Left assumptions in need of reformulation: Existential threats, nuclear and climatic

Back in the 2003 when I first started blogging, the notion of "counterintuitivity" was more often discussed as a position that establishment pundits used to shhow their supposed independence of mind. Actually, even by that time it mostly meant supposedly liberal pundits taking conservative positions.

But there are a couple of current tropes on the left/center-left that I find problematic. Both of them came up repeatedly at the Netroots Nation 2019 cofererence I attended in Philadelphia last week.

One is the now-common assertion that climate change is the biggest threat to humanity's future. I would call nuclear proliferation and climate change the biggest threats. Both are literal existential threats to humanity. But I do see nuclear war as still the more urgent threat.

As Max Tegmark noted a couple of years ago (Why 3,000 Scientists Think Nuclear Arsenals Make Us Less Safe Scientific America Online 05/26/2017):

Why is superpower nuclear war so risky? First of all, massive firepower: there are more than 14,000 nuclear weapons today, some of which are hundreds of times more powerful than North Korea’s and those dropped on Japan. Over 90 percent of these belong to Russia and the US, who keep thousands on hair-trigger alert, ready launch on minutes notice. A 1979 report by the US Government estimated that all-out war would kill 28-88 percent of Americans and 22-50 percent of Soviets (150-450 million people with today’s populations).

And he continues with the close link between nuclear war and climate catastrophe:

But this was before the risk of nuclear winter was discovered in the 1980’s.Researchers realized that regardless of whose cities burned, massive amounts of smoke could spread around the globe, blocking sunlight and transforming summers into winters, much like when asteroids or supervolcanoes caused mass extinctions in the past. A peer-reviewed analysis published by Robock et al (2007) showed cooling by about 20°C (36°F) in much of the core farming regions of the US, Europe, Russia and China (by 35°C in parts of Russia) for the first two summers, and about half that even a full decade later. Years of near-freezing summer temperatures would eliminate most of our food production. It is hard to predict exactly what would happen if thousands of Earth’s largest cities were reduced to rubble and global infrastructure collapsed, but whatever small fraction of all humans didn’t succumb to starvation, hypothermia or epidemics would probably need to cope with roving, armed gangs desperate for food. [my emphasis]

I haven't yet encountered it, but I'm sure there are climate-deniers out there somewhere cynically declaring that forecasts of "nuclear winter" show that them thar fancy scientists cain't make up their minds about whether the climate is heating or cooling.

Of course, outside the FOX News bubble, we know that a change of one or two degrees centigrade over decades can have huge effects on climate. The kind of radical, very rapid changes nuclear winter would bring would be dramatically faster and more severe. Even though it would result from cooling of the atmostphere rather than heating.

In this way, nuclear war is a part of the climate problem. Because the greater loss of life in an all-out nuclear exchange would result from the climate repercussions.

But that doesn't mean that nuclear risk and climate change can be completely identified with each other, either. Eliminating fossil fuel emissions won't get rid of the nuclear weapons stockpiles or solve the proliferation problem. And eliminating all nuclear weapons won't make fossil fuel emissions any less destructive. Both are urgent dangers and both deserve far more serious and responsible attention than they currently get.

The study on nuclear winter which Tegmark cites is Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 112: D13107 (July 2007).