Pentagon Climate Change Author Interviewed

cynical writes "Just in time for the opening of The Day After Tomorrow, the futurism/technology/environment blog WorldChanging has an interview with futurist Doug Randall, co-author of the "Abrupt Climate Change" scenario [PDF] commissioned by the Pentagon earlier this year. The report generated a storm of controversy a couple of months ago, and drew attention to the possibility that global warming could disrupt things enough to trigger a rapid-onset ice age. Now that the furor has died down, Randall can talk about climate change, how the report came to be, and just what he thinks about the new disaster movie."

Comments

And cue...

[gowen]

Cue the "Anthropogenic Climate Change is a liberal conspiracy to stop libertarians driving SUVs posts in 5.4.3.2.1..."

Lets throw in a few "Bjorn Lomborg (a statistician with no environmental science training, let alone numerical modelling or fluid dynamics) is right and everyone else was wrong" too. That'll be fun.

And some recycling of the "Wasn't everyone warning about Global Cooling 30 years ago?" posts (erm, no, frankly, though there were one or two apocalyptic popular science books on the subject).

Re:And cue...

[henrygb]

How about a quote from the interview: "I was actually surprised about how much the scientific community knows about the history of climate change, and how little it knows about the future of climate change, and how hard it is to make these links with with anything close to the level of certainty policy makers and funders would like. The planet is so complex, and so fragile in many ways, that it becomes very hard to understand how everything will interact as the weather changes. More to the point, we don't really know how climate change will play out in specific regions, and that's actually the data we most need to make decisions about what to do."

So at least he is realistic about the quality of the science.

Re:And cue...

[gowen]

how little it knows about the future of climate change, and how hard it is to make these links with with anything close to the level of certainty policy makers and funders would like.

Thats a nice point. Sadly, the present policy makers' response to this is "Lets do nothing."

Re:And cue...

[provolt]

Well, we know that whichever of those is likely, the initial trigger will be greater atmospheric temperatures due to the greenhouse effect. So, how about a ratifying the global environmental protocol concerned with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions?

I don't think you understand. Our knowledge isn't good enough to understand what triggers what. It's plausible (but not proven) that increased carbon dioxide emissions could be the the "trigger" for huge changes in the climate. However, out knowledge of prediction is so poor that we cannot be sure that reducing emission will not be a "trigger".

The correct course of action is to do nothing. Action or in-action could cause the same effects. We don't have enough knowledge to say for certain. However, we can say for certain that adopting treaties like Kyoto would seriously happer our economy. (Which was the true intention of the treaty and why the the US senate unanimously passed a resolution against it.)

So we can choose from the following
1) Unknown chances of global climate change
2) Uknownn chances of global climate change and large, negative impacts on the economy.

It's not a hard choice.

Re:And cue...

[gowen]

I don't think you understand.

I rather think I do. I attend 6-8 environmental conferences a year, and speak, in my own small capacity, at most of them.

Our knowledge isn't good enough to understand what triggers what.

Only if you close your eyes and ears to years of research, and an overwhelming scientific consensus. Go read the Kyoto report, or the opinion of the US Academy of Science, or the Royal Society of London. (I could go on). In fact, its very hard to find a contrary view from a source unfunded by vested interest.

adopting treaties like Kyoto would seriously hamper our economy.

And yet, almost every other country in the world has ratified it, and yet the recent performance of the US economy is no better than that of Australia, or the EU.

Do you often state opinions that are wholly contrary to the facts?

Re:And cue...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Throughout history, science is never done by consensus. Someone comes along with an idea, the bulk of the scientific community laughs in derision, 50 years later all those tenured professors are forgotten and that lone voice is elevated to the status of Einstein.

God, I hate this myth, especially the "laughs in derision" part. Einstein's work was immediately recognized by "all those tenured professors" as having immense value, being a unified explanation of some serious problems with classical physics that had been bothering physicists since the mid-19th c.; there may have been those who disagreed with some aspects of his work (as, indeed, they were right to do; note that we still haven't unified relativity with quantum theory) but controversy is not the same as derision. Einstein's major papers were published in respected, established journals managed by those old fuddy-duddy academics you decry.

Newton, Darwin, Watson and Crick -- pretty much all of them worked their way through the scientific establishments of their day. Every once in a great while a major breakthrough is greeted with open derision (e.g., Mendeleev's periodic table) but the vast majority of those dismissed as crackpots are, in fact, crackpots; and the vast majority of scientific advances come from scientists working within the established system.

