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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."
will this increase the ratings for hockey on ESPN?
I was listening to BBC Radio 4 (Today program) and they sent a group of climateologists/ meteoroligists/ etc to a preview of the film.
the great quote was "the film makers left the laws of science on the cutting room floor"
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.
However, I do think they should make a movie about how all geeks get laid daily!
People in audiences have apparently found it incredibly funny... too bad it isn't a comedy. It's based on a book by Art Bell, the Coming Global Superstorm. I hear the only thing that would've made the movie worse is if they ended up defeating nature by uploading a virus they wrote on a Mac.
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).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
While I'm sure it's hard studying something that by definition you can never experience, measure or predict, I'd rather get my climate scares from a meteor-, climat- or oceanologist, thanks very much.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
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.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
I'll start by saying I did not RTFA.
Can someone tell me how a warming can start an ice age. I thought warming melted ice.
Evolution or ID?
I can confirm that the much of the data behind this pentagon report is false and has been provided by a penguin double agent acting for the Pentagon but mainly for a secret penguin organisation, The Brotherhood of Guin. Apprently it is a suble plan to induce the pentagon to eliminate polar bears, arch enemy and a major threat to the Brotherhood of Guin by tricking the pentagon into believing that polar bears were behind global warming.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The aliens will come and fix all our climate problems. Thier arrival is more plausable than the global storms in this movie.
Mother nature has bossed us around for too long. It is our rihgt, no, it is our destiny as Americans to destory this scourge called Mother Nature and bring peace and stability to the world. Without acting we only invite the onslaught of a new ice age and an armada of penguins with laser guns and jet packs. Strike now before it is too late! Vote for me in 2004 and I will end this threat once and for all.
-Dipster
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."
I see alot of people bashing the movie soley on this line.....I have the opposite feeling, by stating that up front you know EXACTLY what you are in for, which is a special effects romp with a thinner than air story line. It's like a two hour movie ride. I think everyone needs to see a silly camp movie once in a while and stop being so damn critical...
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
In other news, Satan has declared if this global ice-age spills over, into hell, he will sue those responsible for loss of what he calls
"When Hell freezes over bonds".
Hell stocks were down two points on the news.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
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.
Lots of petrified grits
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.
A blog I run for the wealth
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.
Evolution or ID?
For a great intro to chaos theory try this book by James Gleick.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
OK, I'm impressed. I was ready to read another misguided rant filed with half-baked theories and unsubstantiated jumps to conclusions, but the guy is actually displaying the exact right mindset.
He is humble.
In any debate on this subject, many people get into a religious frenzy and froth at the mouth when you present evidence that reality might be more complex than what they believe. It's refreshing to see a guy who actually explains that we mostly don't have enough data to make even educated guesses.
This is very different from the movie, of course, which is about as scientific as your average Star Trek show.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
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...
sounds like we need a whole bunch of Earth Simulators asap!
Do you need a website upgrade?
Its a movie.Don't take it so seriously.watch it.forget it. ;-)
Not that its Lord of the Rings to take seriously.
Lord of the Binges.
Seems to me that consequences of global warming are not dire enough for the greenies (more rainfall, higher crop yields) so they came up with the idea that warming will somehow lead to catastrophic cooling. Amusing!
an ill wind that blows no good
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).
"Stumble before you crawl"
Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese
can't really do it in a small post, but here's a generic scenario. This is VERY simplistic. Say it's getting warmer. The reasons are a totality, not one or the other. Greenhouse gases accumulating, not allowing heat to escape, etc. That's why they are called greenhouse gasses, they mimic what happens inside a greenhouse. The gasses come from both man made (various civilisation *things* that cause heat) and natural sources, like volcanoes, big forest fires, etc,etc. Part of the gasses are also just water vapor. Partly it also the particulate matter suspeneded in the atmosphere, blocking sunlight/heat, a disruption that effects plants in general, they won't grow as well, and therefore can't help mitigate the climate like they do now.
.... !!??1!!"
As it gets warmer, ice that is non floating, the ice that's on land in the arctic and antaractic melts, dumping huge quantities of cold fresh water into slightly warmer salt water. And the more that melts the faster it melts, because the white ice reflected heat, now it's bare rock and dirt, which is darker and absorbs heat, accelerating the melting. This also adds to the overall depth of the oceans, it rises. Floating ice is neutral, but land locked ice adds to the depth after it melts. OK, this new free flowing water up in the arctic (and off antarctica, but we'll just look at the arctic) sinks, causing changes in the global sea currents. One of the important ones is the gulf stream, which cycles around the atlantic as it gets heated in the tropics, flows north up the east coast of north america, dumps heat across northern europe, etc, then sinks back down, flows back across down to the gulf again. If the newly melting arctic ice is injected into this current from melting, it slows this gulf stream down, tremendously. You can see pics now, BTW, that shows this is happening to a large degree in the arctic. Without that warm gulf stream water constantly hitting the northern latitudes, well, it gets a LOT colder there. And the more the gulf stream slows down, the colder it gets up in the northern latitutdes, until such a time as a near- stasis is re established, where the conflicting events cancel each other, then it just hangs as an "ice age" for quite a long time as the smaller events start to accumulate and it reverses. Back and forth and forth and back it goes.. You get your localised "ice age". Hundreds of millions of people live up there, but it's become a lot more un-liveable,all the way to near-impossible, plus the water has risen to the point that coastal communities become flooded, and coastal communites have a huyge % of the populations, because mankind has accumulated itself to a great degree near oceans, and near where rivers enter oceans.
