Living on the Real World

My daughter is fond of reminding me that climate change can’t claim to be the #1 challenge facing the world today, and that it never will be. At the very most it can aspire only to be #2 – taking a back seat to the following worldwide imperative:

to ensure that all babies and toddlers have a strong start in life.

That’s the mission statement from the organization where she works, Zero to Three, which goes on to envision:

a society that has the knowledge and will to support all infants and toddlers in reaching their full potential.

(Full disclosure: increasingly over the years, my daughter has morphed from toddler herself into my adult supervision. An example, from another publication, dating back to 2015; you can also find more of her wisdom in LOTRW posts from 2010, 2012a, and 2012b.)

Hard to argue with those Zero-to-Three goals.

Especially with her.

But occasionally she throws her old man a bone. Take her most recent e-mail: “Thought you would be interested in this new resource.”

Clicking on the link took me to Flourishing Children, Healthy Communities, and a Stronger Nation: The U.S. Early Years Climate Action Plan.

The report opened this way: Caring for our children and caring for our planet are inextricably linked. However, connections between the two areas are rarely present in policy or practice.

What possibilities are we missing?Answering this question is both overdue and urgent. As a country, we are making progress in advancing climate solutions. Yet too often the needs of young children (0-8 years)-who have the most to lose-receive little attention.

What a great start! I had to read more. And the link encourages and facilitates this. Simple scrolling takes the reader through the entire narrative. It begins by discussing those linkages. It then focuses serially on what the federal government, state and local governments, early year (care) providers, the business community, philanthropy, and researchers (at the nexus between early years and climate change) can do. A wonderful flow, concrete illustrations, and compelling arguments inspire in-and-of their own, but also motivate reading of the full report.

The report is chock-a-block full of recommendations for the sectors. These are both broad and general, yet clear with respect to direction and goal. All merit thought. With respect to the private sector, for example, the report notes:

The business community plays an important supporting role in addressing the impacts of climate change on young children and families. Employers should provide material assistance and flexibility to employees with children. They should step fully into their role as members of the broader community. 

Three recommendations follow:

Create climate-aware policies and programs for employees with young children.

Foster partnerships between businesses and early years facilities to fund essential upgrades.

Partner with local communities to build climate-resilient green space and community infrastructure.

The full report also provides a bit more background on its provenance: The Early Years Climate Action Task Force is a group of early years leaders, climate leaders, researchers, medical professionals, parents, philanthropists, and others who came together to learn about the intersection of early childhood and climate change.

We learn that the task Force was co-convened by three groups:

Capita, an independent, nonpartisan think tank with a global focus. Its purpose is to build a future in which all children and families flourish.

This Is Planet Ed, an initiative of the Aspen Institute Energy & Environment Program that intends to unlock the power of education as a force for climate action, climate solutions, and environmental justice to empower the rising generation to lead a sustainable, resilient, and equitable future. This Is Planet Ed works across early years, K-12, higher education, and children’s media to build our societal capacity to advance climate solutions.

The Aspen Institute, a global nonprofit organization committed to realizing a free, just, and equitable society. Founded in 1949, the Institute drives change through dialogue, leadership, and action to help solve the most important challenges facing the United States and the world.

Please check it out! I can make the following promise, especially to my tribe, comprising meteorologists and Earth scientists of related stripe (and even many of my social-science colleagues working in climate-change and weather risk-comm and related fields). Clicking and scrolling through this material will provide a refreshing, positive take that’ll motivate you in your current efforts and open your eyes to additional possibilities for place-based collaborations.

A concluding thought. This early-child generation needs nurturing now, but soon will be spending its entire adulthood closing out the climate-change work today’s grownups have merely started. Since we’re counting on these youngsters, let’s not only protect them but also equip them. That last piece could and should be fleshed out a bit.

(For starters, I hope that all of you who read the previous LOTRW post on hazards will revisit that post and read John Plodinec’s thoughtful comments).

Here are just a few examples of articles published this past week that shed additional light on what’s involved in extending the NTSB-approach from commercial aviation to natural disasters.

Two come from the New York Times.  The first is entitled Years of Graft Doomed 2 Dams in Libya, Leaving Thousands in Muddy Graves. The article merits a careful read from start to finish. An excerpt:

For years, the two aging dams loomed in the mountains above the Libyan city of Derna, riddled with cracks and fissures, threatening the thousands of people living in the valley below.

A Turkish company, Arsel Construction, was eventually hired by the Libyan government to upgrade the dams and build a new one. The work, Arsel said on its website at the time, was completed in 2012.

By then, the government had paid millions of dollars to the Turkish contractor for preliminary work, according to a government assessment dated 2011. But Arsel left Libya in the turmoil of the 2011 popular revolt against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the country’s longtime dictator. Neither dam was ever repaired, the assessment said, and no third dam ever materialized.

When a lethal storm rolled up the Mediterranean Sea toward Derna two weeks ago, dumping far more rain than usual on the Green Mountains above the city, the dams burst. An avalanche of water boomed down into the valley below, driving much of Derna out to sea and killing at least 4,000 people. More than 8,000 others are still missing.

