The Day After Tomorrow.
In February I updated the cartoon. Instead of a generic scientist tapping Uncle Sam on the shoulder, it's Yoda. Not the actual Frank Oz puppet from Star Wars, but Andrew Marshall, the octogenarian quasi-mythic director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, known as "Yoda" within the Department of Defense for his supposed oracular wisdom. Last month, Marshall gave the U.S. government its firmest tap on the shoulder yet, by leaking and publicly supporting an unclassified report that recommends climate change be "immediately?elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern."
There are probably only two ways to get the American people to take climate change seriously. The first is for Mike Ditka to tell them that men won't be able to get erections unless we curb greenhouse gas emissions. The second is for the Pentagon to frame and advertise the issue in the tough language of national security. That's exactly what Andrew Marshall has done.
Until recently, Marshall's Jedi powers were focused on traditional Pentagon stuff, more Darth Vader than Yoda: ballistic missiles, battle-bots, the next generation of high-tech weapons. What redirected his interest toward climate change was a 2002 report issued by the National Academy of Sciences, which the Bush administration had commissioned in an attempt to mollify international outrage over its insolent trashing of the Kyoto Protocol. The NAS study not only reaffirmed the reality of man-made climate change, it also warned that ocean warming and freshwater run-off from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet?both already underway?could throw seawater salinity out of whack, abruptly killing the Gulf Stream and plunging most of the northern hemisphere into an Ice Age.
This little detail caused Marshall to drop his Legos. After digesting the enormity of the threat, he contacted Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, both of Global Business Network, a respected think tank with a futuristic edge and an impressive record of predicting trends and events. Schwartz, a co-founder of GBN, actually has a more legitimate claim to the "Yoda" tag than Marshall. While head of the Shell Oil Group Planning Department, Schwartz was alone in predicting both the 1979 oil shock and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Neither the CIA nor Marshall's legendary Pentagon think tank saw either event coming.
The report Schwartz and Randall handed Marshall in October 2003 is entitled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for the United States' National Security." It offers no original data or research. In 20 succinct pages, the authors merely reiterate the scientific consensus on man-made climate change and sketch the history of abrupt climate snaps, the last of which is believed to have occurred about 8000 years ago. The authors explain the drastic effects on global food production such an event would have and explore what this would mean for U.S. national security. (In light of the situation, they offer what might be the understatement of the millennium: "Alternative fuels, greenhouse gas emission controls and conservation efforts are worthwhile endeavors.")
The better-known picture of gradual, evenly distributed global warming?malaria in Jersey, a few submerged islands, mango orchards in Saskatchewan?is a trip to the spa compared to the abrupt-shift scenario, which Schwartz/Randall say could occur as early as 2010. The report states that the halt of the Gulf Stream would trigger a rapid return to scarcity across the globe, plunging us into a Mad Max-style world rife with resource wars. Conflicts over food, water and energy sources would be accompanied by human and animal die-offs, massive environmental refugee flows and all-around social anarchy. As nations try to protect their dwindling resources from envious neighbors, they will naturally develop weapons of mass destruction. All bets on civilization's continued progress would be off. The "American way of life" that U.S. officials today find so precious and non-negotiable at international climate conferences?well, so long to all that.
"Abrupt climate change is likely to stretch [the Earth's] carrying capacity well beyond its already precarious limits," the report concludes. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life? Every time there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid."
This is a worst-case scenario, but even the current reality of gradual warming deserved attention before Marshall's belated awakening to the real possibility of an abrupt shift. For the last decade, the consensus around climate change has steadily hardened while the prognosis has worsened. By the time the Office of Net Assessment commissioned the Schwartz/Randall report, current warming was already impacting international politics. World grain production, for example, has been falling for each of the last four years, while international tensions over access to drinking water and fisheries continue to rise. Other alarming indicators have been apparent since at least the early 90s, with no shortage of experts warning of the obvious political, social and economic implications.
But better late than never. Marshall's leak of and public support for the Schwartz/Randall study and its conclusions create the possibility that the Department of Defense could become a powerful new constituency in a heavier push for drastic reductions of greenhouse gases?all under the granite banner of national security. Having the Office of the Secretary of Defense as an ally would no doubt enlarge the ranks of those urging a massive, internationally coordinated mobilization.
Just as important, the report could inject climate change and U.S. energy policy into the heart of this year's presidential election. If the media (and the Democratic Party) does its job, the Bush administration will roast over the coals of Marshall's leak. The president that tossed out the Kyoto Protocol like Clinton's old bong is ripe to be revealed for what he is: marshmallow-soft on national security. If climate change is indeed the biggest near-term threat to the United States?and the respected director of the Pentagon's think tank now states that it is?then the administration's ongoing refusal to preempt that threat makes the 9/11 commission look like an episode of Judge Judy. Holding this debate would also force the next president to crusade for the energy revolution that needs to happen in the next decade. (Anyone interested in what this revolution will look like, see apolloalliance.org.)
Meanwhile, the Pentagon continues to address the climate crisis in more concrete ways. As part of a federal building renovation program, the Departments of Defense and Energy have recently installed photovoltaic panels atop the enormous building's five-sided roof. And if a solar-powered Death Star isn't the perfect symbol of humanity's two possible futures, then I don't know what is.