Continuing excerpts from Crichton’s important speech:
[In 1983], five scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a paper in Science called "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions." This was the so-called TTAPS report, which attempted to quantify more rigorously the atmospheric effects, with the added credibility to be gained from an actual computer model of climate.
The similarity to the Drake equation is striking. As with the Drake equation, none of the variables can be determined. None at all. The TTAPS study addressed this problem in part by mapping out different wartime scenarios and assigning numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were-and are-simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that will be injected into the troposphere. No one knows how long the particles will remain in the troposphere. And so on.
According to Sagan and his coworkers, even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months. The greatest volcanic eruptions that we know of changed world temperatures somewhere between .5 and 2 degrees Centigrade. Ice ages changed global temperatures by 10 degrees. Here we have an estimated change three times greater than any ice age. One might expect it to be the subject of some dispute.
But Sagan and his coworkers were prepared, for nuclear winter was from the outset the subject of a well-orchestrated media campaign. The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.
This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.
What I have been suggesting to you is that nuclear winter was a
meaningless formula, tricked out with bad science, for policy ends. It
was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media
campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance.Further evidence of the political nature of the whole project can be
found in the response to criticism. Although Richard Feynman was
characteristically blunt, saying, "I really don’t think these guys know
what they’re talking about," other prominent scientists were noticeably
reticent. Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying "It’s an absolutely
atrocious piece of science but…who wants to be accused of being in
favor of nuclear war?" And Victor Weisskopf said, "The science is
terrible but—perhaps the psychology is good." The nuclear winter team
followed up the publication of such comments with letters to the
editors denying that these statements were ever made, though the
scientists since then have subsequently confirmed their views.A final media embarrassment came in 1991, when Carl Sagan predicted
on Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter
effect, causing a "year without a summer," and endangering crops around
the world. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that "it should
affect the war plans." None of it happened.
MORE TOMORROW.
I thought so. Following the link, I see this is the lecture of Crichton’s I read a year ago that raised my opinion of Crichton by orders of magnitude. Read the whole bleepin’ thing (pardon my Bleepese). Here’s his latest book, State of Fear, also about the eco-ideologues he discusses in this lecture.
Two other areas of science where politics have skewed the facts are carbon dating and the geologic time of the earth.
“It was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance.”
Scare tactics. If folks are frightened enough, or think there’s a conspiracy to keep the “truth” from them, they don’t care about bad science. Dan Brown has traded on this for, what, 3 novels now?
Moochie,
Scare tactics? Are you talking about Crichton or the other guys?
Who’s using scare tactics?
I remember the Nightline episode well. Carl Sagan was debating Fred Singer. Sagan said the smoke from the oil fires would be self-lofting, taking them into the Stratosphere, creating a “Nuclear Autumn” scenario for the Indian subcontinent. Singer said this was nonsense: the smoke would preciptate out of the atmosphere after rising to a height of about 1000 feet (which it did, by the way, as evidenced by the wire service photos of the fires). Sagan replied that Singer was wrong, saying “We have computer models”. Singer retorted “We do too.” That’s how the segment ended.
The point is this: a real-life test showed that the TTAPS model was invalid, and yet this got to my knowledge no press. This is especially interesting to me, because I do modeling of dynamic systems for a living. One of the hardest steps in creating a good model is model validation: getting a model to match reality. There are numerous things that can go wrong: the mathematics may be simply wrong, the code may have bugs in it, the numerical methods may not converge, the parameters populating the model might be off, the model reduction approximations may be overly economical and therefore inaccurate, or too complicated causing numerical difficulties. Validating a model (like, for example, the code that model things like circuits, waveguides, or nuclear weapons) takes a lot of time and data from experiments to get right. TTAPS probably was never put through the necessary paces, and so it was nothing more than a talking-point generator.
Looks like Sagan’s not the only one throwing around bad numbers. There was an interview with John Young (ex-Astronaut) posted this morning where he said:
“The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You’re 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.” (link: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/space/2951406)
Any idiot can think about that number and realize it is stupid for a number of reasons:
1. I doubt that 1 out of every 5000 airline passengers die. That would mean that we’d have literally tens if not hundreds of deaths a day.
2. According to scientists, Humans have been around for at least 10,000 years (even by biblical literalist standards we’ve been around for 6000+) meaning we’re WAY overdue for this event.
3. Isn’t the scientific evidence of the last climate changing event suggest it was 50K-100K years ago?
There’s plenty more reasons this is just a stupid and inaccurate statistic pushed by someone using similarly bad science as Sagan, but I thought it was worth adding to the comment list to further show the accuracy of Crichton’s speach.