TECHNOLOGICAL FORECASTING AND SOCIAL CHANGE 9,301-308 (1976) 301

Climate as a State Variable: What Should be a Rational Policy?

JOHN WILKINSON

Introduction Although “adequate” simulations of climate and its changing effects still lie some time

in the future, models already constructed admit of drawing important (if somewhat general) conclusions.’ It must always be remembered that the progressive elaboration of a model, if it possesses any validity at all, is at any time or stage useful for some sort of more or less general view of the future. Indeed, the conviction that a system exists that can be modelled is often more interesting than any subsequent fmding. Most models, in fact, are overcomplex and overambitious for the problem or problems actually con- templated.

“Climate” almost certainly affects nearly all the rates, i.e., policies, that are the ultimate objects of investigation of any plausibly proposed simulation of the global, or local, economy.2 In a model such as the University of California-Davis agricultural model developed by Kenneth Watt, climate is explicitly present and proves to have an effect indirectly on virtually all subsystems.

In this paper I outline some climatic pasts and futures drawn from, or, at least, compatible with what we have already done at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

The recent visit of Reid Bryson served to crystallize much of our thought on climate as

a state variable. Bryson does not himself display much interest in simulation. In fact, he polemicized against it. Nonetheless, the work he has done lends itself admirably to this technique.

Paleoclimatology, the study of the changing climates of the past and their correlations with historical cultural sequences, is a model paradigm for the Center’s ongoing study: Retrospective Futurology. Modem serial dating techniques have made it possible to gauge the effect of droughts, for example, on the migration of peoples and the evolution and extinction of whole cultures. Chinese cultures seem to have emerged during a well documented “climatic optimum” (the Neolithic) in the “nuclear area” of North China. Optimal conditions of warmth and moisture for a nascent agriculture were located at the

DR. WILKJNSON is Senior Fellow at The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara and Secretary of the World Simulation Organization.

’ For example, the system dynamics models of Forrester, Meadows, Mesarovic and Pestel, and the dynamic simulations of Richard Bellman. Also see J. Wilkinson, Resources in a Stable Society, Technol. Forecast. Sot. Change 7, 13 (1975).

’ One reason strictly econometric models have had such a dismal record in their “predictions” is that they have had no input from climate.

0 American Elsevier Publishing Company, Inc., 1976

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intersection of natural routes of communication.3 The Hittites penetrated into Asia Minor as a result of the dessication of their homeland to the North; and after eight hundred years of domination pushed on again for the same reason, southward and into oblivion. Many of the important stages of Greek culture can be connected with known

climatic change. So, the original penetration of the Greeks (and of the other “Aryans” elsewhere) into the Helladic Peninsula, about 2000 B.C., the end of the Mycenean Age and the beginning of the so-called “dark age” of Greece, about 1200 B.C., and the enormous proliferation of Greek city-states by extensive colonization, about 800 B.C. were all marked periods of drought and famines. And the stages of the Voelker- wanderungen that lasted for 2000 years were climatically dominated. Examples could be proliferated almost indefinitely. What are the political, social and moral problems that could arise for us in a world that, as in the past, may now be on the threshhold of a “small,” but nonetheless potentially disastrous, ice age? And what policies could be

adopted to counter it? Or to damp out lesser fluctuations? The study of the earth’s climate and its effect on almost every aspect of human

behavior, like so many other scientific and pseudo-scientific disciplines, began in earnest with the classical Greeks. That the archetypical product of Greek environmental and medical science was a manual with the title “Airs, Waters and Places” is revealing. The word “climate” itself is of Greek origin and denotes the latitudinal regions of the globe as a function of the sun’s different inclinations at those latitudes in the course of the solar year. In the predominantly torrid tropics, as the Ancients already knew, the only “seasons” are day and night. In the temperate zones the procession of markedly different seasons, together with superposed (and dramatically changing) fluctuations on them, were supposed to act “tonically” on the human frame and to engender races and cultures like that of the Greeks themselves. Men, it was thought by Aristotle and Strabo, long before Toynbee, had to have climatic variety and be forced to face up to “challenges” if they

were ever to be provoked to “civilized” response. If life were harder in the more northerly latitudes this fact had the compensatory merit of making necessity the motive force of invention. Bryson has recently given interesting evidence that “productivity” and the related use of energy, are indeed positive functions of the decreasing mean latitudinal temperature of centers of population; that is, productivity-agricultural and industrial- increases as one moves northward from the equatorial regions.4