Why the dams went unfixed despite repeated warnings is key to understanding the muddy disaster that wrecked a storied city and traumatized a country. It also goes to the heart of the dysfunction and corruption that have consumed Libya ever since rebels overthrew Colonel el-Qaddafi.

This tale is not unique to Libya. Shoddy construction has also been blamed for much of the 43,000 lives lost in the recent Turkish earthquake. Nor is the problem confined to dams or to Africa and the Middle East; no nation is immune. Here at home recall the role of electrical power lines in triggering the 2018 Camp Fire resulting in the destruction of Paradise CA. Some have suggested a similar contributor to the more recent Lahaina fire. Recall that shoddy construction is in some sense a root problem, but it is also a symptom – of the high cost of building-in and maintaining resilience, and the long time scales that may be involved before a recurrence of a rare hazard allows a society to reap the return on its investment. As a result, shoddy construction isn’t always a matter of simple greed, but the result of a complex interplay of financial systems, equity, education, and more.

The second NYT article is a guest essay by Sarah Stodola entitled If Hurricane Rebuilding Is Only Affordable for the Wealthy, This Is the Florida You Get. She says this: When Hurricane Ian, the costliest storm in Florida’s history, made landfall nearly a year ago, a storm surge as high as 15 feet left the town of Fort Myers Beach nearly submerged for several hours.

Today, a drive across the island reveals countless properties recently cleared of debris selling for millions and even tens of millions of dollars. The rapid redevelopment of coastal communities like Fort Myers Beach in the face of sea level rise and more intense storms and hurricanes mirrors a phenomenon sweeping beachfronts around the world: upscaling, the practice of replacing old or more modest homes, condos and hotels with more expensive versions, largely thanks to the high cost of building up to new storm resistant codes, and the potentially uninsured risks associated with doing so.

Despite their intent to make coastal communities safer and more resilient, Florida’s building codes can actually complicate resilience efforts in the long term. Buildings constructed with concrete and other stiff materials represent a doubling down on Gulf Coast living as climate change makes Atlantic hurricanes more powerful, and more likely to hit that very coast. And taxpayers, along with the federal, state and local governments, must foot the bill to maintain structures on eroding beaches and flood-prone coasts.

And yet we could be making other plans for these communities. There are policies that would encourage people to move away from the coast, as well as new possibilities for movable and flexible structures.

Ms. Sodola surfaces issues and trends prevalent along the entirety of the US hurricane-prone coast. Engineering fixes are so expensive as to favor massive complexes that provide high economic returns. (It would be as if improving commercial aviation safety could be accomplished only by constructing bigger planes.)

A third article comes from USA Today, entitled Deadly disasters are ravaging school communities in growing numbers. Is there hope ahead? This excerpt frames the problem:

An increase of natural disasters from wildfires to floods to hurricanes to tornadoes – exacerbated by climate change – have ravaged America’s schools since students returned to in-person learning after the COVID-19 pandemic. And manmade disasters from lead in drinking water to asbestos in school buildings are playing a role.

This school year alone, devastating wildfires exacerbated by winds from Hurricane Dora ravaged one school and damaged three others in Maui. And winds from category three Hurricane Idalia destroyed the roof of an elementary school in Hoboken, Georgia. Kids attending schools without air conditioning were sent home at the beginning of the school year in Puerto Rico, Philadelphia and in other areas of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast because of extreme heat.

Last school year, torrential rains and damaging winds from Hurricane Fiona ravaged schools in Puerto Rico, schools closed in pockets of California after a bomb cyclone and Pacific storms caused flooding. A tornado in Whiteland, Indiana, dismantled internet connection for families across the region. Lead in drinking water Jackson schools closed campuses in the past few years more times than one teacher could recall in an interview with USA TODAY.

And old buildings that were found to be lined with asbestos led to closures of at least six campuses across Philadelphia – sending thousands of kids to cram into other occupied schools.

The focus is on schools, but study of disasters quickly reveals that building community-level resilience to hazards, unlike the aircraft case, is much more than a matter of changing a single component’s defective design or manufacture, or training pilots or air traffic controllers to deal with a novel scenario. The problems facing schools are mirrored in the vulnerabilities of hospitals, or electrical or financial infrastructure, or maintaining continuity of food and water delivery, etc. As a rule, disasters reveal vulnerabilities in each of these that the recovering communities must address simultaneously.

The human cost of failing to get this right is staggering. Consider this article from the Washington Post: What one motel tells us about survival in post-disaster America. To spend even the few minutes required to read this article is to experience anguish, sadness, survivor’s guilt – every known negative emotion. Actually living a full year, one minute at a time, under these circumstances has to be soul-crushing, even to the bravest and staunchest. Multiply by the number of El Rancho Motel residents; multiply that by the number of motels similarly filled with Ian survivors alone. Consider that this past year might not even be the halfway point for many if not most of them. Reflect that Lahaina survivors are even now only experiencing the earliest stages of this nightmare. Recognize that a full catalog of people who’ve never recovered normal lives following other US disasters of the past two decades would number in the thousands. Realize that virtually all these survivors are living in close daily contact with and in obvious contrast to others who were largely unaffected by the respective disasters – people who are complacent/oblivious to the survivors’ diminished circumstances and prospects. Recall further that most of the people who find themselves in these dire straits did not choose to live this way; they were constrained in their options by poverty, and their pre-existing poverty has been exacerbated by the hazard. It’s heartbreaking. And, at scale, it’s socially destabilizing.

