On Climate, the Best Defense is a Good Offense

Originally published on the U.S. Naval Institute Blog and republished here with permission. Source: On Climate, the Best Defense is a Good Offense

On 26 August, Navy Times published an article on how the Navy quietly disbanded its climate change task force in March. Established in 2009 to plan and develop climate change-related strategy and policy decisions, it was shut down for “no longer being needed.” Also referenced in the article are two statements from former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis about the need to address climate change—one in his written testimony to Congress for his 2017 confirmation hearing and another in his former role as commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command. In both statements, he references the threat to stability that climate change will engender and the strain that it will put on the U.S. military to respond.

Separately, U.S. Naval Institute Chair Emeritus Admiral James Stavridis recently wrote about the fires in the Amazon and how they threaten U.S. national security, specifically highlighting the threat rising sea levels present to Navy infrastructure in Hampton Roads and beyond.

With all respect to these two great statesmen and their leadership on this and many other issues, their stated views on climate change and how it will affect national security do not fully recognize the threat.

Within climate change circles, there are two broad areas of concern—adaptation and mitigation. Climate adaptation is the process of identifying where and how a changing climate will alter the established order, predicting the new order, and adjusting resources to support modification to the new paradigm. The Navy’s work to raise piers in Norfolk because of rising sea levels or then-Secretary Mattis encouraging combatant commanders to build climate change into their response plans are examples of climate adaptation. It recognizes the threat is to national security and its apparatus and adjusts accordingly. It is playing defense on climate change.

However, rarely discussed in national security is climate mitigation. This likely is because of the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) inability to create meaningful change using existing internal resources, and because engaging in mitigation beyond these resources would seem overly political. Climate mitigation is the act of going on offense on climate change—reshaping conditions to be more favorable and being less passive in their arrival. It involves creating or modifying policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating the capability of natural systems to absorb those emissions, and developing technology and processes to make emissions unnecessary. It makes sense not to engage in mitigation from an organizational perspective, because it is outside the scope of DoD’s mission.

But this is myopic. The greater charter of the U.S. military is to provide security to the U.S. public and climate change mitigation fits that charter. Here are some examples:

By the 2020s, it is expected that “between 7 million and 77 million people are likely to suffer from a lack of adequate water supplies” in Latin America. This will create a great deal of stress on the U.S. immigration system, and also will increase conflict in a region that has been taken for granted by the U.S. military. We must adapt to this, as there is little that can be done about this growing problem. After 2050, these numbers increase to “between 60 and 150 million,” or approximately 23 percent of the current population. This has a significant likelihood of overwhelming the U.S. military’s capacity for adaptation.
South Asia—including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—has a combined population of 1.75 billion people. Currently, 15 percent of this population lives part of the year in extreme heat. Should the planet continue to warm at the current rate, it is predicted that number will grow to 75 percent of the population, or currently more than 1.3 billion people. Moreover, approximately 4 percent of the population—nearly 70 million people—will be in areas physically too hot to live. India and Pakistan historically have a rivalry and both are nuclear states. What will happen if areas in both of their respective countries become inhospitable to human life? This certainly has the potential to overwhelm the U.S. military’s capacity for adaptation.

There are many more scenarios such as these capable of exhausting U.S. military options. Most concerningly, these events likely will occur simultaneously—on every continent and ocean—so the sum of even relatively minor conflicts and disturbances could combine to exceed U.S. capabilities.

Navy and DoD leaders must begin, in rapid earnestness, using the climate-mitigation levers at their disposal. It is time to go on the offense. The greatest potential is to mobilize and lead the entire U.S. government, which has significantly more options for mitigation, such as reforestation by the U.S. Forest Service, engagement of trade policies and diplomacy by the State Department, and advancement of carbon neutral nuclear power and carbon capture tech research by the Department of Energy. By clearly and repeatedly stating the continued hazard to U.S. security, military leadership can steer the United States away from a grave strategic threat.

The “Conservatives” are right.

One of the things I’ve been hearing from my friends who are “conservative” is some variation of the following: “Environmentalists have been talking about how we only have limited time before the end of the world. We’re still here.”

They’re not wrong. Environmentalists have been talking about the threats that environmental issues present us for a long time. This, of course, completely ignores that things have improved in many fronts because of action brought by those warnings. We do have, generally, cleaner air and water than we did in the 1970s when the EPA was created. The hole in the ozone layer is healing, thanks to the action of the Montreal Protocol.