Basically hilarity and chaos ensue. "social unrest*" and "economic re adjustments**" and so on.
The only real debate is how fast and how much it can happen. That it DOES happen is just historical record. We do have evidence now that it can happen in a time span much less than millenia. Beyond that, "they" are only guessing.
I hope this is close enough, it is the cliff notes version as far as I understand it.
*social unrest = buncha them canuckians all move down here to georgia after they get theyselves all frozen out, where they drink up all the beer and get to eyeballin all our big hair gals-well, we gonna have a faht then, surely
**economic re-adjustments = "whatchoo mean a loaf of bread is now 19.89$, and a gallon 0 gas is 142.999$
and stuff like that there. It would be the sucks.
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.
> implications might be. We weren't saying this is what will happen, only that it plausibly could happen." >
> Pentagon scenario hmmm?...
No, it makes sense now!
Pentagon think tanks begin to realize the implications of global warming - an ice age. So they begin to look for areas which would be favorable to live in during an Ice Age - and they realize that the area around the Euphrates and the Tigris has been documented as being very fertile before the climate changed. So if the climate changed *back*, that would be the place to go. The area is sparsely populated now, but there is that pesky goverment in place headed by that Saddam guy (who we don't really like anyway) So as a contigency plan in the event of an Ice Age, America takes Saddam out, and then<NO CARRIER>
I'm not a natural-scientist, just a CS/mathematician. One thing that I've never understood about the global warming debate is this:
We know that over the last 100 years that the world-wide temp has gone up by roughly 1 degree. But before that time period, there is no climate data at all. So, how can we conclude that this is unnatural or not?
Or, more importantly, how can we use a ~100 year data set to make forecasts on a planet that is millions of years old. I mean hell, we know that the magnetic field inverts every couple 100,000 years and that we're over due for that... maybe the world gets a little hotter ever couple of 100,000 years too???
Isn't this possible?
actually it can be measured.
several years ago I was watching a documentary on some Antarctic geologists or something and they made a tunnel under the surface to "x" depth so they could look at the layers of ice and what they contained and over how many years the span was. I don't know why they didn't just use core samples, maybe they did the tunnel for the documentary so they could bring the camera in?
I don't know, anyways- The guy with the goggle and frozen beard was explaining what all the various strata meant in the ice wall we were looking at. It was fairly mundane until he pointed out one section that, based on the information he had provided earlier, showed rather obviously that SOMETHING had happened to cause a dramatic climate shift to another "ice age" in a period of JUST 50 years.
He didn't speculate on what caused it, but noted that it was possible as it had happened in the past and we were now staring at the evidence.
That's all I got for my science, some some documentary on the Discovery Channel.
I like microcars
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.
The ironic twist at the end of the movie comes when it is reveled decades latter that massive economic dislocations that killed all those people where made in response to exaggerated dangers based on flimsy scientific evidence. All those people died for nothing.
We could call it "The Energy Crises part II: This time it's personal"
It's like sitting down with an expert on nuclear energy to discuss the latest advances in reactor designs and the movie The Hulk.
Pentagon has contingency plan for every possible scenerio, upto and including alien invasion and divine intervention. It is their job to be ready for everything.
Worldwatch Institute has a Climate Change Online Feature targeting The Day After Tomorrow, and trying to use this movie as a chance to educate people about more reasonable climate change realities.
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.
Try "Inuk" (EE-nook) for singular, "Inuit" (INN-you-it with the Is elongated almost into Es) for plural. The language (not that anyone here besides me likely cares) is Inuktitut (ee-NOOK-tee-toot).
"Eskimo" is a derogatory term originally applied by Francophones ("Esquimaux") and meaning "eaters of raw meat".
Cheers!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
I don't know how much energy it would take to crack the Earth in half. But it's interesting to calculate how much it would take to "blow it out of existence", which could be loosely defined as a big enough explosion that all the bits can acquire escape velocity, and so can never recoalesce back into a planet.
The gravitational binding energy of the Earth is U = GM^2/R, where G is Newton's gravitational constant, M is the mass of the Earth, and R is its radius. Plugging in the appropriate numbers (see Wikipedia), you get 2.24x10^32 joules. For reference, if a ton of TNT is 1 billion calories (4.184 billion joules), then that works out to be 5.35x10^22 tons of TNT, or about 50 trillion gigatons. By way of comparison, I think I read that the world's nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War was somewhere between 20 and 50 gigatons.