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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
Those who will not reason
Perish in the act:
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason.
— W. H. Auden
I just discovered this lovely poem. It elegantly summarizes the many dilemmas I encounter in my work, and of course in myself: pathologies about acting without thinking, without wisdom and in haste or with too much denial and ignorance; or the reverse, paralysis through analysis... paralysis through too much uncertainty. The process and content toolbox I work on is about breaking these pathologies. Yeh, I have a hard job, but what a payoff when it works!
Anyway, I found the poem in an appropriate place. It was the epigram to Bill Calvin's influential article, "The Great Climate Flip-Flop" in The Atlantic Monthly (1998). This was the fist public description of the rapid climate change scenarios, which are now getting much attention thanks to the latest controversy which broke in The Observer this weekend about the Pentagon suppressing a secret report documenting the national security threat of climate change. ("Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us " by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, Sunday February 22, 2004.) From the article: "The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents." The report is now available at EMS Environmental Media Services. The experts they quote are former colleagues of mine, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, although Peter is curiously reported as being a CIA consultant and not working for GBN.
As an insider at GBN, I saw this topic evolve gradually over the last six or seven years. Far from "secret", this was was a well known and discussed set of scenarios for anyone paying attention to the debate. I suppose what was secret was how they were communicated and framed for the Pentagon and the US government, an organization particularly rife with some of those pathologies and blind-spots I just mentioned. I have yet to get the full story from my former colleagues. But here is a brief history of the idea within the GBN world.
Bill Calvin, the guy who first popularized the idea, is a GBN network and an active one. So that's one obvious connection. Irving Mintzer, another well known person in this field, was probably another source and possibly the vector for Bill, who studies the paleontology of neuroscience. Mintzer is also a GBN network member. All of this was fringe stuff, a nice way to spice up your apocalyptic scenarios. I can count four different projects, ranging from healthcare to the future of law, where this was a background element. That all changed after September 11th. Rapid climate change became more plausible in a world that was bleaker, more uncertain and characterized by discontinuities.
So Peter Schwartz went from Long Boom to Climate Gloom. This became a key theme in Peter's latest book, Inevitable Surprises, which I mention so much because I just like the phrase! This was also the topic of a GBN Bookclub, Two Mile Time Machine, which is about the story about how climatologists discovered that rapid climate change was more the norm rather than the except by examining ice core data. Peter and Doug also cowrote "The Hydrogen Economy" article in Wired Magazine, which in turn emerged from work Peter and I did with DARPA in the spring-summer of 2001. So the Pentagon study is mostly derivative; it came out of work GBN/Peter did for the Pew Foundation and Woods Hole , which is "the" place working on these issues.
[Picture of an ice-core at one of the poles.]
One gripe about the article. Journalists, please understand something: these are not predictions but scenarios! There are many, many, many uncertainties underneath the science and trajectory of climate change, which is why we are using this foresight tool. The media seem intellectually incapable of communicating the difference. It's not that hard to explain this, but this has been a constant problem. In fact, I worry that these stories – while giving Peter and Doug Randall some exposure – may undermine both their reputations and the seriousness of the topic. There are enough nay-sayers out there as it is. Having said this, I can imagine that Peter is trying to pull the analogue of what Paul Ehrlich did with Population Bomb. Perhaps by raising the alarm bells he is trying to raise consciousness from the bottom up and induce some self-correcting actions at the highest level, that is, within the US government.
Other resources include:
UK National Environment Research Council's
Rapid Climate Change Home-page
Also see Bill Calvin's current talk.