The reality is that hundreds of millions of people live in hazardous areas – floodplain, seismically active areas, etc., where future risk is hardwired in – disaster is only a matter of time. Disaster prevention options available in the commercial aviation analog (e.g., simply grounding unsafe aircraft until modifications are made) are not available. Governments can’t demand, for example, that all residing in hazardous areas evacuate forthwith. Instead, we humans have to be more cautious and strategic about where we settle in the first place.  This morning’s NYT story, Flood Threats Are Rising. Here’s Where People Are Moving Into Harm’s Way, makes clear that quite the opposite is happening worldwide. As difficult as it is, governments and peoples should implement policies (blending incentives and proscriptive regulations governing land use, building codes, and infrastructure performance) This is the last point at which it is inexpensive and possible to build resilience to hazards and forestall future tragedy.

No place on a planet doing much of its business through extreme events can be entirely safe. But we can and should do better in where and how we choose to live and work.

This week’s print edition of The Economist includes an article entitled Uninsurable America. The subtitle reads, succinctly: Insurance is supposed to signal risk. Policymakers should let it. The article merits study in its entirety, but here are a few key excerpts:

For decades Americans have been moving to beautiful places that are vulnerable to extreme weather. Florida, once a swampy frontier, is now America’s third-most populous state. It is also the state most often hit by hurricanes. By 2015, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts boasted more than $13trn of real estate. Look West and the story is similar. Homes are proliferating in the wildland-urban interface, where nature and development anxiously coexist and wildfire season seems never to end…

…Those who enjoy the benefits of living in high-risk areas (such as a majestic ocean view) should shoulder the costs. However, both federal and state governments ensure that they do not, by subsidising or suppressing property insurance rates in such places. This has encouraged reckless building…

…Private insurers burned by huge payouts after disasters are abandoning risky markets such as Florida and California. Homeowners are turning to state-backed insurers of last resort, which offer less coverage for a higher price. When these plans cannot cover claims, taxpayers are often left with the bill.

The article concludes with this ominous forecast:

Eventually, … some Americans will need to move to keep safe from rising seas, roaring floods and fast-encroaching flames. … make no mistake: the longer politicians subsidise building in dangerous places, the worse the pain will be, and the bigger the final bill. 

The underlying reality here? Insurance per se merely redistributes risk; it doesn’t reduce it. Private insurers aren’t asking high premiums because of greed; they’re asking high premiums because they’ve calculated the true risk. State and federal governments can’t insure at lower rates because they’re more efficient. Instead, they’re merely gambling that their bad bets won’t be exposed any time soon. They’re encouraging their state residents, and others contemplating a move in, to live in a state of denial.

As individuals and as a nation, we can and should face this challenge more dutifully. And the United States can do better. We’ve proved it. Commercial aviation provides a singular success story. In the 1960’s, commercial aviation was already the safest way to travel; only one or two thousand people were dying in accidents each year. But those in the sector realized that aviation was about to take off; that in a few decades, air travel would quadruple, and if airline safety didn’t improve, that growth would imply a fatal commercial accident about once a week. Statistical safety or no, the optics would not look good to the traveling public. Government and the private sector joined forces to establish a National Transportation Safety Board to investigate accidents, discover causes, identify and implement fixes – basically instilling a culture of “this must never happen again.” Half a century later, even in the face of that fourfold travel increase, in most years U.S. carriers experience zero fatalities.  

In the same way, if property insurers can characterize wind, flood, fire, and other risks to individual homes, to communities, and to business sectors, that same information can and should be used to drive the search for prevention strategies – more intelligent land-use, more effective building codes, and more realistic public-policy governance and regulation. Surely, driving down risk, no matter how slowly, offers a much healthier, happier way to spend the next half-century than merely watching in dismay as suffering and losses mount.

When it comes to natural hazards, the emphasis should expand from a focus on saving lives per se. More accurate, timely hazards warnings are already increasingly effective in triggering evacuation and sheltering. But not enough is being done to ensure that those saved lives are worth living. The homelessness and joblessness resulting from many hazards devastates communities and ruins individual and family lives for decades, not just months or years. More than ten years after Katrina (2005), some survivors still experience post-traumatic stress. The 2020 Census shows the New Orleans population still down 100,000 from the 484,000 people who lived there in 2000. One 2023 report found many New Orleans homeowners still trying to put their finances back together following the disaster. Chronic health impacts can persist for decades. Hurricanes Hilary (west coast) and Idalia (east coast) took the headline attention off the Lahaina (Hawaii) fires, but survivors of all three of these events will still be picking up the pieces years from now, even as yet other disasters pile on, whittling away at the available relief funding and attention. More and more Americans will experience nightmarish loss. News- and social media will pour salt on those wounds, providing daily reminders of the contrast between the diminished circumstances and prospects for disaster survivors, versus those of the larger, thus-far unaffected American public.