Hellenistic antiquity believed, almost as an article of faith, that the life of an

“Ethiopian” or an “Indian” was an undernourished, lethargic dream, punctuated by

3 See K. C. Chang, “Asian Perspectives,” (1958), and 0. Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, (New York, 1951). Quite in general, “retrospective futurology” seeks to determine whether or not there are time trajectories of state variables (e.g., population) temporarily invariant, i.e., with

respect to the form of the curve. The rate equations (“policies”) that produced these curves can be

investigated. As far as “climate” is concerned I cannot find that there are any responses to it with

which we are familiar today that did not exist in Classical Antiquity. For example, plant and animal

breeding, migration, securing food supplies from widely different areas, siting and construction of domiciles, irrigation, etc. Even a crude sort of weather modification by fireworks was practiced in

China and in Asia Minor, at least after powder had been invented. The Byzantines are known to have

received fireworks across the Central Asian trade routes. In both areas the formula was: “Bombarding heaven with our prayers.” See The Dynamic Programming of Human Systems-A Social and Historical

Analysis by J. Wilkinson and R. Bellman, Occasional Paper, Center for the Study of Democratic

Institutions, Santa Barbara, CaL, Dec. 1973. 4 R. Bryson and J. Ross, The Relation of Climate to Some State Variables used in Simulation,

paper presented at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, March 1975.

CLIMATE AS A STATE VARIABLE 303

infrequent, but violent, episodes of running amok. One version or other of “climatic

determinism” has had its protagonists in all ages. But excessive claims on its behalf have time and again caused it to pass into the discard and to make men lose sight of the fact (at least until something went inexplicably and badly awry) that climate is really in some

degree determinative of nearly every phase of human activity. For example, much of the post-classical disrepute into which climatology fell came about as a result of its too close association with astrology and its consequent rejection by Christianity. Nonetheless, the association of climate with geography and astrology was unavoidable for the Ancients just because geography is in large part a projection of the celestial sphere onto the terrestrial. The passage of the sun and moon (and, it was thought, of all the other members of the solar system) through the belt of the Zodiac does in fact determine days, months, seasons, the extent of the tropics, and many human biological and cultural cycles, and does determine that purely “solar climate” would be the only one that could exist on an earth that lacked the inhomogeneities of oceans and continents. Astrology (which, with the dismal Babylonian superstition of horoscopy removed, is astronomy) plunged down- ward into a well-deserved ruin, but carried any rationd study of climate along with it.

But the study of climate has nevertheless had many insistent rebirths. For example, near the beginning of the present century, a scientist named Dexter attempted to correlate local climates with all manner of social traits and even with the incidence of murder in places like New York City. As it had done repeatedly in its long history, climatology again set itself up to explain rather more than is good for a sound theory. The work of Dexter and his colleagues gradually fell into disrepute even though it has recently been revived by finding many validating phenomena, e.g., positive correlations between murders and California’s Santa Ana winds; or difficult post-operative recovery in

Vienna during a season of FGhn. The probable connection of changing climate with the etiology of many diseases, with the wholesale extinctions of species, and with cultures and famines (and even with the individual’s behavior), is so irresistible that climatology, after a time in which its hybris has been forgotten, is always revived, the last (and present) time ‘round as a pluridisciplinary enterprise involving meteorology, geology, anthropology, archeology and history-all these in a framework of some sort of over- arching environmental theory of general systems. In this way the apparently unavoidable need of most men of most generations to feel that the universe is indefeasibly one, possessing those subtle and universal sympathies and concordances that were demanded so strongly if so wrong-headedly by the older astrology, finds at last its modem justification. I myself am incapable of understanding the “little ice age,” that lasted from the fifteenth century of our era to the beginning of the twentieth, in total disconnection from the twin facts of the European Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, and from the characteristic diseases and wars that accompanied them.

