What climate scientists can learn from Isaac Asimov
Climate science has been predicting the future since the 1970s, using mathematics to predict the future and influence policy decisions…
Climate science has been predicting the future since the 1970s. Like hurricane predictions, climate predictions, far from being purely of scientific interest, have been used to influence policy decisions to avert potential disaster.
Through his alter-ego character in the Foundation novels, Hari Seldon, Asimov was prescient in thrusting his academic mathematician into the world of high stakes politics and showing how the world would not welcome his predictions of disaster.
Climate scientists could learn from Hari Seldon that those in power are unlikely to change their ways until they are put out of power, and by then it will be too late.
Like an Old Testament prophet, Seldon fearlessly proclaims the coming end of civilization, but he also realizes that if anything is to be done about it, he has to do it himself.
And this is the lesson that scientists need to learn now. Governments are designed like the Galactic Empire, to maintain the peace, not to move quickly in the face of danger.
Our modern decadence all but ensures that if we trust our leaders they will fail us. We must establish our own foundation based on science, not politics.
Let us peer into the prime radiant.
How climatologists predict the future
Climate science may just be the most mature of a whole new science of predicting the global future, a real psychohistory, and how that might work for humanity decades from now as computing power enables us to model the world at finer and finer resolution.
Models for climate prediction are similar to models for predicting the weather or hurricane paths in some respects. They are fitted to observations from the past. Unlike those models, however, since they are designed to predict climate decades in the future, we cannot tell as easily how accurate they are. A hurricane model can be tested against dozens of hurricanes every year. Weather models can be tested weekly. But for climate models, we have to wait years.
On the other hand, what we are trying to predict about the climate is much less specific than hurricanes or the weather as I will describe.
Global warming models are about 50 years old now, and so we are finally seeing the early predictions pan out. That is both disturbing (because they have done a good job predicting the degree of warming and it is alarming) and pleasing because we know that we have a good handle on the future of warming.
Climate models, on the other hand, that attempt to model the results of global warming are newer, and we do not have much historical data to verify them against.
This means that climate models tend to be tested by comparing them to each other (inter-model comparison) or to events in the distant past (paleoclimatology).
Unlike people, the climate, particularly atmospheric and ocean circulation, is largely governed by basic laws of physics, conservation of energy, mass, and momentum. These laws, rather than empirical correlations between greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and warming, are the core of climate models. Since these laws are essentially ironclad, climate models are very robust when exposed to some external force like global warming.
One of the problems with climate models, however, is that because they have to model the entire Earth, they aren’t so good at modeling local climate. Grid sizes in today’s models are about 100 km on a side (T85 below), about the size of the state of Connecticut, but much finer resolution models run on supercomputers will allow us to predict climate changes at the level of cities and even neighborhoods.
As we get to finer and finer grid sizes, we can be much more certain about how individual areas will suffer or benefit from climate change. This is actually a big deal because, theoretically, in order to model things correctly, you need to know the action of every molecule. Atmospheric and ocean temperature variations and circulation within the grid squares is assumed to be uniform, but it isn’t.
Chaos not only exists within the real world, but also within these models. Models run over and over with different initial conditions get different results and cannot predict when warm and cold years will occur.
When it comes to climate change under global warming, that doesn’t matter, however, because every future year is a “warm” year compared to the past. Knowing which years will be just warm and which will be really hot is not as important.
This is generally true of modeling. If all you care about are great trends, knowing when individual events will occur isn’t that important, as long as they are still part of that trend.
We can be confident in our predictions of general trends but not when events will occur.
What the future holds
Climate science predicts a number of unpleasant outcomes from global warming. They include
longer, more intense, and unsurvivable heat waves,
more heavy rainfall,
more hurricanes and cyclones,
more extreme cold events (from changes in ocean currents and salinity),
droughts,
crop failures,
and flooding.
Many major coastal cities are at risk for being flooded and island nations may be completely wiped out.
Some islands have already been rendered uninhabitable because they are disappearing under the sea.
We face increased species extinction, famine, war, humanitarian crises from lack of clean water and resources, and billions of dollars in damages from extreme weather events.
Cities are also going to be forced to implement mitigation strategies such as adding cooling centers to deal with extreme heat and high sea walls and levies to prevent flooding and higher storm surge from hurricanes.
That is, if they can afford it and those in power care enough and don’t just move to higher, cooler ground, abandoning those in the flood path.
We are quickly going to become a world that is under siege from the rising ocean levels and summers that this planet hasn’t seen since the time of the dinosaurs.
The current mass extinction event underway suggests that this era is rapidly becoming a once in 100 million year catastrophe.
While climate science may be basic physics, predicting how the world will forgo catastrophic changes to the climate is difficult.
As in any catastrophe, there are winners and losers, and the losers greatly outnumber the winners, but the winners may be the ones with power.
The wealthy can easily flip on the A/C in a heat wave. They can pick up and move if their house floods. They are well-insured. As food prices rise and water becomes scarce, they will be the ones who can afford it.
What they care about is keeping money flowing, which is why they always bring up the economy when confronted with the truth. These are not the sorts of people we want making decisions for us.
In addition, there is a lot of denial that, as the COVID pandemic has shown us, does not go away in the face of death. It will only go away when leaders stand up and do what is right even in the face of opposition.
Are our leaders bold visionaries or are they like the Galactic Emperor, stuck in the past and sure of our civilization’s survival despite the warnings to the contrary?
Time will tell, but we don’t have time.
I argue that time is up for our leaders and that if climate change is to be stopped, it is up to the scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and innovators to move past them.
This does not mean establishing a colony on the moon or Mars. That is ridiculous and useless. The Earth is our galaxy, and our Terminus is not a place but a way of thinking, one that is motivated to solve problems with science and technology even as the world crumbles into anti-intellectualism.
In the novels, the success of the Foundation was based on its technological dominance and its shrewd dealings with backwards neighbors. Likewise, the goal of a modern approach to climate change is to achieve technological dominance over fossil fuels so that they simply aren’t practical, obsolete like the horse drawn carriage. This disruption of the fossil fuel industry — the large but backwards neighbors in this case — will cause it to either change to renewables (unlikely) or collapse.
In particular, because energy storage and production is a molecular or atomic level process, it can be shrunk in certain ways to become cheaper and more dense, similar to computer chips. This is already happening with solar power and should be happening with batteries. (Wind power is the opposite. Bigger is better.) While we may be in the vacuum tube era of batteries, we may soon be entering the transistor era, and it is only a matter of time before a Moore’s law style exponential growth in watts/dollar renders all other forms of power production and storage obsolete. This is the true path to replacing an economy.
I am not saying that the government has no role in this. Just as the Galactic Empire supported the Foundation at first, we need government support for technological innovation. What is currently lacking, however, is perhaps a realization that we are looking for salvation from those who lead instead of those who know. What we need is for those who know to be more than Cassandras, predicting a future only to be ignored. They need to become doers in the face of doom.