Climate & civilisation collapse (was: Re: A second WAS [ox-en] Germ of a new form of society ? [Philosophical Investigation])
- From: "Niall Douglas" <s_fsfeurope2 nedprod.com>
- Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 16:02:49 -0000
On 13 Feb 2004 at 5:41, Adam Moran wrote:
(BTW I attach "Climate Collapse - a Pentagon Report" which is semi-
relevent to the discussion)
May be it
would have gone another way if Germany hadn't been split. (Alive Rosa
roo - A valentine to you). Germany was far more industrialised; Russia
was in a predominantly agrarian-feudal system and it was just too much
to turn around. Dunno ... I heard this stuff mainly on picket-lines
... maybe these are are just malformed memories of other malformed
memories.
I was more coming at it from a historical point of view - if you try
to work out why every civilisation eventually falls - Roman,
Egyptian, Chinese, Incan etc. it invariably comes down to a lack of
dynamism - societies become rigid, taking risk becomes penalised and
ossification sets in. Similarly if you have a good dynamic system, I
don't think it matters how backward a population is, they'll thrive
(even if it doesn't look like it from the outside).
On a simpler level, in capitalism there's no shortage of bad practice
either through ignorance or "couldn't be bothered" - however there's
a motivation to change and improve if there's a financial reward
(where there isn't, not much tends to change). In communism there
were similarly plenty of workers who realised there were systemic
faults in their modes of production too, but here if you complained
you certainly weren't rewarded (neither are you in capitalism, but
the worker could leave the company, found their own competing
business which didn't make the mistake and thus had a competitive
advantage).
We here in the west are still living within the afterglow of the
renaissance and in historical terms, we should get a few hundred more
years before our civilisation will fall though as the Incans and
Romans found out, outside factors can precipitate a much quicker end.
I take the point - ideas become flawed when adopted en mass unless
they make use of the need of systems to grow - what is required is
*Feedback*.
PRECISELY! (if I had bold, I'd not have used capitals)
BTW, I'm becoming more and more impressed at the intellectual
capabilities of IFSO members. I had a medium sized thread with David
Golden a few months ago and he too is a very bright and well educated
guy.
Maybe IFSO has hidden honey-like qualities? :)
Cheers,
Niall
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Subject: [Politics] Climate Collapse - a Pentagon report
Date sent: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 01:14:07 -0000
Grim reading this, but interesting. Isn't it strange how the
Americans always think Europe will be more devastated than the US by
climate change and we always think the opposite?
For the last 100 years the US has had more natural disasters than any
other country. If climate change were to happen, surely those large
expensive disasters would multiply considerably to several a year,
rendering much of middle America uninhabitable? Also the average
arable topsoil depth in the US is now only 18 inches after decades of
forced agriculture - not much is needed to permanently blow all that
away and make most of the US like northern Africa.
Cheers,
Niall
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Climate Collapse
By David Stipp
Fortune
Monday 26 January 2004
The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare
The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the
mother of all national security issues.
Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face
it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about
al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly
remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever
imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the
Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.
The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming,
rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be
pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the
ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch
from one state to another in less than a decade?like a canoe that's
gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know
how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate
change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the
need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies?thereby upsetting
the geopolitical balance of power.
Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling
in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in
much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts,
turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last
fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar
disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or
Russia?it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in
abrupt climate change.
Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a
decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient
layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts
in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed?in
some cases, just a few years.
The case for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded as the most
likely explanation for the abrupt changes. The eastern U.S. and
northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic Ocean
current that flows north from the tropics?that's why Britain, at
Labrador's latitude, is relatively temperate. Pumping out warm, moist
air, this "great conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves
north. That causes the current to sink in the North Atlantic, where
it heads south again in the ocean depths. The sinking process draws
more water from the south, keeping the roughly circular current on
the go.
But when the climate warms, according to the theory, fresh water from
melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North Atlantic, lowering the
current's salinity?and its density and tendency to sink. A warmer
climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current, further
lowering its saltiness. As a result, the conveyor loses its main
motive force and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump
and altering the climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere.
