Climate Change Equals Thermonuclear War
June 2nd, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
A group of Nobel laureates met in London last week at the St. James Symposium on Sustainability and crafted yet-another-political-statement-from-scientists. The statement (here in PDF) shows how hard it is to rise above the noise on the climate issue. Kofi Annan and his 315,000 deaths? That’s nothing. Look at what the Nobelists came up with:
The solutions to the extraordinary environmental, economic and human crises of this century will not be found in the political arena alone. Stimulated by the manifesto of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, the first Pugwash gathering of 1957 united scientists of all political persuasions to discuss the threat posed to civilization by the advent of thermonuclear weapons. Global climate change represents a threat of similar proportions, and should be addressed in a similar manner.
We are seeing an auctioning of promised devastation in an effort to corral attention on this climate issue. However, rather than motivate action via alarm, comparisons of climate change to thermonuclear war are probably going to lead to rolled eyes and a few laughs. Richard Cable at the BBC explains:
The qualitative difference between the two threats is perhaps nowhere better expressed, however inadvertently, than by the convener of the symposium himself, Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Where once we had ‘the Cold War notion of mutually-assured destruction,’ he told the Times, ‘Today we have mutually-assured increases in greenhouse gases.’
OK. But while debates around climate change are still qualified by the words ‘might’, ‘could’ and ‘predicted’, it’s probably fair to say that the average person in the street may view the comparison of carbon emissions with things that can vapourise a major city in seconds as unhelpfully alarmist and perhaps just a little bit silly.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:07 am
The first rule of writing is “know your audience”. Certainly the authors who are bidding higher in the auction of promised devastation do not have Roger in mind when creating the scary scenarios. Or me. My friends who don’t care about the underlying science but are expert at recognizing defective arguments just snort and scoff at such stories and make comments about Al Gore that would be snipped here.
My guess is that Kofi Annan et al. have a very low opinion of the general population that that the MSN reaches for them.
Having experts in science shoot holes in the scary stories is intellectually satisfying but should not leave the impression that the original scary story was ever based on science.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:55 am
LOL. It is hard to comprehend this kind of nonsense by any grown-ups, let alone Nobel Laureates. Too bad there is no way to take their Nobel Prizes back.
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:24 am
Here’s a Nobel Laureate that is wiser (and knows his physics!):
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10254009-54.html
June 2nd, 2009 at 2:07 pm
If Boston’s summer temperatures were increased 3 degrees C, that would turn my neighborhood in to the hell that is Washington D.C. Slightly cooler than Charleston, S.C., and just a bit less than Dodge City, Kansas.
A regular nuclear armegeddon, that. Oh, the humanity!
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:07 pm
For those who want a break from the written reports of mass deaths and the equivalency of nuclear Armageddon, watch “Earth 2100” on ABC tonight, 9:00PM EST.
Description at: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Earth2100/.
For those who miss it, the program will likely be repeated – and likely often before the Copenhagen climate change summit.
Who will keep the growing list?
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Just saw Earth 2100 (in 3 minute segments, which was all I could take before gagging).
I see that the New York City barrier that took 30 years to build failed at the first important challenge to it.
I told them and told them that a portable barrier was the way to go, but nooooo…they wouldn’t listen!
So now New York City is deserted. I think Greg House Jr. had the most appropriate quote, on hearing that the fixed permanent barriers failed: “Idiots!”
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Sorry, I don’t see the unfortunate leap here. Some scientists legitimately see the threat of AGW in Armageddon clothes. None of us have any idea whether AGW will be a pussycat in 50-100 years or a total game changer, but I think all of us would agree that both extremes are within the set of possibilities. The chance of MAD warfare was (and still is) equally impossible to quantify, but with a similar downside risk on the extreme end. You can try to make the argument that if a nuclear war begins you know pretty well the final outcome (Armageddon), whereas you still don’t know very well the outcome of >>500 ppm CO2e, but that’s a strawman distraction from the point that these scientists are driving at: unchecked CO2e into the atmosphere could destroy us just as effectively as thermonuclear war could. The key word – used twice – is “could.” Considering all the likely hidden positive and negative feedbacks inherent to the climate system that we haven’t even characterized yet, I’m willing to concede their characterization of risk here.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:37 am
“Some scientists legitimately see the threat of AGW in Armageddon clothes.”