But when we talk about climate change, the environmental community has been warning about impending doom for years. The IPCC and Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for warning about climate. The IPCC itself was formed in 1988 to deal with pressing threat of climate change. In 1972, there were warnings of climate change regarding greenhouse gases and aerosols. Arrhenius’ first notes on climate occurred in 1896. Those warnings occurred 12, 31, 47, and 123 years ago! Yet we’re still here. The “conservatives” are right. Environmentalists keep warning that our time to act is limited, but as our deadlines are passed, new ones are created.

But the problem is that without context, a fact does not lead to understanding. It is a crude fact; a failure to understand what the warning entailed. The reason we keep having a chance to act to save the future is because we keep telling ourselves that increasingly more heroic actions are possible. Our hope has paralyzed us into inaction. A graphic that Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate leader, shared recently brings this into clear relief:

So now, we really are at the absolute last moment to act. We have to move heroically if we’re going to save the future. As we’ve previously discussed, even if we achieve our goal of 1.5°C, we are going to have some pretty awful consequences. Failure to act as greatly as the situation requires will lead to even worse outcomes. I’ll write about those next time. But the last vestige of hope must compel us to act this time. It – we! – will require a fundamental reworking of all of global civilization, but especially that of the industrial world.

I’ll leave you with this: we’re living in the geologic age of the Anthropocene. Quite literally, it is the epoch of climate being created by humans. That will mean some measure of disaster. But it also means we have a great deal of control. If we act, collectively, we can change it for the better.

But we must act.

Two people can illustrate crudity to you. The first is the crude man, whom you see perceiving the diamond as a stone. The other is the refined man, who makes clear to you the crudity of the first one.
Idries Shah

The History of the Problem

Fifty Percent.

Half.

That is the statistic that caused me to start writing this blog. I’m 38 and have known about climate change my entire adult life, but I learned that in about that time, we’ve done as much damage to the atmosphere as all of human history before it. In the last 30 years, we have released more than half of all of the industrial carbon dioxide emissions that humanity has ever released. This isn’t some long simmering problem that we’ve only recently noticed. It’s the exact opposite. It is:

A long known problem
that we’ve recently and increasingly made worse.

First, the part about being long known.

It starts in 1896, or around the time that Utah got statehood, William Jennings Bryan gave his “Cross of Gold” speech, and John Philip Sousa composed the Stars and Stripes Forever. If that sounds old to you, it is. At least in terms of human understanding. Regardless, in April of 1896, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius published the paper On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground. Arrhenius would later go on to help invent the field of physical chemistry and win a Noble Prize for his unrelated work in ionic disassociation, so it should go without saying, he was a pretty smart fellow. Anyway, another name for “carbonic acid in the air” is the gas knows as carbon dioxide, or CO₂, and Arrhenius’ paper described how CO₂ trapped heat from the sun and kept the earth warm. This would be later termed as the “greenhouse effect”, so CO₂ and its cousins became known as “greenhouse gases”. Remember, this all happened back in 1896. And, if you’re a skeptic, you can duplicate the experiments of Arrhenius in your own home.

From Arrhenius’ work has been built a whole body of knowledge around greenhouse gases and how they work, but the simple version is this: increase the concentration of greenhouse gases in a system and it will warm up. Again, you can demonstrate this relationship in an experiment you can do at home, so to deny this is willful ignorance.

That may seem interesting, but so what? Well, we’ve been doing a planetary experiment to confirm what happens when we increase the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases since before Arrhenius’ time. With the advent of fossil fuel use, we’ve been taking carbon that had been locked in the earth for eons, burning it to create energy, and releasing its byproduct – CO₂ – to the atmosphere from every smokestack and tailpipe ever since. In many ways, this is a good thing, as it has given us access to previously unimaginable energy to do all sorts of things, from the amazing to the mundane. But it has also created the trap I talked about in my last post and will again in my next.

The evidence of our impact upon the chemistry of the atmosphere is something known as the Keeling Curve. Since the late 1950s, we’ve been directly measuring the concentration of CO₂in the atmosphere daily from the top of a mountain in Hawaii. These measurements have created a record that shows increasing concentrations in a curve that gets increasingly steeper.

As you can see, we’ve increased the concentration of CO₂ by about 32% in the lifespan of someone unable to collect Social Security. You can validate this data at home, too.

There you have it. Direct and verifiable evidence that our atmosphere has a lot more CO₂ than it used to and a repeatable home experiment that shows that when one increases CO₂, it will warm up. Everything else is noise. And there is a lot of noise, from claims of temperature increases coming from sunspots, to a lack of consensus among scientists or their models, to even a global conspiracy to alter the data. They’re all false and easily proven through a careful, unbiased reading of the data and appropriate papers, but engaging in this discussion only benefits those who deny that our climate is changing. Why? Because it makes it seem highly technical and open for “debate” when it really isn’t.