Politicians get blamed for downplaying and subsidizing risk, and (for the associated inequities that favor the already well-to-do, at the expense of the poorest). Shame on them – maybe. But they’re operating in a democracy, and delivering only what the voting public demands and rewards. Politicians see that we don’t like to face facts and not just those associated with hazard risk. So, some politicians allow campaign rhetoric to degenerate to some form of looking us in the eye and saying “You’re living in a fantasy world… and I can keep the fantasy going four years longer than my opponent.” Any shame is therefore on us. We need to seek something more responsible from ourselves. Only then will our would-be leaders take notice and follow suit.

Living on the real world demands nothing less.

______________________________________

A closing thought. Meteorologists have a special opportunity to foster the needed social change. During the extended periods of calm that separate intermittent hazards and our life-saving warnings, we can be a voice for building societal resilience through land-use, building codes, and critical infrastructure protection – much as our dentists encourage us to floss and brush our teeth between visits.

At twenty years on, it’s once again time to revisit J.F. Rischard’s 2003 book, High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them. LOTRW provided an earlier look at the book on November 9, 2013, ten years after its publication.. Here’s that earlier text, reproduced in its entirety:

Speaking of books, in 2003 J. F. Rischard, then Vice President for Europe of the World Bank, and based in Paris, wrote and published High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them.

We’re halfway to his deadline. How are we doing? And how well is Mr. Rischard’s book standing the test of time?

Worth a look.

First some background on the book itself.  This CliffsNotes version won’t do the book justice. It merits a thoughtful, relaxed read in its entirety. But here’s the gist. Mr. Rischard notes two great trends: explosive population growth, especially in countries ill-equipped to handle it, and the globalization of the world’s economies. The first trend produces stresses. The second stresses us as well, but also creates opportunities. Mr. Rischard notes that government attempts worldwide to provide stability in the face of these trends instead of adapting to the changed circumstances have allowed a number of problems to fester and grow more urgent.

Mr. Rischard acknowledges that inventories of these problems are a subjective matter and might vary. Some people might see ten problems; others fifty. He offers a list of twenty, binned in three categories, nicely labeled:

(1) Sharing our planet. Global warming. Biodiversity and ecosystem losses. Fisheries depletion. Deforestation. Water deficits. Maritime safety and pollution.

(2) Sharing our humanity. Poverty. Peacekeeping. Education. Disease. The digital divide. Natural disaster mitigation.

(3) Sharing our rulebook. Consistent rules worldwide for: Taxation. Biotechnology. Financial architecture. Illegal drugs. Trade, investment and competition. Intellectual property rights. E-commerce. International labor and migration.

He next points out that we don’t have all the time in the world to solve these problems (hence the book title’s channeling of the 1952 Gary Cooper western film). Perhaps for some it’s as short as ten years. For others, it might be fifty. So, he says, let’s just say twenty. He argues that in nearly every case, the first five years are the most important and urgent. He then (rhetorically) asks: how many of us think that government, in any of various combinations – individual countries, the United Nations, the G-7, the European Union, etc. – are up to the job? He closes by suggesting the formation of what he calls global issues networks to deal with each. Each network would bring together governments, private enterprise, and academic expertise to tackle a problem. The idea is that experts from all three sectors will supply the best thinking, and that after a year or so of global brainstorming,  governments, whether singly and in combination, could start to take over the task of implementing the more practicable ideas. (This is evocative of something like an IPCC-process for each issue. Mr. Rischard himself , though referring to the IPCC in the global warming section, doesn’t make this connection, and you shouldn’t be put off by any baggage you happen to associate with the IPCC, unless and until you have read his full description, or have a better idea yourself to offer.)

The book wears well with age. Remarkably, it looks to be pretty much as fresh and insightful today as it did when first published. For example, the worldwide financial-sector meltdown of 2008 stemmed from concerns he identified under the section on financial architecture. Subsequent multi-lateral efforts to build in more margin and resilience into the financial sector exemplify the steps he’s suggesting. The same can be said for many if not all of the other nineteen issues. While the world hasn’t fully embraced Mr. Rischard’s prescription, we do see organizations of various stripes taking steps similar to what he’s proposing. I might be alone in this, but I actually see the IPCC process, with all its flaws, as a rousing success story.

What about actual progress? Are there any victories to be claimed? Well, it could be argued we’re making progress with respect to global poverty. But in most instances, we see a pattern of small, isolated victories, as well as a number of battles lost, and the outcome of the twenty “wars” still very much in the balance.

The bottom line for you and me? We could do worse than to read (or re-read) this book, make a connection to that piece of the puzzle where we have something to offer (there will be one or more for each of us), and then pitch in.

