Einstein’s gravediggers

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Is it really true? The Pentagon, no less, is saying that climate change could be a really big deal: blood, sweat and tears on the grand scale, wholesale collapse of giant countries, the war of each against each, and all within twenty years (see box on the Pentagon report’s key findings).

Details of an unclassified report, completed late last year, made it into the media in January 2004 by way of an article for Fortune by David Stipp. They story appeared again in a piece in the (UK) Observer a month later.

As Stipp reported it, defence department planner Andrew Marshall had 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.” Wow. If “Yoda” gets the message (see picture), some were moved to say, this is a breakthrough! Surely American military planners – and so, inevitably, the administration – will start to think about global security in a more integrated way?

Not so fast, says Tom Engelhardt in a recent dispatch; the Pentagon study focuses exclusively on worst case scenarios and conflict, and neglects action that may be taken to prevent the worst from coming about.

Well, yes, it’s true that the study is highly selective. As Joachim Schellnhuber, a climate scientist who diplomatically welcomed the report, put it to the BBC, the Pentagon doesn’t grasp the full complexity of what could happen. It focused just on one possible outcome out of many (see this Globolog for more detail on climate change).

But the military is not wholly to blame for that. It is part of their job to “game” for the worst. It is for governments and the wider society to work together to try and prevent the worst happening. And this is where the real news has been in the last ten days.

Last week the Union of Concerned Scientists published a report Restoring Scientific Integrity, documenting systematic dishonesty by the present US administration. This includes:

• a well-established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high ranking Bush administration political appointees across numerous federal agencies

• a wide-ranging effort to manipulate the government’s scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that may run counter to the administration’s political agenda

• the imposition of restrictions on what government scientists can say or write about sensitive topics

• the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science [by a US administration] is unprecedented.

Sixty of the most distinguished scientists in the US, including twenty Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, and former federal agency directors, as well as university chairs and presidents, endorsed the report and called for regulatory and legislative action to “restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking.”

John Marburger III, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not deny any of the incidents documented in the UCS report had occurred. Rather, he argued, they did not add up to a “pattern” of deception.

As someone said, “it depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is”.

Money is not the only truth

The breaches of scientific integrity reported by the Union of Concerned Scientists occurred across virtually every field of scientific endeavour where corporate welfare was at stake, from human health to toxic pollution. But climate change got especially rough treatment. For example, the US Environmental Protection Agency chose to say nothing on the topic in a 450-page report that covered just about every other conceivable threat to the environment.

But it would be a mistake to think that what is at work here is solely the special interests of certain corporations (documented in, for example, Contract Sport, an assessment of Halliburton).

Disregard for the central values of the enlightenment also plays a role. This is particularly prevalent in the US, as Francis Wheen shows in his excellent new book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. A presidential election in which the head of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences runs against the head of the American Philosophical Society is unimaginable today (it happened in 1800. The candidates were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson).

Mumbo-jumbo is, of course, by no means confined to the US. It flourishes at the highest levels in Iran and South Africa, to name just two. But its grip on power in America is probably unique amongst the highly technological nations (European politicians may have problems but they do not deny the science of climate change).

Part of the reason for this is the strength of Christian fundamentalism in the US, which has ceased to be “the heart of a heartless world, the opium of the people” (to quote correctly Karl Marx’s finely balanced formulation), and turned into something much more aggressive and organised.

In the Christian fundamentalist vision, climate change is to be welcomed as a sign of End Times. As Jeremy Leggett, documents in Carbon Wars, the belief permeates right to the top of the biggest corporations. Saul Landau cannily assesses the consequences.

(On the End Times explanation: verily, this one of those times when you realise just how wonderful the internet is; not only can you find out who really bears the Mark Of The Beast, but you can also get a special deal on a premier stainless steel multi-wick kerosene stove to get you through the rough patch).

So it goes

If an axis of hardline military-industrial and millenarian thinking were all that stood in the way of forging a rational approach to climate change then the task might be relatively easy. But it isn’t. The entire world economic and technological system needs to be transformed (see here for some of the issues).

It may be too late to achieve the necessary changes, even if they are possible. But taking account of the possibility that even the best efforts may be absurd or tragic does not mean assuming that they are before one starts (as some “post-modern” enemies of the enlightenment would have us believe). For this reason, among others, the challenge is moral and political as well as a scientific and technological.

Key findings of the Pentagon Report:

- Future wars will be fought over the issue of survival rather than religion, ideology or national honour

- By 2007, violent storms smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable. Cities like The Hague are abandoned. In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento river area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south

- Between 2010 and 2020 Europe is hardest hit by climatic change with an average annual temperature drop of 6° Fahrenheit. Climate in Britain becomes colder and drier as weather patterns begin to resemble Siberia

- Deaths from war and famine run into the millions until the planet’s population is reduced by such an extent the Earth can cope

- Riots and internal conflict tear apart India, South Africa and Indonesia

- Access to water becomes a major battleground; the Nile, Danube and Amazon are all mentioned as being high-risk

- A ‘significant drop’ in the planet’s ability to sustain its present population will become apparent over the next 20 years

- Rich areas like the US and Europe would become ‘virtual fortresses’ to prevent millions of migrants from entering after being forced from land drowned by sea-level rise or no longer able to grow crops; waves of boatpeople pose significant problems

- Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable; 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

- By 2010 the US and Europe will experience a third more days with peak temperatures above 90° F; climate becomes an ‘economic nuisance’ as storms, droughts and hot spells create havoc for farmers

- More than 400 million people in subtropical regions at grave risk

- Europe will face huge internal struggles as it copes with massive numbers of migrants washing up on its shores; immigrants from Scandinavia seek warmer climes to the south; southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in Africa

- Mega-droughts affect the world’s major breadbaskets, including America’s Midwest, where strong winds bring soil loss

- China’s huge population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable; Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea level, which contaminates the inland water supplies

Source: The Observer, 22 February 2004. An error in the Observer led it to conclude that storms would leave large parts of the Netherlands “habitable”. A shock indeed. The error has been corrected in this box