Robinson, Kim Stanley. Fifty degrees below. New York: Bantam Books, 2005. ISBN 0-533-80312-3.

Summary: In the second book of a trilogy that began with Forty signs of rain, the Gulf Stream shuts down in response to a vast release of fresh water into the North Atlantic resulting from global warming. Rapid climate change begins, bringing unbelievable amounts of rain to the tropics and dangerous cold to the temperate zones of Europe and the United States. Robinson goes into graphic detail about the effects of a night at -50° F in Washington, D.C.

In all the American government, there is no one who is willing and able to plan a response to the problem except the National Science Foundation, which is struggling against political control by dimwitted Republicans, headed by the President, an undisguised Bush clone. Nonetheless, the NSF rockets into action, soliciting various plans for terraforming the Earth and separating the wildly speculative from the merely impracticable. They also venture into partisan politics, drawing up a democratic-socialist platform and tossing it into the ring of Presidential electoral politics as the stand of a “Virtual Scientific Candidate,” who despite her nonexistence manages to outpoll any third-party candidate since Ross Perot.

This basic plot is festooned with various side interests of Robinson's -- outdoor life, exercise, Tibetan Buddhism -- and a tiresome love story between an NSF scientist and a beautiful intelligence agent, unhappily married but fortunately persuadable.

Once more, I am left hoping that the next book in the series will be better, but my expectations are lower.