Oh, and did I mention that this book is a great read? A real page-turner? Mr. Rischard has a flair for clear exposition, and a magical way of keeping the arguments grounded, accessible, and compelling. Got an e-book or Kindle? Within minutes, you can reading his book over your weekend coffee. It’s crisp, engrossing… a quick read. You can be finished by Monday morning, and hit the workplace with a spring in your step and a renewed sense of purpose and understanding of your role in making the world a better place.

Back to the present day/some impressions.

Twenty years on, the book still feels fresh and relevant. If you’re keeping score, it would be fair to say that none of the twenty global problems has been “solved.” Hardly a surprise there. What’s more, while some progress has been made on most of the problems, the problems themselves have morphed over the two decades. Each today poses a bigger lift: looming larger, extending in scale, growing more complex, intersecting more strongly with the others. We’re falling behind.

Mr. Rischard might wish to tweak his thesis in some small ways. As for noting the role of “population growth, especially in the countries ill-equipped to handle it,” he might want to balance that with a few words on the subject of the aging of populations elsewhere (in Europe; in China, and in other countries seemingly equally “ill-equipped to handle it”). He might today give greater emphasis to “international labor and migration” (as both a problem and an opportunity). And today he might ponder the promise and the threats posed by artificial intelligence to his twenty global challenges.  

Perhaps most sobering at this 20-year mark is Mr. Rischard’s sense, dating from 2003, that the first five years of the twenty were the most critical. But it’s also important to note that Mr. Rischard was careful to say that “twenty years” wasn’t meant as a fundamental physical constant, but rather to denote a range of 10-50 years, say, and convey a sense of urgency.  But again, that’s before factoring in AI.

One area where Mr. Rischard seems most prescient – most insightful – is his choice of the notion of sharing as the organizing principle to cluster his twenty challenges into three bins. Ponder these again: Sharing our planet. Sharing our humanity. Sharing our rulebook. Grand. Visionary. Spot on.

And chilling. Perhaps if we had to name one virtue or trait that has nearly universally eluded us as individuals, as nations, and as a species, for virtually our entire experience spanning many millennia (not just some twenty-year interval), it would be sharing. We don’t share so well with others.

But suppose: if we were more gifted at sharing – if it were an innate part of our nature and culture, rather than something we accomplished only spasmodically, through strenuous effort, and for a special few people in our lives – perhaps each of those challenges that seem so insurmountable would fade away.

On its face, our struggle to share seems somewhat surprising. At a personal level, many if not most of us probably grew up hearing our parents exhorting us to share with our siblings. If we could perhaps hold that childhood thought and at the same time extend its circle of application, the world might quickly become a better place – perhaps even within the next twenty years. What’s the problem? Social scientists tell us that at its root is a scarcity- versus an abundance mindset.

Interested in how to shift from a scarcity to an abundance mindset? The internet has lost of advice to offer. An example, one of many:  a Forbes article from a few years ago lists five steps: (1) focus on what you have. (2) surround yourself with people that have an abundance mindset. (3) create win-win situations. (4) incorporate gratitude into your daily life. (5) train your mind to recognize the possibilities

Hmm. Simple, doable ideas that can be accomplished by each of the eight billion of us almost overnight. Cost-free. And look closely! These actions aren’t sacrificial; they are in our self interest while at the same time working toward the greater good. If even a fraction of us made this mindset change, we could see those twenty mountainous challenges turn into twenty global molehills before our very eyes.

All together now… share!

(Forgive this post – the idea came to me during last night’s bout with insomnia. And no shaming, please; we all suffer sleeplessness for our own reasons and cope in our own ways…)

Let’s suppose you unexpectedly find yourself at some Friday happy hour or on a Metro commute or through some other lucky coincidence with that someone-you-think-or-hope-just-might-be THE ONE. Let’s take a further leap and suppose that against the odds you’ve somehow made it past your usual, lame pickup line, or you rose to the occasion, because this might be THE ONE, and you actually wanted to get off to a meaningful start, and so you managed to say something authentic. So the conversation continues and hope still lives and the evening and perhaps your entire future are suddenly full of possibilities.  But it’s all still a bit fragile.

Then he/she/they ask what you do for work.

(I know, I know, you, or this other, are not necessarily supposed to open up this topic on a first date – you’re not supposed to make the conversation feel like just idle work chatter, etc., etc. Google leads you to a plethora of advice on why this topic might be a bad idea. But this isn’t a date; it’s a first encounter. And it’s the 21^st century, everybody has to work, it’s Washington DC [or some other city], so there it is.)

