Climate and Nuclear Threats

We live in an age of twin menaces: climate change and nuclear weapons.  In a recent book by Robert Lifton, these menaces are intertwined in his book entitled Climate Swerve (public library).  As Lifton points out, we are in a predicament and that is that people’s awareness of climate change is evolving, and as he says that is a source of hope.

Lifton has spent a lifetime writing about nuclear weapons, and it was during those sixty years that he met people and events related to the climate story, and now he writes that he is part of the climate swerve.

Lifton writes that his work on climate change has “evolved” by his decades of “the mind’s relationship to murderous nuclear devices and the world ending threat they pose.”

Climate and nuclear threats exist simultaneously.  And indeed, Lifton says that we simply can’t avoid confronting either the nuclear or the climate threat.  He writes that his role is as follows:

My portion of it—the task I have set for myself—is the comparison of nuclear and climate threats as a way of focusing on the dilemmas we face in connection with our own prior and contemporary actions (Emphasis mine).  I make no claim that this perspective will in itself decrease our carbon emissions or stem the overall rise in sea levels. But even as it enables us to take another look at the still-pervasive nuclear danger, I believe it can offer a measure of insight into grasping our climate menace and acting on it.  Lifton, Robert Jay. The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival (Kindle Locations 88-92). The New Press. Kindle Edition.

Although I’ve included a brief discussion of the threats below, there is a concept that Lifton briefly brought up in his book, and that is the notion of a Nuclear Winter.  It is in this discussion that Lifton brings the two threats together.  A nuclear winter is a period of abnormal cold and darkness predicted to follow a nuclear war, caused by a layer of smoke and dust in the atmosphere blocking the sun’s rays.  According to some scientists, an all out nuclear war in which 100 or more nuclear devices were detonated over major cities, would potentially set the earth up for unprecedented changes in its weather and climate.  The concept of a nuclear winter, with its critics in mind, is an idea that has been discussed for decades.  As Lifton states, “it is an ultimate form of devastation.” The nuclear threat, according to some, will lead to a dramatic affect on the Earth’s environment.

This blog will explore  climate and nuclear threats.  Let’s briefly talk about each.

The Climate Threat

David Popeik, in the Scientific American guest blog, says that “climate report nails risk communication.”  He suggests that the 2014 National Climate Assessment that was released by the White House presented a powerful report that he hopes will play a role in the U.S. acting on climate change.  He writes:

Most climate change communication has framed the issue as a future threat. Future risks don’t worry us as much as threats that are imminent or current. The basic message of the National Climate Assessment, offered repeatedly through the entire report, is that climate change is not something we need to worry about tomorrow. It’s something to worry about now. “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” it reads.

I was to focus on the latest report about climate change, and how the report should be used to have people take seriously climate change.  The evidence is clear that the earth is heating up (see Figure 1).  In one sense, we might say were living in a period of “extreme earth.”  This is not to say that there haven’t been other extreme (hot or cold) periods in the paleoclimate record.  But the present extreme earth period—the time we are living in—was caused by the activities of humans.

Extreme Earth raises questions about the nature of science, especially as it relates to climate change. Global warming has been in the public eye for years now, as scientific panels and independent scientific research studies have suggested.   The changes in earth’s weather and climate might, to some degree, be due to human activity.  This is  especially true due to fossil fuel extraction and the burning of fuels resulting in a 25 – 30% increase in CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Unfortunately climate change has become politicized , and resulted in the what some say is a “head in the sand” approach to doing something about the changes going on all around us.  (see Jack Hassard (2012). Extreme Earth: The Importance of the Geosciences in Science Teaching  Kindle Edition.)

Many of you are familiar with the environmental phrase, Think Globally, Act Locally.  We used it with middle and high school students as an important concept in the Global Thinking Project, which was headquartered at Georgia State University.

But, there is good reason to rephrase this statement, and put it this way: Think Locally, Act Locally.  In the Global Thinking Project, which was a hands-across-the-globe environmental science program, we engaged students in local problems (acid rain, ozone, soil erosion, water quality), but connected them with peers using the Internet.

The project helped students realize that studying their own environment was as important (maybe even more so), than connecting with problems in other parts of the world.  Don’t get me wrong, one of the attractive features of the GTP was bringing middle and high school students from different parts of the world together to share ideas, and solve problems.

But there is something missing about the issue of tackling the problem of global warming and the induced climate changing of which we are participants.

As Dr. Popeik says, climate change is now and it is affecting each of us at the local level.  If those of us that live in the Atlanta area think about extreme earth events that occurred in the recent past, we can list a few:

• the flooding of rivers and streams,
• a drought that cost many people their livelihoods,
• high temperature periods that were hazardous to many people’s lives,
• snow events that created chaos in Atlanta, Augusta and other communities,
• increased number of fire threats across the state,
• more tornadoes than have been reported in the recent past, and increased concern about hurricanes.

The Deniers  

But perhaps one of the most serious problems that we face, in the context of climate change, are those deniers that distort climatology to support their political and economic views.  For example, some researchers have commented that climate change science has been distorted, and at the same time science is evoked as a defense. They describe how a handful of scientists obscured the truth, not only about climate change, but issues related to tobacco and to the government’s “star wars” strategic defense system. As they point out, the climate change deniers use the same “play book” that big tobacco firms used to try to convince the public that smoking tobacco was not associated with cancer. (see Oreskes and Conway, 2010).

