The Naked Future (11 page)

It's the sort of discussion that could take place between a pair of very modern, twenty-first-century pundits, which evinces the fact that public certainty about climate change remains in a state of flux, even as scientific consensus has grown more firm over the last half century.

We've made great progress in understanding weather patterns and events and how they are influenced by climate, but we were never able to build von Neumann's weather clock, at least not the way he envisioned it. There is no model that perfectly mirrors the climate. The potential variables are too numerous for us to handle at present. The weather is a dynamic and chaotic system. Changes, imbalances, and disturbances that are too small to see build power quickly and meet with other physical forces, matter, and energy, creating new imbalances, adding new complications, and all of this is happening all the time, all over the world.

What we have instead of an infinite forecast is an amalgamation of timepieces, stopwatches, and calendars sharing many parts between them but purporting to tell time in somewhat different ways. Historical temperature readings from the 1800s provide one picture of our weather history (and thus our future weather); tree-ring samples going back centuries provide another; ice-core samples going back well before the dawn of humankind provide a
third. Researchers who are spread all over the world, and who use a menagerie of instruments including radioiodine, offshore and surface weather stations, geostationary and polar orbiting data, all contribute to an ever-changing understanding of how the climate operates. All of these observational and mechanical processes yield hundreds of terabytes of data on a yearly basis. No wonder climate science as a field consumes more supercomputer time than even particle physics research. Standardizing and synthesizing all of this information is a monumental task.

So what do the models tell us? The IPCC has forecast a mean global temperature increase of 4 to 6 degrees Celsius and a sea level rise of as much as a meter by the year 2100. (Views from the 2013 assessment were not yet available at the time of writing.) This may not sound like a significant change, only a mere seasonal transition. We are again forced to rely on computational models to make sense of the transition, which suggest that such a rise, especially in the 4-to-6-degree realm, would be incredibly disruptive to human life on this planet. Cities such as Bangladesh and even the lower portion of Manhattan would be overtaken by water. Parts of the world that had enjoyed temperate or stable climate conditions would see drought, flooding, and an increased number of extremely strong hurricanes (Category 4 or higher).

The IPCC findings are not perfect and the body has been forced to issue corrections, amendments, and the like. Their assessments represent not what thousands of people at the forefront of climate science, academics, engineers, technicians, and politicians,
know
but what they can
agree on
. There is tremendous nuance within that consensus and some scientists believe the IPCC estimates are too conservative. Yet agreement on the existence of man-made climate change is far narrower than certain political and business interests would like to believe. More than 95 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and the process is heavily influenced by mankind.
¹⁰

To this day, the fundamental question that drives the so-called climate debate is simply this: What can and cannot be modeled? It's
a flimsy-sounding problem and so flimsy politicians who are eager to align themselves with the prevailing political winds make good use of its ambiguity. In 2011 presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich found himself having to reverse his previous support for carbon cap-and-trade legislation in order to appeal to a far more conservative Republican base voting in the Republican primaries. His explanation for this turnaround was laughable: “I think that we're a long way from being able to translate a computer program into actual science . . . I, also, am an amateur paleontologist, so I've spent a lot of time looking at the Earth's temperature . . . and I'm a lot harder to convince than just [someone who is] looking at a computer model.”
¹¹
Imagine all the trouble and argument that could have been avoided if John von Neumann had had the chance to meet Newt Gingrich. Perhaps he would have given up the whole computer nonsense and taken up a more suitable profession, such as paleontology!

It's very gratifying to shake a fist at know-nothings who claim that global warming is a grand hoax. But very little about the actual process of
climate modeling is intuitive or straightforward. In elementary school we're taught that an experiment performed under a certain set of conditions should result in the same outcome no matter who you are or what you believe. We call this process science. But there is no way to run an experiment on the entire global climate. We're stuck with the numerical simulations that the average person can't repeat. Yet modeling is essential to make
any
sense of the data. It's not an after-process; it is
the
process. In the future, even as scientific consensus continues to cement, the politics of climate change will become more troubled and fractious; the assault on climate science will intensify.

Why is this? Public opinion on the existence of anthropogenic climate change moves up and down based on factors outside science. That's fairly incredible when you think about it:
more
certainty on the part of climate science results in
less
certainty on the part of the public. How could that be? The short answer is that climate science represents everything that's wrong with the big
data present. The opaque and highly technical nature of crunching these various variables and data points assures that many people are left out of the process.

Most people without science degrees understand science from their elementary or high school exposure to the scientific method: you form a hypothesis, you devise an experiment, you record the results, you repeat. If anyone in the world can run your experiment and achieve the same results that you have, then you've learned something true. Of course, there are plenty of homemade science projects that enable students to understand the basic principles of climate change but a very small number of men and women actually have access to the data, the computer-processing power, and the technical skills necessary to develop climate models or critique them. Simply put, not every technically trained person has access to the rich data or the robust computing power necessary to make a climate model. When looked at from that (rather limited) perspective, climate science fails a crucial test; the models or experiments can't be simply or easily reproduced by, say, a local weatherperson. The perception among many is that we're being asked on faith to accept the research of high priests and clerics.

