While on vacation recently I picked up a Sci- Fi book from the book exchange place in the hotel, read it in one day, then put it back. I don’t remember the author or what it was called, and I was going to recommend it to a friend as an example of a writer who had done research about San Francisco but had never been there. I think the writer was British. (At one point in the book he has a local character refer to San Francisco as “Frisco” - an obvious tip-off).
Anyway, the plot - at some point in the near future fuel companies have devised a way to control the weather using solar panels from satellites and one large one on the Moon. Countries pay to have the cloud patterns shifted so there can be sunny days for certain times of year in rich countries.
There are vast colonies of people from displaced countries that live in large boat-people colonies that consist of a bunch of barges and old cargo ships tied together. No rich countries will allow them to land, and one of the heros is an attorney trying to sue in an International Court to grant them rights.
Meanwhile our heroine works for a company that monitors volcanic activity on the ocean floor, and several dormant volcanos start erupting again, causing global terror. At the same time, massive Earthquakes start happening too.
The book spares no time having an earthquake destroy all of San Francisco, while volcanos and tsunamis kill millions more. The hero attorney’s family lived on Russian Hill and were killed. There was something about the son being an amatuer astronomer and he figured out Russian Hill was sinking b/c the position of the stars didn’t match correctly, and his dad showed his findings to the heroine scientist.
The weather changing solar panels have caused Earth to reset itself, or something. By the time the book is over the major players are all on the Moon for the opening of the new Moon station, and almost all life on Earth has been destroyed.
Except for those boat people, who rode out the tsunamis in their tied-together cities and are now the last life on Earth. Oh, rich irony!
At the end the scientists from the Moon come back to Earth and they try and rebuild the human race.
Seriously, nobody recognizes this book? This from the crowd that answers OPs like "What is that song, you know, that goes “boogeeboogaabaabaa” in less than a minute?