The chief denier is Donald Trump who claims that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese.  He withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accords, and agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  Trump and associates claim that the Accords will undermine the US economy.  Yet at the same time, denying that global warming is undermining environments throughout the earth–rising sea levels, ice melting at increasingly higher rates, ocean and air temperatures on the rise, increased number of extreme weather events, increasing acidity of the oceans, animals seeking temperatures more comfortable for survival, plant species’ environment changing faster than plants can accommodate, and miserable social effects associated with higher temperatures, unpredictable weather, food shortages, and spread of disease by insects and other carriers of disease.

In the field of science education, professional science teachers have had to deal with a subset of deniers who inhabit or hope to get elected to state  houses.  The Next Generation Science Standards, the latest published set of science standards in the U.S. have come under fire for the place and specific content related to climate change and global warming.  There is also the usual protest about teaching evolution, but for this landing page, we’ll limit it to climate change.

Several states have moved to block the use of the NGSS in their schools.  In Kentucky, a coal-producing state, the legislature blocked the NGSS, but the governor overruled them.  But it is the case in Wyoming where the issue of teaching climate change became a hot political issue.  Apparently some legislators objected to teaching “theories” and not ideas in science that had been proven.  But if we go deeper into the issue, we find that they oppose those theories that don’t fit with their world view.  In this case, supporters of the fossil fuel industry object to teaching any science that might put them in bad light.  In Wyoming, the NGSS was blocked by a footnote added to the state budget that prohibits the spending of any money on the review or revision of student content and performance standards for science.  Even their own!

The climate threat is just real as the nuclear threat.

The Nuclear Threat

When I was five, I  the read the headline in the Boston Globe when the morning paper arrived at our home in Natick, MA.  In the boldest letters you can image were the words” A-BOMB!  It was the second detonation if a nuclear (Atomic) bomb in the world.  But this bomb killed nearly 90,000 – 146,000 people living in Hiroshima.  Three days later another A-Bomb was dropped on Nagasaki killing between 39,00 – 80,000 people.

The US military was ready to drop a bomb on other Japanese cities every three days, or until they surrendered.

When Dwight Eisenhower heard about the A-Bombs, he said this:

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, for his part, stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives…” He later publicly declared “…it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”  (Alperovitz, Gar. “The War Was Won Before Hiroshima-And the Generals Who Dropped the Bomb Knew It.” The Nation. 6 Aug. 2015. Web. 7 Aug. 2015.)

Within a few years, a new and more murderous bomb was developed by the US: the Hydrogen Bomb.  Soon, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France has nuclear weapons.  Very soon, these countries designed and perfected Intercontinental missiles capable of delivering H-Bombs anywhere on the Earth.

Presently, Earth is armed with thousands of nuclear weapons.  Here are the leading nuclear bomb nations:

• China: 250 warheads
• France: 290 warheads
• Russia: 1,582 strategic warheads, several thousand non deployed warheads, and 2,000 tactical warheads
• United Kingdom: 120 strategic warheads, total stockpile about 225 weapons
• United States: 1, 597 strategic nuclear warheads, 2,800 non deployed strategic warheads. In total about 4,800 nuclear warheads.

MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction is an US Defense Department military strategy that assures that in a full-scale nuclear exchange, the result would be complete annihilation.  The men who developed and hold on to this theory believe that it has prevented war between the superpowers.  Now, that’s what is mad.

This murderous horror that we have lived with for more than 70 years can be summed by this quote from Lifton’s book on climate and nuclear threats.

He writes:

Psychologically speaking, one of the terrible legacies of the twentieth century was our realization that we could annihilate ourselves as a species with our own technology. What resulted in our minds was imagery of extinction.  Lifton, Robert Jay. The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival (Kindle Locations 248-249). The New Press. Kindle Edition.

The Doomsday Clock. 

Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 which sets Midnight as the moment of apocalypse.

It’s now two minutes to midnight.

The clock is a universal indicator of threat to the world from nuclear weapons, climate change, and new technologies.

This past year is not been a good one.  Not only did the US drop out of the Paris Climate Accord, but Trump has threatened to walk away from the Iran Nuclear Deal between Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council, as well as Germany and the EU.  He walked away.  Recently, Trump and Kim Jong-un staged a war or words and gestures insulting each other, at the cost of the everyone else in the world.  After two meetings, and the show boating at the DMZ, the two seem to be best pals.

Would you choose these two to talk about nuclear weapons and the fate of millions of people?

Doomsday Machines.

According to work by Daniel Ellsberg, the US and Russia have actual Doomsday Machines (DM).  A DM is a system of men, machines, electronics, communications, institutions, plans, training, discipline, practices and doctrine that could within minutes bring about the global destruction of civilization and probably all of human life.  Doomsday Machines have brought the world very close to all out nuclear war several times over the past 5 decades.

In his book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (public library) by Daniel Ellsberg, the author explores the question: Does any nation on earth have the right to threaten other nations simply by possessing a system to destroy a country or the world?

The United Nations adopted a treaty in July 2017 that would ban nuclear weapons.  At a UN meeting on to discuss nuclear weapons abolition, none of the nuclear weapons states (US as leader) attended, even though 120 other nations signed the treaty.

Just as we are working to slow the rate that the earth is warming, so too must we work to denuclearizing the earth.  Isn’t it interesting that we do talk about denuclearization, when it comes to North Korea or Iran, but none of the nuclear nations are willing to look into the mirror and ask, “Do we have the right to keep up our nuclear weapons arsenal?