Now if you’re a meteorologist, the best, wisest, only thing to say, is “I’m a meteorologist, and I work for (fill in the name of the federal agency, or corporation, or university, or NGO),” and then hold your breath. If this person is THE ONE; he/she/they will have a great follow-up. (Full disclosure, I met and married THE ONE a long time ago, so this work question has been low-stakes for the past half-century. Today I usually answer the question with another question: “You may have noticed that sometimes your weather forecast is wrong?” Just about everybody provides a snarky response – some variation of “sometimes?” And then I tell them my job was to help make weather forecasts better…)

But if you’re a meteorologist, and it’s the middle of the night, and you’ve recently written a blogpost touching on the need for international data sharing, your restless, tossing-turning brain might have a “what-if?” stream of thought like this:

Suppose you ask someone what it is they do, and they say “I’m a doctor.” That’s interesting in a certain way, and brings to mind a whole bunch of follow-up questions. But if they say, I’m a doctor, and I work for Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), that’s INTERESTING – at an entirely different level. You know they practice medicine (with all the expertise and training and experience that implies), but there’s more; they bring medical humanitarian assistance to victims of conflict, natural disasters, epidemics or healthcare exclusion. For them it’s not about the money; it’s about reducing human suffering, making the world a better place, and all the rest. That’s special. You want to know more.

But (continuing the middle-of-the-night line of thought), if you think about it, ALL meteorologists are interesting in that additional, special way. To say “meteorologists-without-borders” is actually to be redundant. There’s no other kind! The atmosphere is no respecter of political boundaries, and its study and prediction require corresponding perspective. And meteorology is not the pathway to great wealth. It’s about making people safer, healthier, more secure. So every meteorologist is a “Meteorologue sans Frontieres.” And here’s the thing. Many non-meteorologists will fail to see that connection. The label will likely conjure up images of broadcasters, or (less-likely), a forecaster in a National Weather Service office, or (less-likely still), a researcher. Those impressions are okay as far as they go. But they don’t really capture the intrinsic humanitarian part. If we don’t convey that, as individuals, and as a community, then we’ve seriously sold ourselves short.

Truth be told, even we meteorologists, of whatever stripe, can struggle ourselves to maintain that fuller, more profound vision. The urgency of the broadcast job, with the constant updates, the struggle to refresh the social media feeds, the concerns with ratings; the government forecast job, with its shift work, public services, and engagement with emergency managers and other partners; the research job, with its publish-or-perish pressures – all these tend to move our higher calling into the background.

Today’s invitation, then, is for each of us to keep that higher calling front and center – and draw inspiration, courage, and satisfaction from it. Thanks to each of you for your humanitarian work.

Historically, monitoring weather and issuing weather forecasts and warnings has been the province of governments. But recently, both the incentives and the means for anticipating and coping with chaotic weather are growing in scope and variety. And so are the ways and extent to which unfavorable weather can disrupt today’s society. This conjunction of technological advance, changing societal vulnerability, and higher economic stakes has triggered and nurtured the emergence of private weather services. These for-profit services are at one and the same time (1) dependent upon-, (2) supplementing-, and (3) competing with government weather services.  

Recent articles, published in two quite different publications, spotlight these trends. Perhaps surprisingly, the one, The Economist, a major news magazine reporting world events as seen through an economic lens, focuses on the emerging scientific and technical opportunity. The second, EOS, an in-house publication of the American Geophysical Union, a scientific society, draws attention instead to the broader public-policy challenges raised by the partial privatization of what once was considered a public good. This man-bites-dog aspect of the two articles makes for interesting reading, even as it reveals a truth: weather, though never a mere backdrop to global affairs, has moved from side- to center stage in 2023. For example, this summer, the isolated episodes of oppressive heat seen in years past have given way to a constant heat burden at levels compromising human health across the entire northern hemisphere. Accompanying wildfires span the globe. The usual strains on energy infrastructure (the occasional brownout in the face of air-conditioning energy demand) and agriculture (localized crop failures) have morphed into worrisome disruptions (e.g., the role of the electrical grid failure in the Lahaina fire and threatened bankruptcy of the power providers at fault).

A few highlights from the articles (which each merit a fuller read):

The science and technology section of the July 29^th print edition of The Economist takes as its point of departure the recent spate of particularly-long-lived heat waves characterizing the northern hemisphere warm season, observing that the intensity, extent, and duration of these had been rather well forecast. It notes that today’s five-day weather forecast is about as accurate as a two-day forecast twenty-five years ago, in large part because of improved spatial resolution and small time-steps in today’s numerical weather-prediction models. It acknowledges the existence of fundamental limits to atmospheric predictability, citing the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) estimates that numerical forecasting might achieve something near this theoretical limit around 2050. The article then segues into a look at short-time-horizon, local- and regional forecasts; the economic value of these to weather-sensitive businesses, and financial sectors such as energy trading; and the accompanying rise of for-profit weather companies to meet these demands. It notes that the private-sector in some cases is downscaling government products, and in others is running its own local- and regional models and supplementing government observations with its own tailored observing networks. The article closes with a look ahead to the possibilities that artificial intelligence (AI) will offer. These range from computationally cheap and quick AI alternatives to conventional numerical weather forecasts, to improved ability to tease out the resulting impacts on societies, and on economies, at both macro- and micro levels. AI influence will extend from the short-term, localized weather predictions across the full spectrum to forecasts of global climate trends.