More important, the modelers can only agree on broad scenarios that look decades into the future. But they can't tell you how unmitigated climate change will affect anyone specifically or how it will change the weather in the next five or twenty days. We expect the smartest people in the world to be able to deliver extremely specific predictions, as in
climate change will cause a tornado this weekend; cancel your barbecue
. But that's not the way it works. In fact, climate scientists are, for the most part, extremely reluctant to blame increasing global temperatures on any specific weather event that we experience, even retrospectively. What they can offer is sound and sober admonishment to live more responsibly. The message of the climate science community too often seems to be that we should be prepared to make
individual
sacrifices or else face terrible
collective
consequences later. Is it any wonder why polling has shown that in tough economic times public skepticism toward climate change grows?
¹²

For both Republicans and Democrats, developing nations and the industrialized world, attacking climate change is a loser at the ballot box and could soon become more so, especially in the United States. The same political forces that insist more research is needed before the United States can take meaningful action on climate change are working to undercut the nation's ability to conduct that very research. The United States is continually on the verge of ceding leadership on the most important issue of our species.

In 2013 NASA had thirteen Earth-monitoring satellites. Six will no longer be in operation by 2016. In 2006, under former president George W. Bush, the U.S. government restructured the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series (GOES-R), which worked to greatly diminish the United States' Earth-monitoring capabilities. A 2011 Government Accountability Report found that unless the United States works to cover the gap and put new equipment in space, the nation “will not be able to provide key environmental data that are important for sustaining climate and space weather measurements.”
¹³

In 2010 President Barack Obama warned that the budget put forward by House Republicans would seriously harm the ability of the nation to gather weather data: “Over time, our weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn't be able to afford to launch new satellites and that means governors and mayors would have to wait longer to order evacuations in the event of a hurricane.”
¹⁴

That means future climate data will increasingly come from such other sources such as Europe, Russia, and even China. Much like global warming itself, this is a sort of feedback loop, which conveniently plays into the narrative that climate science is inherently dishonest, sneaky, and most—damningly globalist—un-American in nature. This will be at least partially true. The mounting evidence for man-made climate change will indeed
be less American
in origin.

Fifty years after von Neumann set out to change what could be known about the operations of our natural world, various political forces in the United States the adopted country he loved so dearly,
are demanding we ignore the problem or employ only half measures to fix it.

What we need is a system or service to allow individuals to understand how climate change may affect them individually, not in the year 2100 but in telemetric real time (or something like it). Only then can the big data present give way to a future in which everyone can understand what climate change actually means
to them.
The very slender silver lining on the dark cloud of climate change is that entrepreneurs are stepping up to fill the role our public leaders have left vacant.

The year is 2002. David Friedberg is driving down San Francisco's Embarcadero, the highway that hugs the San Francisco coastline, on his way to his finance job in Foster City. It's raining. At the intersection near the AT&T Park, Friedberg turns and sees the Bike Hut, a small plywood bicycle-rental stand on the boardwalk. It's closed.

“I said to myself,
That's a pretty crappy business
. Whether or not this guy is going to make money in a given month depends on how many days it rains. It occurred to me that's actually a big problem,” Friedberg went on to tell a roomful of Stanford undergrads in a 2011 lecture.
¹⁵

Back on the Embarcadero, Friedberg realizes that if he can model the weather, with a sense of the probability of different weather outcomes, he could provide businesses such as the bike shop with individual insurance against weather loss. The owners of the Bike Hut could buy an insurance contract to pay him a small sum when it rains. Friedberg stores this insight. The light turns green. He continues his commute to Foster City.

Friedberg, born in South Africa, came to the United States in 1986 at the age of six. His parents moved the family to Los Angeles hoping to succeed as independent filmmakers. In his Stanford lecture, he recounts growing up in Hollywood and watching his parents struggle to find investors for their projects. The experience might
have scared him away from risk, long-shot bets, and overly ambitious plans. Instead, he says, his parents instilled in him the exact opposite attitude. As a child he had been interested in “the way things work” and went on to study astrophysics. But the study of the interrelationship of solar bodies, while challenging intellectually, felt divorced from real life. He felt like “a cog in a machine that was going to take forever to output some theory that might be disproven fifty years later.” At this time, around 1999, the tech bubble was reaching critical mass and Friedberg acknowledges that the hype helped move him toward investment banking in Silicon Valley.

A few years later he moved from finance to Google where he worked as a product manager in the AdWords program. This involved sifting through massive amounts of data, anonymized versions of the words and phrases that Google users were putting in e-mails and search queries. His mind kept returning to the shuttered Bike Hut and how that business model could be improved. He saw a clear overlap. “The idea of taking lots of data and extracting signals could apply to weather,” he would go on to tell the Stanford students. “We could analyze weather data and take these signals and apply them to a problem.” That problem was two-pronged: what the weather would be and how much it would cost. If you could calculate those two things, then you could sell an insurance contract to a ski resort to help them recoup losses after a season with below-average snowfall, or you could help a Bike Hut make back a bit of lost profit after a very rainy spring.

He solicited the help of fellow Googler Siraj Khaliq as chief technical officer and, with $300,000 in seed money, in 2006 they formed WeatherBill (since renamed the Climate Corporation). The first step was to get a clear statistical sense of the different types of weather a given location was most likely to experience in the future based on what had happened in the past and what was happening right now.