Re:And cue...

[Waffle Iron]

However, we can say for certain that adopting treaties like Kyoto would seriously happer our economy.

We can't say that for certian. The "science" of economics involves an order of magnitude more BS than even climatology. For all we know, it might be good for the economy, just like the counterintuitive notion of nationalizing most industrial production and then blowing up most of the output was excellent for the economy during WWII.

People who practice hand wringing over how every human action could destroy the economy are just as stupid as the worst tree huggers. Maybe they should be called economentalist whackos.

Re:And cue...

[JWW]

The only problem is that countries like France and Japan can abide by Kyoto with their power plants because they actually build and use nuclear power plants there.

In the US we don't have any new nuclear plants and they never can build any because the environmentalists block new nuclear power plants at every turn.

So the economic impacts of Kyoto in the US would be quite large. We would have coal and gas power plants that would have to be shut down because they would never meet emmissions standards, but we would be unable to build nuclear (no emmisions) plants to replace them.

I do not like the environmentalists claiming that the US should do something about carbon dioxide emmissions and then saying that one of the best solutions to no emmissions power generation can't be used.

That movie looks so awful

[The I Shing]

What I think is hilarious about that Day After Tomorrow movie is how the studio advertises it as "from the director of Independence Day." That's not a big recommendation in my book. That's like a breakfast cereal manufacturer advertising a new product as "brought to you by the makers of pus, earwax, boogers, chewed bubblegum and cat vomit! Yum!"

I think it's a mistake to advertise that a movie was directed by a guy who directed a really awful previous movie! On that basis alone, I am absolutely not ever going to allow any of this movie to come into view of my eyes, other than what I've already suffered through by seeing the ludicrous trailer about a billion times.

Re:Total Bunkum

[Space cowboy]

However, it just goes to show; make a movie about a meteor hitting earth and we spend billions on searching for NEO's (near earth objects), make a movie about climate change and all of a sudden we are at risk from "Abrupt Climate Change". The planets lasted this long already, I personally am not too concerned.

Whereas I share your view (to an extent, it wasn't billions!) on the knee-jerk reactions to disaster films, it's not the planet that really has anything to care about - the moon was formed when the planet was hit by a rock, and the planet is still here. It could happen again. Anything living would be from a time after that event, of course. Anything. The planet itself is fairly resilient, even when it came close to being completely destroyed.

Simon

Science vs. Slashdot

[dachshund]

These days I only tune into these arguments to see how stridently unconcerned Slashdotters are with the possibility of environmental change. I am, of course, open to arguments about the validity of the threat. What never fails to amaze me is how many Slashdotters-- ostensibly a group of relatively intelligent people-- are moved to approach this issue from emotional, rather than scientific point of view.

To quote Isaac Asimov: "It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong."

The Day After....Tomorrow

[guacamolefoo]

The title of the movie (The Day After Tomorrow) struck me as strangely similar to that of The Day After, a TV movie released in 1983 which highlighted the Doomsday consequences of nuclear war. Both movies appear to be highly politicized, anti-GOP movies timed (more or less) to coincide with the election cycle. Naming the new movie "The Day After Tomorrow" struck me as an obvious play on the original "The Day After". It just seemed too close to it to be an accident.

FWIW, The Day After had a realistic representation of the effects of nuclear war. Too bad the current The Day After Tomorrow seems to be according to many accounts just a modified, updated Poseidon Adventure or Towering Inferno. To some extent that undercuts my theory that there may be political motivation behind this, but the less realistic it is, the less effective it is, and it becomes just a fantasy type movie. Unfortunately, people often take fantasy (i.e. "JFK") and turn it into their reality because they are too intellectually lazy to find out whether something on the big screen has any basis in reality. Too many people just guzzle the shit that the media pumps out to them without questioning any of it. That goes for for left, right, and plain old profit-seeking media alike.

I'm feeling cynical this morning for some reason. Please excuse my negativity and have yourself a really nice day. Maybe it'll offset the negative karma I'm giving off this morning.

GF.

Long scale economics

[jago25_98]

While there may be disagreement on:

- whether things will get hot or cold
- or whether we are causing the changes

We are very sure that change of some sort is absolutely unequivocal.