Scientists aren't sure what caused the warming that triggered such
collapses in the remote past. (Clearly it wasn't humans and their
factories.) But the data from Arctic ice and other sources suggest
the atmospheric changes that preceded earlier collapses were
dismayingly similar to today's global warming. As the Ice Age began
drawing to a close about 13,000 years ago, for example, temperatures
in Greenland rose to levels near those of recent decades. Then they
abruptly plunged as the conveyor apparently shut down, ushering in
the "Younger Dryas" period, a 1,300-year reversion to ice-age
conditions. (A dryas is an Arctic flower that flourished in Europe at
the time.)
Though Mother Nature caused past abrupt climate changes, the one that
may be shaping up today probably has more to do with us. In 2001 an
international panel of climate experts concluded that there is
increasingly strong evidence that most of the global warming observed
over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities?mainly the
burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release heat-
trapping carbon dioxide. Indicators of the warming include shrinking
Arctic ice, melting alpine glaciers, and markedly earlier springs at
northerly latitudes. A few years ago such changes seemed signs of
possible trouble for our kids or grandkids. Today they seem portents
of a cataclysm that may not conveniently wait until we're history.
Accordingly, the spotlight in climate research is shifting from
gradual to rapid change. In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences
issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt
change. Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers
to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within
two decades.
Such jeremiads are beginning to reverberate more widely. Billionaire
Gary Comer, founder of Lands' End, has adopted abrupt climate change
as a philanthropic cause. Hollywood has also discovered the
issue?next summer 20th Century Fox is expected to release The Day
After Tomorrow, a big-budget disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid as
a scientist trying to save the world from an ice age precipitated by
global warming.
Fox's flick will doubtless be apocalyptically edifying. But what
would abrupt climate change really be like?
Scientists generally refuse to say much about that, citing a data
deficit. But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew
Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the
question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense
Department's "Yoda"?a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements
on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense
policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is
to envision future threats to national security. The Department of
Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his
brainchild. Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked
him to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift
toward nimble forces and smart weapons.
When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar
screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to
write a report on the national-security implications of the threat.
Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has
since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to
DreamWorks?he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven
Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall
at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning
think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and
pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from?at
least in public.
The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that
the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE. It doesn't pretend to
be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario
to help planners think about coping strategies. Here is an abridged
version:
A total shutdown of the ocean conveyor might lead to a big chill like
the Younger Dryas, when icebergs appeared as far south as the coast
of Portugal. Or the conveyor might only temporarily slow down,
potentially causing an era like the "Little Ice Age," a time of hard
winters, violent storms, and droughts between 1300 and 1850. That
period's weather extremes caused horrific famines, but it was mild
compared with the Younger Dryas.
For planning purposes, it makes sense to focus on a midrange case of
abrupt change. A century of cold, dry, windy weather across the
Northern Hemisphere that suddenly came on 8,200 years ago fits the
bill?its severity fell between that of the Younger Dryas and the
Little Ice Age. The event is thought to have been triggered by a
conveyor collapse after a time of rising temperatures not unlike
today's global warming. Suppose it recurred, beginning in 2010. Here
are some of the things that might happen by 2020:
At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather
variation?allowing skeptics to dismiss them as a "blip" of little
importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with
uncertainty. But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic
is happening. The average temperature has fallen by up to five
degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and up
to six degrees in parts of Europe. (By comparison, the average
temperature over the North Atlantic during the last ice age was ten
to 15 degrees lower than it is today.) Massive droughts have begun in
key agricultural regions. The average annual rainfall has dropped by
nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its climate has become more like
Siberia's.
Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor becomes wobbly
on its way to collapse. A particularly severe storm causes the ocean
to break through levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities
such as the Hague unlivable. In California the delta island levees in
the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct
system transporting water from north to south.
Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states,
along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now,
causing widespread dust storms and soil loss. The U.S. is better
positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse
growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources. That
has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and
fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America.
Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around
itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back
starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean
islands?waves of boat people pose especially grim problems. Tension
between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges on a 1944
treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into
Mexico. America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with
options that are costly both economically and politically, including
nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives
without catastrophic losses.
Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with
immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south.
Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in
Africa and elsewhere. But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it
from catastrophe.
