Brace for ‘Climate Wars’

…On how to predict the fall of human civilization:

“Most of [the scenarios] were from military reports. There was a lot of awareness among scientists about the severity of climate change, but scientists don’t do strategic scenarios. A lot of that scenario stuff, believe it or not, actually started with Shell Oil back in the ’70s. They came up with relatively disciplined rules for these things — we’re not just writing science fiction here. What we want is credible, possible futures. The pentagon’s very big on that now.

“The American military has been doing them for a long time — they’re not hard to get at. When Bush didn’t want climate change discussed at all, the Pentagon went to the think tanks in Washington and said, ‘We need you to do all the research that we’ve already done, but can’t publish. You publish it, and we’ll distribute it to our staff.’


“I was in Washington in February — I met with a lot of senior career people, and there wasn’t a denier among them. They had made their plans, and were waiting for the administration to change so they could get some action on these things.”

The Tyee