One problem today is: Do we face another such mini-ice age? Available evidence strongly suggests that we do.

During the last two or three years a large number of national and international congresses have been held (many under the auspices of the United Nations) having to do with the problems of the environment, population, food, health, energy, the ocean regime, and the world economy. All these gatherings have tended to be dominated more by the ideologies of the participants than by a sound, systematic, and global view of the problems involved. All of them have been heavily charged by dogmatic special pleading. The Rome World Food Conference found many participants advocating a sink-or-swim, devil-take-the-hindmost ethic. According to this convenient view of things, nature should

304 JOHN WILKINSON

be aided (or, at least, not impeded) in “starving out of the human race” those misfits and incompetents who had not had brains enough to become affluent while it was still possible. This “triage,” a globalized version of the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, has rightly been called “obscene.” Unfortunately, the bleeding hearts who have belatedly recommended setting up a “World Food Bank” in order to prevent, during the coming years, widespread famine, should have begun to grind out that tune a decade ago. But, at that time they were busily crying up the “green revolution”, which was brainlessly supposed to make Southeast Asia and other chronically undernourished parts of the world self-sufficient. Systematic ecologists, systems theorists, and other opponents of the “quick technological fix,” warned them then that the necessary conditions, as, for example, assuring to the agriculture of the under-developed countries adequate genetic variability, adequate supply of energy and fertilizer, and a complete rearrangement of their infra- structures, were then held to be “obscene” by these whilom joyous prophets. A decade ago it was still possible to speak of “crisis management” with respect to pressing national and international problems. These “solutions” ought rather to be termed “catastrophe management,” or, better, what the Deutsche Zeitung has called: “Catastrophe on the installment plan,” since they have irretrievably lost the name of action. The “green revolution” has not even bought a year or two of time, as Bryson claims. It has most likely lost seven. In the social sciences, as with chemical polymers, there are more than a sufficient number of signs of structural failure long before the breaking point is reached, at least, for those who care to heed them.

Perhaps the most intractable and neglected variable affecting all these global problems is not population or inflation, but the worldwide, progressive change of the earth’s climate. It is, of course, completely untrue that one can do “nothing about the climate.” Even cracker-barrel meteorologists took notice of the periodic droughts of the Great Plains of the Midwest of the United States (a “repitition phenomenon” that can rather satisfactorily be brought into reasonably good relationship with the twenty-two year cycle of sun spots’) and reformed their agricultural practices accordingly. It may be the case that we are not yet about to dominate the climate. But there do exist certain powerful measure that could be taken to ameliorate further the disastrous effects of, say, our own recurrent Mid-western droughts. Even should wheat and corn cultivation be pushed, for example, to a band further south than that which they presently occupy, crops (oats and barley?) of high protein content could still be developed and grown in regions in which the growing season has in the last decade or two experienced a shortening of a couple of weeks. It is not at all clear that the associated vast readjust- ments of our economy would be easy to carry out. But Americans have had their own green revolution before this, and presumably have learned something. It is, unfortunately, quite probable that Henry Wallace has destabilized the Far East. Monocultures, or oligocultures, are inherently unstable and exceedingly costly to maintain in an acceptably stable condition.

The first half of the present century represented an extraordinarily favorable world climate. Such favorable climatic episodes, according to Cesare Emiliaini, have “existed during perhaps a mere five per cent of the time over the last seventy thousand years; and

’ Or rather, with an associated magnetic cycle. The Byzantines (before Manzikert) took note of the same drought periodicities in Asia Minor, viz. circa 22 years, and twice and four times this base. J.

M Keynes analyzed this cycle for commercial enterprises. He emphasized, however, that the effect

would be greater in predoniminatly agricultural societies.