Along the way, The Economist takes note of an elephant in the room: does privatization benefit the rich nations (and their corporations) at the expense of the poor? A bit of the text:

Private players insist their participation is beneficial for everyone. There are far more weather stations in rich countries than poor ones (see map). “Outside of America, western Europe, Japan and Australia, and a couple of other countries, national meteorological services are lagging decades behind,” says Rei Goffer, one of Tomorrow.io’s founders. Some rich-country agencies help other countries—the Met Office, for example, works with the governments of India, South Africa and several South-East Asian countries. Even so, Mr Goffer argues, many countries simply cannot afford the sort of good-quality forecasting that might help them adapt to a changing climate. Tomorrow.io’s satellites aim to allow countries access to better weather infrastructure without having to build it from scratch.

Hmm. This brings us to:

The July EOS article, written by Bill Morris, a science writer. He provides a concise history of international cooperation in meteorology. That narrative begins by establishing the long-understood reality that meteorology/forecasting is an inherently cooperative activity, requiring that countries and peoples share their weather data. It then focuses on the WMO, and its antecedent, the International Meteorological Organization. Historically, the WMO has been the primary vehicle for accomplishing this sharing. The article’s title notes that The WMO weathered the Cold War, then asks: But can it survive capitalism?

Morris focuses on a pivotal period in this history:

WMO may have faced its greatest challenge in the 1980s, as market-oriented, conservative governments, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, put pressure on their meteorological services to recoup some of the considerable costs of gathering weather data by charging for them. This pressure coincided with the rise of private forecasting services like AccuWeather and the Weather Channel, which package government weather data for popular consumption on apps, television, and websites.

Neil Gordon was New Zealand’s representative to WMO during this period. “What was happening,” he said, “was observations from, say, France were going on international circuits into the United States to be used and ingested into weather models.… [Those data] would then go to companies like AccuWeather, who would then provide services back into France. And France was very unhappy about it. There was a risk that they would no longer send their data to the States.”

“We almost got to the point where data exchange was being shut off,” Gordon recalled.

Morris recounts a dramatic set of sessions at the Twelfth World Meteorological Congress in 1995 that produced Resolution 40, which formally acknowledged that essential meteorological data were necessary for protection of life and property and affirmed WMO commitment to the continuing free and open international sharing of such data.

Resolution 40 has held sway for some twenty years; the formal and informal WMO community has feared that to revisit it would risk its collapse. But here’s the rub. Over the ensuing decades, the capabilities and role of the private sector in providing weather services has continued to expand. This has led to a corresponding erosion of the former degree of government control. That’s because governments can proscribe private issuance of emergency warnings to the public, but they can’t insist that companies freely share any privately-obtained observations and the privately funded numerical forecasts. So far, public-private-sector cooperation continues to be the order of the day, but it’s informal, subject to change with little notice, and consists of a hodge-podge of arrangements, some involving free sharing of data, and some involving fee payment and restriction on its downstream use. In poorer countries, budget-constrained governments are tempted to rely on whatever weather information is freely available (for now) on the internet, rather than undergo the expense and effort of maintaining in-country data sets, climate records, and national weather services.

Along the way, it’s become increasingly clear the value proposition for international sharing of weather data is greatly enhanced  if oceanographic and hydrologic data are shared internationally as well. Ocean data are needed for predictions of storm surge, tracking and prediction of harmful algal blooms, and predictions of seasonal to interannual, decadal, and longer-term climate trends, and much more. Hydrologic data can be combined with precipitation forecasts to anticipate riverine flooding, and conversely, low water levels, etc. But there exists no strong tradition of data sharing in these communities.

Which brings us back to that room-filling elephant:

Both articles make it clear that international data sharing is essential to achieving the needed weather forecasts and climate outlooks. But they stop short of addressing what’s needed if rich and poor nations alike are to fully share in the benefits of such information. In particular, mere sharing of weather forecasts per se stops short of what is needed. Harnessing the value of those forecasts depends upon additional information decision support for weather-sensitive economic sectors (agriculture, energy, transportation, water resource-management, etc.), for the financial community (e.g., investors and insurers). Such decision support is a given in wealthy nations; in the rest of the world, not so much. Thus, as matters now stand, it’s likely the wealthy benefit far more from weather information coming from poorer, more-remote corners of the world than do the peoples native to those regions. The current disparity is puts cooperation on shaky grounds at best. Only if the benefits of data sharing are themselves shared fairly can collaboration be sustained. More worrisome, if left unaddressed, the current gap in benefits to haves- and have-nots will widen as artificial intelligence comes into play. Nations of the world would do well to address all this sooner rather than later (presumably, under auspices of the WMO).

“Gravity: it isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law.” – Adam Savage

“Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.” – Will Durant

And that word is – wait for it – Geocivics.

With apologies, today’s continuation of the recent LOTRW focus on K-12 education begins with more than the usual amount of background.

Start with a definition. Wikipedia provides this articulation: “Civics is the study of the rights and obligations of citizens in society. The term derives from the Latin word civicus, meaning “relating to a citizen”. The term relates to behavior affecting other citizens, particularly in the context of urban development.” 

