Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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
So at least he is realistic about the quality of the science.
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."
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
It does, and this gives an influx of fresh water in the Polar Oceans. In a normal freezing season, theres extensive rejection of brine, which produces dense, saline water, which sinks to form water masses usually called Deep Water and Bottom Water. These form a large part of the Thermohaline Circulation (THC), a global scale conveyor belt of water, of which large scale surface currents like the Gulf Stream are but a part. Turn off the dense water formation at the poles, and that may be enough to retard or stop the THC.
If that turns off, you switch off the major heat transport mechanism from the equator to the poles, and that means abrupt cooling for the mid-latitude and polar regions.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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
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."
There was a number of programs on BBC/Discovery in the horizon series. One of them is about global warming, the other one was about the fall of the Maya empire which happened during one of these abrupt events.
l .shtml
The thing which people do not understand about global warming is that it sooner or later brings the gulfstream to a standstill due to decrease in water salinity in the arctic. As a result New England, Iceland and most of Wester Europe freeze as the temperature drops down by up to 9C. After all, London is at the lattitude of Alaska and the only thing keeping it warm is the Stream.
Latin America overheats and goes into a draught. There are some effects going as far as changes in the monsoon patterns and draughts in South East Asia.
This is also the reason why you cannot indiscriminately use historic data sets about climate without weighting. This is also the reason why a recently published right-thinking-tank flamebait (honoured on Slashdot) that the original global warming research is flawed because they did not use all data including Texas is what it is - flamebait. Texas is probably the only place to go cooler in such an event because the rain that currently drops on Latin America will drop there.
The simulations have been run many times and the result is always the same. In fact sod the temperature, the most scary fact of global warming is the gradual decrease of flow in the antigulfstream and water salinity which have been picked up for the last several years.
For a lamers overview see this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/bigchil
For non lamers - see Science as well as a few other magazines where the results have been published over the years
Also, I am not amazed that the Pentagon has asked for this. The most scary part of global warming is the stop of the gulfstream and the 2+ billion of hungry and thursty armed people on the move. Some of them with nuclear weapons...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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"
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.
I have to admit, I did not do a full RTFA before doing the previous post.
Here are my 2p after reading the rest of it.
There are several incorrect assumptions in this article:
It forgets to account that EU deliberately expands towards less affected countries. It also forgets to notice that the agriculture in all of EU except Poland, Italy, Spain and possibly South France lives only on life support. If British, German, Northern France agriculture will die for climate reason the shelves in the supermarket will not even change and the Mediterranean regions are not going to be affected that much. Poland, Bulgaria and Romania are largely outside the affected zone (if the british met simulations are to be believed). After they join the EU (Poland already, BG and RO in 2007) EU will go fully selfsufficient in agriculture even if UK, DE and Scandinavia will freeze.
It forgets to mention that another least affected country - Russia. There will be some cooling around St Petersburg, Baltic, Murmansk, but the rest of the climate will stay where it is and it is largely selfsufficient.
The assumption that US is selfsufficient is deeply flawed. Nearly all large agricultural states in the US will be hit by either draught or multiple class 5 hurricanes per year. So in fact US is the only place that cannot fold into itself (yeah, we know who ordered the report and what do they want to hear).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Do you often state opinions that are wholly contrary to the facts?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
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.
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.
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?
/. post.) However, all of them are investigated by groups of very intelligent and trained people who know about the problems and do their best to compensate. Furthermore, you must remember that our picture of the past is a jigsaw puzzle and every piece must fit; for instance, it is not enough to observe that ancient beetles whose hard anatomy is the same as modern might have had different soft anatomy (and thus different temperature sensitivity.) You must also explain why the other evidence appears to match the beetles.
There is not much direct temperature evidence before the 19th century, but there is plenty of inferential evidence. Isotope ratios in Arctic ice give a good record going back 10s of thousands of years. This might sound doubtful, but the earlier part of this evidence can be cross checked with more obvious sources, such as tree rings (more than a thousand years) and sediment layers in lakes (thousands of years.) There is a great deal of fossil evidence, of which the best comes from pollen and hard-shelled micro-organisms (e.g. diatoms.) These (when embedded in countable sediment layers) tell us when conditions allowed the organisms to live in a particular locale. Beetles are also very useful, with many temperature-sensitive species having conserved their morphology for quite a long time (a million years.) In general, the most useful species are small organisms with hard parts; these leave more remains and travel less than larger organisms (a rare fossil could easily be in an atypical location.) Geological evidence tells us about glaciations over quite long time scales (millions of years.)
All of these sources of evidence are beset with problems and complications, and therefore highly technical (i.e. beyond a
maybe the world gets a little hotter ever couple of 100,000 years too???
The world's climate does indeed vary on many different timescales and for many different reasons - it even gets a little hotter every 100,000 years or so! In fact it's in a hot period right now; that is why you haven't noticed that we are living in an ice age. The reason for the cycle is not magnetic fields, but rather the shape and timing of the earth's orbit around the sun (the amount of eccentricity, the amount of "wobble", and the timing of northern summer relative to the orbital position are not constants.) This is the "Milankovich cycle."
The people who think that human activity might make dramatic short-term changes in the earth's climate know all this and try to take it into account.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
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.