CLIMATE AS A STATE VARIABLE 305

have usually ended quickly. Most often they have lasted less than a century.” Bryson

presented (to me) compelling evidence at the Center strongly suggesting that the favor- able period we have just lived through “has been the most abnormal of the last thousand

years.” Nonetheless, “planners,” for the most part take this altogether exceptional period as a norm in making, by extrapolation, their “predictions” for the balance of the present century. It is true that the average world climate has not varied much since the end of the last glaciation, that is, during the last lO-12,000 years. But within this average climatic range there have occurred numerous abrupt fluctuations that have been of the greatest importance to the world-wide human economy. These fluctuations themselves tend strongly to be world-wide. This means that if a drought occurs along, say, the southern (Sahel) band of the Sahara there will be, to a high degree of probability, floods elsewhere on the globe. Floods are even likely to alternate unseasonably with dryness in the drought

region itself. This last situation will usually cause flood-induced soil erosion to compound the difficulties of the preceding abnormally dry season. Most plant life is, furthermore, deliberately geared by evolutionary selection to a proper alternation of wet and dry, cold and warm. Bryson suggests that it is-on balance-highly probable that the monsoons will not return regularly to India and Pakistan during the present century. (I have calculated, for what it is worth, that the assumed “regular” return of the monsoons to southeast Asia has a probability as low as one in one hundred.) But even though known history may here be repeating itself, Bryson fears that hardly anyone is heeding its lessons. He says that he himself has developed “almost a paranoid state of mind” through sheer inability to be heard, or even less, to prompt necessary governmental action. “They seem unwilling even to Zisten.” The political implications of this unwillingness are clear to him. During our discussions Bryson suggested that the recent explosion of an atomic bomb in India has been “induced by the prospect of a famine. ” The Indian bomb is therefore “a calculated risk to develop enough political muscle to get food.” Some around the Center table contested this version of the purpose of the Indian bomb. They agreed that it might be indeed some sort of “device for blackmail,” but that, since the affluent upper ten per cent of Indian society demonstrably cared little or nothing about most of the remainder, it was not at all clear that the nourishment of the permanently submerged ninety per cent could have weighed very heavily in the atomic balance. One prominent Indian demo- grapher was quoted by me as having averred that most of his upper class countrymen would be “perfectly happy to see fifty percent of the lower class Indian population disappear.” Since this situation of the “haves” versus the “have not? is locally as well as globally universal, it is far from clear how anyone could be sanguine enough to expect problems of food, population, or inflation to be meaningfully solved by givers or receivers of food in the interest of the great majority of those threatened by famine.6

It was suggested more than once during our discussions with Bryson that only a fear of violent revolution on the part of the world’s Lumpenproletariat could act as a force for change. But revolution as a mode of social change “usually comes too late,” and certainly will come too late for the famine that impends if Bryson's fears are well founded.

Meteorologists and climatologists have developed at least several dozen theories to

6 The Indian Minister for Agriculture suggested to the press only last week that his country’s

famines and the deaths resulting from them “ought to be thought a blessing rather than a curse.” If anyone is guilty not only of mentioning but actually promoting the presently fashionable “triage,” it is the Indian government. In India any extra grain is 30% eaten by rats and 60% subducted into the

black market. The remaining 10% trickles down to the starving.

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account for worldwide climatic norms and oscillations about them. For example, changes in the radiation received from the sun or alterations in the magnetic field of the earth are often adduced. Bryson’s own view is that the most prominent variable in the ups-and- downs of the world climate is periodic change in the particulate matter held in suspension in the atmosphere as a result of natural (e.g., volcanic) activity and/or of human industry.7 This particular theory should not, of course, exclude the possibility that a number of factors may interact simultaneously-either constructively or destructively-to promote (or to level out) climatic change. In any case, the result or cause of these interactions, whatever they may be, is a change in the southward extent of the jet streams about the poles of the earth, along with an accompanying expansion or contraction of both the mass and extent of the Arctic and Antarctic(?) ice caps. The net result of the present expansion of the circumpolar vortex, and the associated ice, is to depress southwards the normal high pressure zones, and with them the monsoons, which, in the case of Pakistan, fall uselessly into the Indian Ocean. But, one doesn’t have to go off to the Sahel or to the Indus Valley to observe this effect. Here in Santa Barbara an omnipresent and persistently undisplaceable “low” has hovered over the Califomia- Arizona border for the last two “summers,” drawing in a mile-thick layer of marine air, cancelling the summer season (and the tourist industry) as effectively as in Europe. The dollar value of loss of world tourism until now has outweighed world agricultural deficits.