That brings us to the second part. We’re making this much worse.

I’ve been paying attention to climate change since around 1996. And one of the graphs that I have seen, in various formats, is like the one below:

It roughly has the shape of the Keeling Curve, so it all seemed intuitive. As we increase our emissions, the concentrations in the atmosphere increase proportionally, and temperatures would increase proportionally as well. My understanding was wrong. In retrospect, it is a good illustration of the importance of visualizations and the failing of intuition. Because though the graph above is factually correct, it doesn’t really convey the severity of the problem. Every time one year’s emissions is higher than the previous year’s (all of which is greater than natural systems can compensate for), it represents an acceleration of the problem.

Here’s another way to look at that graph that relays the 50% metric a little more clearly:

It shows that the area under the curve is the important part. That is the real story – the cumulative emissions. Shown another way, it would look like this:

That is a much more alarming representation, because it shows the drastic stress we’re putting on the system. It caused me to look at the Keeling Curve and notice that the slope is getting increasingly steeper. It caused me to notice that the time frame that is commonly shown – post 1958 – doesn’t really convey the whole story and, if we expand the visualization, we start to see it:

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/co2_800k_zoom.png — The Post-Industrial Revolution Keeling Curive

Here’s the really big problem. Increased concentrations of CO₂ have a leading effect on temperature. That is, the concentrations of CO₂ that are already in the atmosphere represent a temperature increase that we won’t see for years. You can go back to Arrhenius’ paper to read about it. We’ve known this for about 123 years. We have created climate inertia that, even if we stopped emitting today, will make the world even warmer. And we’re not stopping. We’re accelerating.

If we really want to look at our history and climate, we should go way back. The Neolithic Revolution started about 12,000 years ago and was the beginning of human agriculture. Before that, humans were not much more than particularly adaptive chimpanzees dealing with a series of ice ages. All of human civilization, in any real sense, has been since that point. Writing, organized religion, The Beatles, Rome, the Apollo missions, the Constitution, the pyramids, and Svante Arrhenius. It is all built upon a climate that has been stable enough to support agriculture and civilization in a period known as the Holocene. And this is what our climate has looked like during that time:

The blue line, which represents temperature, rises to a point of relative stability around the beginning of the Holocene. We have flourished since it stopped moving more than a degree or two from average. We’ve gone from around six million people at the dawn of agriculture to nearly eight billion people now. But you’ll notice that the red line in the graph has spiked higher than anything in human history. That’s CO₂. That is the Keeling Curve on the civilizational timescale. It shows that we’ve left the Holocene and have entered a new period called the Anthropocene. And it shows that our civilization is at risk.

And we have known about it since before you were born.

Living on the Kobayashi Maru

If you’ve never seen the movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, I’d strongly encourage you to stop now and go watch it. It’s a great, old fashioned blockbuster of a movie and if you keep reading, I’m going to completely ruin it for you.

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In the opening to the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a starship simulator is run for a young officer so she might learn the weight of command. The details of the simulation are not particularly important, other than it is entitled the Kobayashi Maru and it is an unwinnable situation. No matter what decisions the officer being evaluated makes, it will end in the virtual death of all involved. The evaluator and Star Trek’s main protagonist, Captain (now Admiral) Kirk, is confronted by the young officer upset at the unfairness of it all. Kirk replies, “A no-win situation is a possibility every commander may face. Has that never occurred to you?” The lesson, it appears, is that how we deal with our end is as important as how we deal with our lives.

I believe that we are now living in our own Kobayashi Maru scenario. A concerted analysis of the evidence indicates that I’m probably right. Our planet and its environmental systems have become unstable and, as a result, the continued survival of human civilization is in jeopardy.

The nature of environmental problems are insidious. They creep up on you, little by little, until you are trapped, with no good options. I’ll write more on this later, but we are in for some very hard times. Our climate is changing at a pace never previously witnessed in human history. Its cause is the human emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. Even if we were to stop doing additional damage, what we have done already has the inertia of bringing us towards significant destruction. More distressingly, we’re not stopping. We’re accelerating. It is as if we are standing on a ship, with the props spinning ever more rapidly, and we’re staring at a jagged reef waiting to tear out the bottom of the ship. We’ve hardly sounded the collision alarm, let alone tried to reverse the engines or brace for the unavoidable impact.

