Interview: Abrupt Climate Change, the Pentagon, and The Day After Tomorrow

By: Alex Steffan
Date: May 26, 2004
Source: WORLDCHANGING (www.worldchanging.com)

Ednote: Sometimes it is advisable to visit yesteryear to view the predictions and muse on the timing and eventuality of their completeness. Did they happen can they still happen? How valid were the facts that the predictions were made from and how creditable was the source?

The Pentagon in 2005 or so released a report that said in essence global warming was the greatest threat to the U.S. security. In 1992 a report by the actuaries of the European Insurance Industry forecast “that within the next decade, whole countries could go bankrupt as a result of global scorching (heating, warming). This dated article gives you some of the background for that Pentagon Report. Of course the Administration totally ignored the report.

Doug Randall wrote (along with his boss at Global Business Network, Peter Schwartz) what has come to be known as "the Pentagon study" on abrupt climate change. Their scenaric findings -- that the gradual global warming we're experiencing could plausibly trigger an abrupt climate snap, and that its effects would be massive, perhaps catastrophic, and of direct relevance to the national security of the United States -- were picked up by media around the world, gathering a snowball of controversy and hype along the way. Their scenarios, freely available on the Web, were termed a "secret Pentagon report," and their descriptions of possible climate catastrophe taken as bald prediction.

But underneath the hype was a reasoned attempt to judge the seriousness of the threat posed by climate instability. That's something all of us hoping to change the world have to take into account. So we asked Doug about the implications of that report (now that the dust has settled), the movie The Day After Tomorrow, and how to think about the future of climate change.

Alex Steffen: Please give us the elevator pitch here: what is abrupt climate change, how could it happen and what did your scenario study show it could be like?
Doug Randall: Sure, and let me also give you the background on this. The Pentagon asked us to think about abrupt climate change and what its geopolitical implications might be. We weren't saying this is what will happen, only that it plausibly could happen.

Abrupt climate change is the possibility of sudden and dramatic cooling, drying and windiness that potentially could be triggered by slow and gradual global warming. Now when you talk about climate change, most people think slow and gradual global warming, which itself is a very real problem. But the story that hasn't been told as often, but is clearly understood by most scientists, is a sudden and abrupt change in the planet's climate.

This has happened many times in the planet's history, and most scientists agree it will happen again at some point and that gradual warming makes it more likely to some degree. The big questions are when, how much, in what regions and to what degree.

Now, we looked at the worst-case realistic scenario: what would happen if abrupt climate change was as extreme as is plausible, if it hit the most vulnerable regions the hardest, and if it all happened at once. There are no scientists we've run into who say that abrupt climate change will unfold exactly as we've outlined, but there are also very few scientists who say that something like this is implausible.

What would happen? Well, in our study, average temperatures drop five degrees Fahrenheit, maybe twice as much in North America and Europe. There are huge droughts across the world and rapidly-worsening storms, leading to food shortages, lack of fresh water and disrupted energy supplies.

In terms of daily life, food prices would go up, and certain foods would be harder to get. Fuel prices would go up. But more importantly, if this were to occur, you'd probably see mass-migrations. People in Sweden moving to Spain, people in Canada moving to the US, people in hard-hit developing countries moving wherever they can.

But things might not be that bad, and we might be able to respond effectively.

Your scenario is based on actual events 8,200 years ago, right?

Yes, the historical record is clear. Abrupt climate change happens.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't huge questions. For instance, do advance technologies and globalization make this sort of change less impactful, because we can adapt more quickly, or do they make it worse, because our systems are more brittle and we're more reliant on one another? That's a key question.

And what's your thinking on that?
It's hard to know. It's certainly plausible to imagine the impacts being worse, and that leading to a sharp decrease in the carrying capacity of the planet, and that would lead to even more conflicts over food, water and other resources, more instability.

I was just recently reading the newly-released, updated 30th anniversary edition of The Limits to Growth. The authors there argue that we're already beyond the limits, and cutting pretty deep into the natural capital upon which human civilization relies, and you make the point that abrupt climate change could wreak profound havoc on natural systems, which are already under stress. How bad could this get?

Well, on the one hand, human society is pretty resilient.

On the other, if abrupt climate change strikes in an area which is already vulnerable right now, say, Africa, then the impacts will be much, much more severe. African systems are already straining. How much more drought, how much more famine, how much more severe weather can we handle in Africa? Where carrying capacity is already stressed, where we're already beyond the limits, a sharp right punch like abrupt climate change could be truly disastrous.

Is the industrialized world doing a good enough job preparing for climate instability?

What do I think personally? No. I believe the industrialized world has the knowledge, the capacity and the motive to focus much greater attention on these issues, and we ought to. But that's not a suggestion that came out of the scenario or our report.