There is more than a small possibility that the particulate matter in the atmosphere has indeed been greatly increased by the exponential increase of human industrial pollution that began long ago, but became so distressingly marked after World War II. It is difficult for some to suppose that human industry could possibly have loaded the atmosphere with anything like the tonnage of particulates that resulted from the explosions of Sumbawa

(when the “summer failed”) or Krakatoa, and the subsequent global cooling, in the nineteenth century. However, one of the most important lessons to be derived from the yet admittedly insufficient “simulations” (or modellings) of the global atmosphere is that the entire system is replete with nonlinearities and threshholds, which, once being exceeded, are likely to be self-perpetuating over greater or lesser time intervals. A change of as little as 3 “C could bring a new glaciation.

Another important lesson that can be learned from the simulation models that we hope to perfect and which combine energy, capital expenditure, climate, and agriculture, is that the industrially-developed nations, which lie primarily in the North temperate regions of the globe, have such a high ratio of energy to agricultural production that even

a dramatically increased input of energy, already in short supply, would produce only minor, marginal, increases in American agricultural production, perhaps not amounting to more than one to three per cent of the increase to be expected of a proportional energy invested in the subsistence economies that lie further south. The point of diminishing returns to produch’vity from energy-capital has been reached or even passed. We pay dearly for the microclimates in which we are forced, or choose, to live. The moral seems clear: Aid to the dependent world, even if it were to be temporarily successful, can only come about permanently by helping to develop the agricultural resources of that portion of the human race, and hoping that the theory of voluntarily reduced birth rates in these

’ This is also the official view of the Soviet Akademiya Nauk. The Soviets also dislike intensely the

contrails of American jet-aircraft in the stratosphere. Very recent borings have shown the existence of

numerous sedimentary volcanic deposits that probably correspond to a long series of Krakatoa-like

activities.

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circumstances is correct. The African Sahel has nearly no resources at all to work with. It passed long since the “carrying capacity” of the environment and will probably have to be supported by means of direct and free aid from the more developed countries at least for as long as the present drought lasts and perhaps forever. This drought built up over years and may last a correspondingly long time.* Other more fortunate areas of underde- velopment might perhaps be aided best, not through the introduction or the continuation of destabilizing green revolutions alone, but through a labor-intensive and rationalized agricultural economy as that of China is reported to have become.

In the meantime, since rational solutions to their own (and others) climate problems are difficult, and perhaps impossible, the tendency of the Soviets and the Americans is to turn to deliberate (and, it goes without saying, mostly “unpredictable”) global “weather modification.” The Soviets have already begun to dam the great rivers, like the Ob and Irtysh, of Central Siberia; and both American and Soviet schemes to dam the Bering Straits are under active investigation. (It was reported in the press that President Ford and Chairman Brezhnev conferred in Vladivostok about such a plan. No details were given to the public and it is highly likely that any will be given). A report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rightly calls all such schemes “irresponsible’‘-pending better

conjectures than it is now possible to make of their global consequences. But then Mr. Ford and Comrade Brezhnev seem already to have come to a whole grab-bag of other irresponsible conclusions and it is far from certain whether or not they have decided to

alter the earth’s climate before simulation models are available to test alternative hy- potheses and to frame alternative, stabilizing policies.