Australia's size and resources help it cope, as does its location?the
conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern Hemisphere. Japan has
fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to
cope?its government is able to induce population-wide behavior
changes to conserve resources.
China's huge population and food demand make it particularly
vulnerable. It is hit by increasingly unpredictable monsoon rains,
which cause devastating floods in drought-denuded areas. Other parts
of Asia and East Africa are similarly stressed. Much of Bangladesh
becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea level, which
contaminates inland water supplies. Countries whose diversity already
produces conflict, such as India and Indonesia, are hard-pressed to
maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding changes.
As the decade progresses, pressures to act become
irresistible?history shows that whenever humans have faced a choice
between starving or raiding, they raid. Imagine Eastern European
countries, struggling to feed their populations, invading
Russia?which is weakened by a population that is already in
decline?for access to its minerals and energy supplies. Or picture
Japan eyeing nearby Russian oil and gas reserves to power
desalination plants and energy-intensive farming. Envision nuclear-
armed Pakistan, India, and China skirmishing at their borders over
refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land. Or Spain and
Portugal fighting over fishing rights?fisheries are disrupted around
the world as water temperatures change, causing fish to migrate to
new habitats.
Growing tensions engender novel alliances. Canada joins fortress
America in a North American bloc. (Alternatively, Canada may seek to
keep its abundant hydropower for itself, straining its ties with the
energy-hungry U.S.) North and South Korea align to create a
technically savvy, nuclear-armed entity. Europe forms a truly unified
bloc to curb its immigration problems and protect against aggressors.
Russia, threatened by impoverished neighbors in dire straits, may
join the European bloc.
Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable. Oil supplies are stretched
thin as climate cooling drives up demand. Many countries seek to
shore up their energy supplies with nuclear energy, accelerating
nuclear proliferation. Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop
nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt, and North Korea.
Israel, China, India, and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.
The changes relentlessly hammer the world's "carrying capacity"?the
natural resources, social organizations, and economic networks that
support the population. Technological progress and market forces,
which have long helped boost Earth's carrying capacity, can do little
to offset the crisis?it is too widespread and unfolds too fast.
As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern
reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water,
and energy supplies. As Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc has
noted, wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries
ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population's adult males
usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again
come to define human life.
Over the past decade, data have accumulated suggesting that the
plausibility of abrupt climate change is higher than most of the
scientific community, and perhaps all of the political community, are
prepared to accept. In light of such findings, we should be asking
when abrupt change will happen, what the impacts will be, and how we
can prepare?not whether it will really happen. In fact, the climate
record suggests that abrupt change is inevitable at some point,
regardless of human activity. Among other things, we should:
Speed research on the forces that can trigger abrupt climate change,
how it unfolds, and how we'll know it's occurring.
Sponsor studies on the scenarios that might play out, including
ecological, social, economic, and political fallout on key food-
producing regions.
Identify "no regrets" strategies to ensure reliable access to food
and water and to ensure our national security.
Form teams to prepare responses to possible massive migration, and
food and water shortages.
Explore ways to offset abrupt cooling?today it appears easier to warm
than to cool the climate via human activities, so there may be "geo-
engineering" options available to prevent a catastrophic temperature
drop.
In sum, the risk of abrupt climate change remains uncertain, and it
is quite possibly small. But given its dire consequences, it should
be elevated beyond a scientific debate. Action now matters, because
we may be able to reduce its likelihood of happening, and we can
certainly be better prepared if it does. It is time to recognize it
as a national security concern.
The Pentagon's reaction to this sobering report isn't known?in
keeping with his reputation for reticence, Andy Marshall declined to
be interviewed. But the fact that he's concerned may signal a sea
change in the debate about global warming. At least some federal
thought leaders may be starting to perceive climate change less as a
political annoyance and more as an issue demanding action.
If so, the case for acting now to address climate change, long a hard
sell in Washington, may be gaining influential support, if only
behind the scenes. Policymakers may even be emboldened to take steps
such as tightening fuel-economy standards for new passenger vehicles,
a measure that would simultaneously lower emissions of greenhouse
gases, reduce America's perilous reliance on OPEC oil, cut its trade
deficit, and put money in consumers' pockets. Oh, yes?and give the
Pentagon's fretful Yoda a little less to worry about.
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