Change is generally bad, usually costing money. On that all parties agree.

So it is economically wise to proact rather than react.

When economics begin to look at the whole timescale - 10 years or 100 years things will change. That's the real challange.

Re:Long scale economics

[CrimsonAvenger]

No. The thing to do is adapt.

Climate change will come with humans, or without. It's been going on since long before humans arrived on the scene, and there is no reason to believe it'll stop just because we ask it nicely.

There is also no reason to believe we know enough, or have power enough, to hold the planet's climate in long-term stasis. So let's forget that option.

Concentrate on what we CAN do.

If we are shifting the CO2 balance in the atmosphere, then work on fixing our contributions. But don't expect that because we stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, that the CO2 balance will stabilize. There's no reason to believe it will, and even less reason to believe that the "historical" level is some magical stable point.

Another thing we can work on is becoming less dependent on environmental fresh water. Rain is all well and good, but if we don't start making our own fresh water soon, we'll be in deep before too much longer.

Same with food supplies - too dependent on weather. We've been able to grow things hydroponically and aeroponically for a long time, so it's time to start looking at them in the large scale. It'll help in all sorts of interesting ways, not least will be reduction of our (current) need to dump fertilizer into the Gulf of Mexico.

It'll happen anyway

[millahtime]

The enviornment will change anyway. History, Arechology and other sciences have shown us that. Even before mans time of rule here the climate was in constant flux. We've had ice ages, tropical times and the inbetween.

What is there to be concerned with. It will change wether we want it to or not. We have to learn to live with it, try not to kill ourselves off, make sure we don't do too much damage (climate change is not damage. although damage can cause climate change), and enjoy our short time on this earth.

Re:Why can't people just watch a movie?

[The Only Druid]

The reason is simple, and its the very same reason people dont watch movies in foreign languages without subtitles:

We want to connect to the storyline, and through it the characters.

If a movie has too much of a break with reality - either because of it being too 'fantasy' for a person (i.e. how some people reacted to LotR, though not too many of course) or because it asks for too intense a suspension of disbelief (i.e. how many of us react to The Day After Tomorrow) - then people cant relate to it. Sure, its touching that Quaid's character wants to reach his son, but the setup is simply too absurd.

Another post aluded to aliens visiting; given the absurdity of the environmental effects visible in the movie, it actually is no less absurd to show an alien ship arriving, causing this damage and then leaving, than to have these environmental effects.

Think of it this way: suppose you were watching a sci-fi movie, and in the middle of it the writers changed the internal rules (i.e. a given cause had a new and different effect, unpredictably so). You'd be angry, because you can no longer connect to the story, because you cant predict results. Its the same thing: we're angry because this significant a suspension of disbelief calls for an absurd break from reality (think those crazy maneuvers they depicted in ID4 for existing aircraft).

Interview with Patrick Michaels this morning.

[mobiux]

On Wisconsin Public Radio.

He was there to respond to the "day after tomorrow" myths, and spent 20 minutes picking apart this Pentagon report.
He basically said that the one event they base this entire article on, was actually caused by huge freshwater reserves that dumped into the ocean. These reserves came from pools left from the ice age.
I recommend tracking down the audio on wpr.org.
7am - 8am hour this morning.

Re:Total Bunkum

[Megane]

I think Letterman summed it all up last night when he asked a "scientist" what he thought of that movie. The answer? "It's hor*****t." (that includes the broadcast bleep)

Re:Weather

[wes33]

Your analogy is not cogent ... I can predict with fair certainty that people will lose money on average at Las Vegas. But I have to admit I am weak on predicting the next 6 numbers to come up on the roulette wheel. Climate is like the odds; weather is like the particular results.

Re:The Real Disaster Movie

[sql*kitten]

In this movie, millions of worlds poorest and most vulnerable die horribly when the economic systems that keep them alive are disrupted by Ivory tower plans of the world's frivileged elite.

That's pretty much what happened in China. The Communist government of Mao needed to increase crop yields, so it ordered every farmer to plant seeds only a third of the distance apart that they normally did. What happened of course is that none of the plants could get enough nutrients from the soil to mature, and tens of millions starved. However, no Communist party officials starved, and were free to try a new plan the following season.

Re:The Real Disaster Movie

[gclef]

or you could replace the hysteria over weather with hysteria about war, call it "1984", and buy it at your local bookstore/rent it at your local BlockBuster.