In Japanese, maru is a common suffix for ship, roughly akin to HMS or USS for British or American warship. However, maru also means circle. Kobayashi is a proper name in Japan, like Smith or Cooper in English, but it roughly translates to Small Forest. In short, Kobayashi Maru means Small Forest Circle. What better shorthand for Earth could there be?

Returning to Star Trek, the irony and hypocrisy of Kirk lecturing on the possibility of the “no-win situation” is that we later learn of Kirk’s own history of problems with the Kobayashi Maru. Kirk’s friend and a leading Star Trek character, Mr. Spock, reminds him of this history, stating “The Kobayashi Maru scenario frequently wreaks havoc with students and equipment. As I recall you took the test three times yourself. Your final solution was, shall we say, unique?” We come to find out that Kirk cheated. He reprogrammed the simulator to create an option to win. When confronted about having never had to face death, he gives a trite answer and moves on, convinced of his own brilliance.

I have spent years trying to present evidence to those who doubt that our climate is changing and have been routinely disappointed and increasingly embittered as their positions retrench. I am no longer going to try to convince them of our reality. No amount of additional information or effort at persuasion will change a position that isn’t based upon evidence. We need to ignore the people too drunk upon the good times to recognize the peril we’re in. We need to get to the people who can make a change. We need to reverse the engines. We need to sound the alarm.

Alarm. We have particular contempt for those who give alarm unnecessarily. The most common example of a limit to the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech is the example of falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. One of our most cherished rights is only circumscribed by giving false alarm. We’re naturally resistant to this because we fear the scorn of being someone who gives it falsely – an alarmist. It is part of the trap. Those who we needed to have given the alarm of our current predicament have been resistant to for fear of being seen as alarmist.

The scientific and policy communities have routinely understated that likely outcomes of our actions and couched them in probabilities that give a false hope that unpleasantness can be avoided. Their current assessment shows that, if we only limit warming to 1.5°C, we’ll see as many as 50 million refugees from sea level rise, $54 Trillion in damages, the total death of all coral on the planet, and numerous other social and environmental crises too great to list here. All of which, if past is predictive of the future, are likely being underestimated. This is the best case scenario. The path we’re on is much, MUCH worse, yet those who are here to warn us are scared of being alarmist. They want us to hope. They want to hope themselves.

The greatest false hope is technology. There has long been an estimate of the maximum amount of emissions that can be released into our atmosphere for decades. There is now no feasible means of not exceeding that maximum budget. To accommodate this and to avoid seeming alarmist, the models increasingly rely upon a profile of steeper and steeper emissions reductions. Increasingly, there is an even greater presumed role for negative emissions – to capture what we’ve already done; to buy the ship more time to avoid the rocks. It isn’t here and it won’t arrive in time to save us. Don’t get me wrong, technology will be necessary to do those things and more. But our own brilliance won’t save us from the coming disaster. We cannot cheat our way out.

It again brings us back to Kirk. At the end of Star Trek II, Kirk finds himself in an actual unwinnable situation. The antagonist has Kirk, his crew, and their ship trapped. With the well-worn plot device of a timer counting down to certain destruction, the antagonist can be heard to taunt Kirk’s inability to escape. Kirk has never mentally considered the “no-win situation” and he comes to act like a confined animal, out of answers and pacing with worry about what he can no longer control. Spock, however, is undaunted, and more importantly, has asked himself the hard moral questions that Kirk has failed to contemplate. Spock sacrifices his life to save the ship and his friends, stating simply as he dies, “do not grieve …. the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Spock had faced the end in his mind, so when the time came, he acted with clear mind and moral courage, though at great personal cost.

This is the situation we find ourselves in. To escape this trap, we’ll need something unexpected. We’ll need clarity of purpose and the will to act. And we’re going to lose something valuable to us, though I cannot say for certain what yet. Perhaps technology will have an unexpected and wondrous breakthrough unlike anything in human history. Perhaps the children’s climate movement will force the decisions that we’ve all avoided.

But here is what won’t work – doing what we’ve been doing. We can’t rely upon individuals to make decisions that only affect themselves. No number of roofs with solar panels, electric cars, or any other personal environmental decisions will achieve our awful yet best case scenario. This can only be done with a total, societal commitment to doing the right thing. It means demanding of every politician, every company, and every individual that they put climate change as their top, most immediate priority. It means that it can no longer be enough to hope. Anything less is an abdication of moral responsibility.

We’re in this ship together. I’m going to act. Will you?