A dependable simulation model of the earth’s climate, taking into consideration the

all-important ocean-atmosphere interaction, is perhaps a decade or two away. In the meantime concerned scientists and policy makers might perhaps attempt to show to the citizens of the world the bundles of possible alternative futures resulting from damming the Bering Straits or continuing to pollute the atmosphere.’ Since most of these alternative futures are unthinkable by rational men it is possible that a moratorium could be put on weather modification, except perhaps, that of a purely local nature. But a people whose military could unleash weather warfare by means of cloud-seeding on Vietnam might be difficultly classifiable as “rational”.r’ Far from being rational, nearly

all policymakers I have ever met here at the Center have been dullards. If there is even a small probability that Bryson is correct in concluding that the approaching adverse climate means that world food reserves will soon be effectively zero, that contingency would be so dangerous to the human race that any responsible policy should treat a small probability as a moral near certainty.

It is possible even now to frame a coherent policy that would fit both ends of this

* The population of the Sahel has been destroyed many times. The great (and overpopulated

empire) of the Mali with one of its capitals at Timbuctoo was totally destroyed by the same events

that are occurring today. The extension of the polar ice cap during the last glaciation was accom-

panied, according to purely paleostratigraphic evidence, by the depression of the Monsoons south-

ward.

9 A proposal made by the Soviets to do this via computer-graphics and television, under the

auspices of the United Nations, found no resonance at all, perhaps because of a suspicion on the part of the Americans that it was not seriously meant.

” The Department of Defense’s rationalization (only stated when the Vietnam project recently

became known) was that it was “better than bombing.” But, of course, they meant to do both.

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spectrum. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t presently square with the decrepit, but still potent, ideologies of either the rich or the poor.

But a detailed discussion of appropriate policy must not be put off. The problem is essentially that of damping out climatic effects on agriculture-whether over short periods or long ones. Experts already agree that “food banks” must be built up, and that it is also necessary to increase the genetic variety of cereals. And here it must be remembered that genes, for example, for “cold” and photoperiodism, are available-just as genes are available for high protein content.

The principal pressure point of policy is to cut back capital expenditure requiring energy on the agricultural sector. (The Rome conference urged an increase.) Non-intuitive as this step may seem, it will perhaps be remembered that, in our simulations, a reduction of input to the capital sector damped markedly all the fluctuations over time of all the state variables.” Some of the resultant capital-saving could then be used for research and some transferred to the developing countries-where a little could go a very long way. It seems obvious that damping oscilations would be useless until the lowpoint of the swing is at least equal to the subsistence level of the famine-stricken parts of the world. (It is a great misfortune that the reduction of capital investment is not available for any purpose, if, as at the present time it results from inflation. That capital has quite simply been lost.)

Other methods of “impedance” damping that are useful both for us and for the famine-threatened areas, are food reservoirs (“capacitance” damping), and cleaning up the environment (“inductance” damping).12 The damped-out capital could be transferred from the investment sector proper to the information sector. Whether or not the ideology of Capitalism (consumerism), or that of Marxism (which favors the growth of heavy industry over modest but useful improvements in agriculture) could be changed is, of course, very much open to question.

The mismatch of impedances between capital and the other sectors is very marked. And even though planners are often heard to babble about “impedance mismatch”, I never met one who had the faintest idea of what he was talking about. Here is one task for Alvin Weinberg’s interdisciplinary climatological institute, which he proposes to found. (Science 18 Oct., 1974.) There are few matters in popular ideology or myth SO

firmly entrenced as “climate.” The genius caeli is always more important than the genius loci. ’ 3 But what may impede carrying out Weinberg’s inspired suggestion even more is the disesteen in which climatology is held by meteorology. To most meteorologists a climatologist is just a failed meteorologist. (It might be remembered that a meteorologist is, to a physicist, just a physicist manqu&.) This Kantian battle of the disciplines is one matter Weinberg will have to turn his attention to promptly.

Received 4 February 19 75

” The principal reason for this is that it is exceedingly expensive to maintain an agriculture of

high productivity but low variety. The agricultures of most subsistence economies are of low

productivity and high variety. American agriculture’s further productivity, whatever climatic changes

occur, cannot be increased except by capital put into the “knowledge” sector.

I2 In a sufficiently detailed simulation of capital flow, negative capital is necessary to clean up the

environment and therefore must be subtracted from total available capital, i.e., it represents a debt. I3 I.e., the “spirit” of the weather is always more important than the “spirit” of the locale.