Who are the scientists, and how are they “legimately” seeing “the threat of AGW in Armageddon clothes”?
For example, if you’re talking about James Lovelock (of “few breeding pairs (of humans) at the poles” fame), I would not consider his views to be “legitimate” science.
“None of us have any idea whether AGW will be a pussycat in 50-100 years or a total game changer, but I think all of us would agree that both extremes are within the set of possibilities.”
Well, “pussycat” and “game-changer” are not scientific terms, but if “none of us have any idea” about AGW in 50-100 years, then none of us are practicing science.
The whole point of science is to be able to predict future events (e.g., “the atmospheric CO2 concentration in 2050 will be between 450 and 550 ppm; will result in an average global temperature that’s between the present temperature and 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the present temperature”).
“…but that’s a strawman distraction from the point that these scientists are driving at: unchecked CO2e into the atmosphere could destroy us just as effectively as thermonuclear war could.”
Absolute nonsense. The *minimum* number of people killed by a “thermonuclear war” would be tens of millions of people. In contrast, even accepting the WHO estimate of 150,000 people killed annually by global warming (a very scientifically debatable estimate), it would take 67 years to even kill 10,000,000 people. And the difference between property damage caused by “thermonuclear war” and AGW is even more dramatic. (For example, even assuming that Katrina was caused entirely by AGW, the property damage caused by Katrina doesn’t even begin to compare with the property damage that would be caused by dropping a thermonuclear weapon on New Orleans.)
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:15 am
Kevin: I agree completely with Mark and I cannot help but pile on here, when you observe:
“Considering all the likely hidden positive and negative feedbacks inherent to the climate system that we haven’t even characterized yet, I’m willing to concede their characterization of risk here.”
How on God’s green Earth can you concede a risk, when there is ABSOLUTELY not a shred of empirical evidence that indicate any risk? There has not been a significant rise in temperature for over 12 years, and even the “theory” is highly debatable. Are you sufficiently confident in computer models and the opinions of famous climate scientists whose very livelihoods rely on “belief” in such risks to agree with destroying our standard of living and causing millions more to starve/freeze to death?
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Kevin – You can’t debate this with people who deny the basic science, but the problem is that nuclear war is a very sudden thing. And while climate change in our case may be a lot faster than interglacial warming between ice ages, it is still slow on the scale of human lives. Many AGW activists wonder what the “Pearl Harbor moment” is will be that will genuinely motivate our society. People are well known to deny almost any disaster that affects their lives – it can’t happen to them, after all.
However, we can look at history and see that many human cultures and civilizations have declined and even disappeared due to climate change. Some of it was even human-caused, but regional, not global. Deforestation, for example, is well known to cause regional climate change in certain circumstances. Roger Pielke _SR_ recently blogged on that in his ongoing effort to convince people that AGW is more about land use than CO2.
The Maya and the people of the Colorado Plateau may well have suffered a dieoff comparable of a nuclear war due to climate. But some people (who accept the science but don’t fear the impacts) have an article of faith that our civilization can do better. That ain’t science, it is the very religion they accuse us of. That we are fundamentally different from civilizations of the past. Clearly we are different in many ways, but only time will tell if we are different in ways that count in this case.
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Dean observes:
“You can’t debate this with people who deny the basic science,”
LOL. Can you enlighten us on just what is the “basic science” you are referring to. Please try to put up something more specific than “the consensus is…” pap.
“However, we can look at history and see that many human cultures and civilizations have declined and even disappeared due to climate change.”
LOL, again. If you read your history books, it has ALWAYS been A DECLINING TEMPERATURE THAT HAS CAUSED “CIVILIZATIONS THAT HAVE DECLINED.” If you have some facts counter to this, we would love to see them.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Mark and the rest of the peanut gallery, I will rest on this: “The whole point of science is to be able to predict future events”
really? wow. ok. you win.
Dean (#10), agreed, but it is a matter of time scale perspective. Geologically, it’s the same amount of time. From the human perspective, yes, it is hard to make it comparable.