The future. I'm living on the moon. It's terraformed, though not very well yet--a thin, barely breathable atmosphere, and still very cold on average. We still mostly live in domes and caves. Mars is much farther along: seas and forests and all--at a casual glance it could nearly be Earth seen from an angle where a lot of desert shows.

Hard to avoid Mars envy.

Lots of political intrigue between the three worlds. Sigh. Some things don't change!

Like the weather. For weeks now we've all huddled in our burrows--out the airlock is a huge ice-storm, Moon-wide. We have burrow fever, but even with electric parkas it's just too cold to go out.

Such ice storms used to be common, in the early days of terraforming. Thought we'd eliminated them at last. I worry this is a harbinger, that the bad old days are returning. But sitting inside for days, I sit down and really study all the global climate-data for the first time in years. It's soon clear the storm was born of extraordinary conditions--maybe even seeded, by political agents.

But as I run projections, it looks like the storm's turmoil may itself tip the climate over permanently to a warmer, milder, wetter state, more Martian than lunar.

Still cold, still thin-aired... but if my numbers are right, this may be the last global ice storm the Moon will ever see.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• The blizzard: I've been sick and antisocial. But the dream suggests my turmoil will motivate healthy changes--I may not be this ill again for a long time.
• Climate setback: echoes the "Year Without Summer" in Kim Stanley Robinson's RED MARS trilogy--a setback for Martian terraforming, but they didn't let the ice and desert defeat them.
• ACTION: Patience! Courage! And... take protective actions I've dismissed as stopgaps. Do what small things I can, and ride this time of illness out. This storm may be the last.

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