologetic tree-hugging antiwar throwback to a bygone era of protest politics. He became a world-renowned climatologist, and Stratt selected him specifically because his climate-prediction models had been proven true over and over again for the previous twenty years, making him the only expert she could find with that track record. When Stratt introduced him to the science team, she noted that he was from Paris, and he waved halfheartedly in greeting.

The Climate Assessment

Leclerc delivered a devastating assessment to Stratt and the assembled science team. He explained that the reduction of solar energy would cause extinction of many species, complete upheaval of biomes, and major changes in weather patterns. When Stratt pressed for tangible numbers, Leclerc gave her a single figure: nineteen years. That was his estimate for when half the people currently alive—three and a half billion people—would be dead. He described the math of famine as straightforward: take all the calories the world creates with farming and agriculture per day, divide by about fifteen hundred, and the human population cannot be greater than that number for long. He detailed how global staple crops—wheat, barley, millet, potatoes, soy, and most critically rice—are all sensitive to temperature ranges, and how rice paddies freezing over, potato farms flooding, and wheat farms experiencing ten times normal humidity leading to fungal parasites would all contribute to catastrophic crop failure.

The Antarctic Methane Plan

When Stratt insisted that humanity needed at least twenty-seven years for the Hail Mary mission to succeed, Leclerc initially protested that the outcome was not optional but inevitable. Stratt countered by proposing deliberate greenhouse-gas emissions to insulate Earth like a parka, and Leclerc stammered at the scale and morality of such an act. Stratt dismissed his moral concerns, telling him she cared only about saving humanity and ordering him to come up with something to make humanity last at least twenty-seven years. Leclerc ultimately devised a plan to detonate two hundred and forty-one nuclear weapons, courtesy of the United States, buried fifty meters deep along a fissure at three-kilometer intervals in Western Antarctica. The explosions would cleave the ice shelf, causing it to slowly work its way into the sea and melt, releasing enormous quantities of methane trapped in the ice. Leclerc explained that methane breaks down in the atmosphere after ten years, so if the Hail Mary found a solution, humanity would only have to wait a decade for the methane to dissipate—unlike carbon dioxide. He stood on the aircraft carrier's flight deck with Stratt, looking for all the world like a man being led to the gallows, and when the detonation came, he buried his face in his hands and cried. Stratt put her hand on his shoulder and told him he had done what he had to do.