Recently the Observer reported on a Pentagon-sponsored study on the strategic implications of climate change. The piece has generated a lot of attention, but unfortunately it illuminates the limits of futures work more than the future itself.
Let's begin with the Observer piece, subtly titled "Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us," reports that
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
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 story has been picked up in a number of places (this Common Dreams report is representative). But there are two problems: the report isn't a prediction, and it wasn't a secret report. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted yesterday, the purpose of the study was to
investigate the "worst-case" possible events, those that are highly unlikely to happen but, if they did happen, would be catastrophic, especially in their impacts on U.S. military operations — "low probability, high impact" events, as they are known in the futurological world….
Unlikely though such events are, such studies are valuable, Schwartz said — as valuable as if, say, someone in the 1990s had investigated the highly unlikely looking possibility that someone would try to destroy the World Trade Center by flying two airplanes into it, he noted….
Unfortunately, the distinction between prediction and highly improbable was muddied by some of the more frantic press coverage.
The report wasn't "secret" in the sense of being classified. I don't know what the Pentagon plans (or ever planned) to circulate the study publicly, or whether the press attacks made them decide not to make it public. But a month before the Observer piece, Fortune published an article (available online to subscribers) about the report that summarized it thus:
Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decadeólike a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societiesóthereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.
It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies.
Of course, the worst-case scenarios are very scary, and even the mid-range problems are pretty frightening; but the jump from "might happen" to "will happen" is one that futurists are as loath to make as journalists are eager to make. Scenarios should be read- and reported on- as possibilities, and warnings, but not as predictions.