The U.N. just called for more aid to help the developing world predict severe storms, estimating that last year, 75,000 people died as a direct result of a weather disasters. Freak storms, tidal surges, sea level rises, Arctic trekkers finding open water at the North Pole -- many of the kinds of things your scenario describes are already today's headlines. What if anything does your work tell us about how to think about stories like these?

You know, it's hard to know where you are in the cycle. We tend to think, during a harsh winter or a heat wave that, see, global warming is here. But are we deep in climate change, or are these just aberrations? We just don't really know where on the curve we stand.

One of the things Day After Tomorrow had been criticized for is the extreme suddenness of the climate collapse. Nobody credible thinks it will happen overnight or to that extent. Yet, as you point out, drops of 5-10 degrees in a single decade are entirely plausible, given the historical record -- that's still pretty freaking extreme, pretty damn quick. Should they have titled this movie "The Decade After Tomorrow"?

[Laughs] Well, they're trying to sell movies, and a day is much more interesting than a decade. This movie is science fiction, not science fact, but I think that it's becoming a platform for meaningful discussion.

Really? Do you see signs of that discussion starting to happen?

I was actually very pleased with the responses we received to our work from a lot of individual readers. Of course, there was a media firestorm and a lot of inaccurate statements made, but what came out of it was the beginning of a real dialogue, and I think there's starting to be an awareness in the general public of what abrupt climate change is. Global warming is serious and somewhat understood, but the second half of that story -- abrupt climate change -- is not something we've been thinking about.

So it may be good that it's hard to ignore The Day After Tomorrow. I haven't seen it. I know that in the movie the impacts of abrupt climate change are probably exaggerated and the timeframe is definitely exaggerated, but the premise is one of the real issues of our day -- and it's being debated right there on the big screen, with people paying $9.50 to do it. I applaud that. I think it's great.

You guys make the point that in terms of being prepared for abrupt climate change, the question to ask is not whether this will happen, but when. You also say we may be on the cusp of such an event. What are the danger signs, and how alarmed should we be, how alarmed are you?

The danger signs come from the world of science and have to do with things like salinity of the Atlantic Ocean and the thermohaline conveyor. Signs that point to big shifts in these kind of processes are the ones to look for, as opposed to hotter weather or strange storms. We need scientists out there looking. We need deeper understanding and more knowledge.

How alarmed am I? This could be a much larger problem than even climate change in general is, but I'm hopeful that we'll put more resources towards understanding it.

But there must be a certain level, when you're doing this kind of thing, where you realize, "Wow, there's some real plausibility to the idea that the whole planet's weather could change in a decade." At some point you must've had an "Oh, shit!" moment there, you know?

Sure. There are definitely those moments. Oh shit moments kind of come with the job. I mean, personally? I would really like to see us start moving more aggressively on global warming and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

This is why I'm -- again, personally -- an advocate of hydrogen and similar kinds of solutions. The hydrogen scenario (which Peter Schwartz and I painted in Wired magazine a while back) has its own problems. Hydrogen is a good direction to move because it gives increasing flexibility to move away from fossil fuels, but it's hard to imagine realistically doing it without using fossil fuels and probably nuclear power to create the hydrogen in the interim. So those would be steps towards a greener future, though not necessarily green steps themselves. If this were an easy problem, we'd have solved it already.

While you were working on this, what surprised you the most?

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 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.

You can't build up every sea wall. You can't fortify every grid. You can't find more water for every farm. We just can't afford it. It's not possible. But you don't really know for certain where gradual climate change is going to hit the hardest, or how abrupt climate change might unfold. And you can't make good decisions about how to respond until you do.

What kinds of questions remain to be asked, that would be useful to ask in a scenaric way: what kinds of questions do you think remain to be asked about these larger questions of climate that may not be usefully subject to straight prediction?

Wow. I like that question. My primary focus is really not on the environment, but I guess I'd say that among the questions that remain to be asked is what would it be like if the world viewed climate change as a global problem, rather than a set of national problems? How would things change if the world engaged in real collaboration on stopping and responding to climate change? I think that'd be the one I'd be really interested in.

Then there are lots of unknowns about technology. People are starting to talk about technology and the developing world -- the cell phone in places like India and China is the often cited example of... what do they call that?

Leapfrogging.

Yes, exactly. What might that look like if it continues, and how real is the possibility of leapfrogging here in the developed world? I have yet to see good scenarios on the future of technology and how it relates to climate change.

For example, environmental groups in the United States might ask themselves, Can we have the greatest impact focusing domestically, or would we have a greater impact focusing globally, even though our area of concern, our sponsor dollars, our members are here? I'm not an expert on the environment, but I suspect that looking dollar-for-impact, focusing on the developing world would be the way to go. But it's a big, unanswered question.

So, last question: are you going to go see The Day After Tomorrow?

[Laugh] Oh, definitely, yes.