Civics has been with us a long time. That same Wikipedia source provides this quote, dating back to ancient Sparta and ascribed to Archidamus II (died 427/6 BC, one of the city-state’s kings):

And we are wise, because we are educated with too little learning to despise the laws, and with too severe a self-control to disobey them, and are brought up not to be too knowing in useless matters—such as the knowledge which can give a specious criticism of an enemy’s plans in theory, but fails to assail them with equal success in practice—but are taught to consider that the schemes of our enemies are not dissimilar to our own, and that the freaks of chance are not determinable by calculation. In practice we always base our preparations against an enemy on the assumption that his plans are good; indeed, it is right to rest our hopes not on a belief in his blunders, but on the soundness of our provisions. Nor ought we to believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school[1].

And still focuses minds today. A few years ago, Rebecca Winthrop of Brookings provided an insightful articulation of the worsening state of and the need for civics education in 21^st century schools. To whet your appetite for her fuller analysis, here’s material from her executive summary:

Americans’ participation in civic life is essential to sustaining our democratic form of government. Without it, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not last. Of increasing concern to many is the declining levels of civic engagement across the country, a trend that started several decades ago. Today, we see evidence of this in the limited civic knowledge of the American public, 1 in 4 of whom, according to a 2016 survey led by Annenberg Public Policy Center, are unable to name the three branches of government. It is not only knowledge about how the government works that is lacking— confidence in our leadership is also extremely low. According to the Pew Research Center, which tracks public trust in government, as of March 2019, only an unnerving 17 percent trust the government in Washington to do the right thing. We also see this lack of engagement in civic behaviors, with Americans’ reduced participation in community organizations and lackluster participation in elections, especially among young voters.

Many reasons undoubtedly contribute to this decline in civic engagement: from political dysfunction to an actively polarized media to the growing mobility of Americans and even the technological transformation of leisure, as posited by Robert D. Putnam. Of particular concern is the rise of what Matthew N. Atwell, John Bridgeland, and Peter Levine call “civic deserts,” namely places where there are few to no opportunities for people to “meet, discuss issues, or address problems.” They estimate that 60 percent of all rural youth live in civic deserts along with 30 percent of urban and suburban Americans. Given the decline of participation in religious organizations and unions, which a large proportion of Americans consistently engaged in over the course of the 20th century, it is clear that new forms of civic networks are needed in communities.

Winthrop goes on to make the case for the role of schools. A sample of her thinking:

As one of the few social institutions present in virtually every community across America, schools can and should play an important role in catalyzing increased civic engagement. They can do this by helping young people develop and practice the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors needed to participate in civic life. Schools can also directly provide opportunities for civic engagement as a local institution that can connect young and old people alike across the community. To do this, civic learning needs to be part and parcel of the current movement across many schools in America to equip young people with 21st-century skills. To date however, civic education experts argue that civic learning is on the margins of young people’s school experience. The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education examined the status of civic education and found that while reading and math scores have improved in recent years, there has not been the commensurate increase in eighth grade civics knowledge. While 42 states and the District of Columbia require at least one course related to civics, few states prioritize the range of strategies, such as service learning which is only included in the standards for 11 states, that is required for an effective civic education experience. The study also found that high school social studies teachers are some of the least supported teachers in schools and report teaching larger numbers of students and taking on more non-teaching responsibilities like coaching school sports than other teachers. Student experience reinforces this view that civic learning is not a central concern of schools. Seventy percent of 12th graders say they have never written a letter to give an opinion or solve a problem and 30 percent say they have never taken part in a debate—all important parts of a quality civic learning.

Which brings us to today’s main idea. In these writings, bracketing more than two millennia, we see civics defined as the study of the rights and obligations of citizens in society. In this view, society is the platform of interest. The rights (think life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for example) and the obligations are considered in this context alone. Even with this constraint, the complexities are daunting – the subject of continuing examination, interpretation, and vigorous, even violent debate. Questions of ethics and morality quickly arise; considerations of so-called natural law (think, for example, the Golden Rule) and (for some) God’s law can come into play.

What’s missing? Explicit incorporation of a different set of natural laws. Truth is, civics is lived out on a finite planet: a planet with generous but limited natural resources; a planet featuring fierce extremes of flood and drought, earthquakes, volcanism, and more; and a planet that at the same time is proving troublingly fragile – easily and sometimes irrevocably damaged by societal actions and decisions, however well-intended. History provides examples of civilization decline resulting from societal failure to account for environmental realities. To list a few: Mesopotomia struggled to cope with the soil salination resulting from irrigation. Here in the United States, the Anasazi people and other contemporaneous cultures wilted under the pressures of the so-called Great Drought. Just as covid has rocked today’s world, the Great Plague of Athens (40 B.C.) damaged Greek fortunes and changed the course of world history. Climate change and pandemics emphasize that the scale of today’s geo-civics is truly global.

Citizens of ancient Sparta might be forgiven for overlooking the role of nature in human affairs, but not the societies of today. Perhaps the 21^st-century preoccupation ought to be Geocivics – the study of the rights and obligations of citizens in society on a generous-but-finite, dangerous-but-fragile Earth.

Integrate the study of civics and the geosciences in public schools? Natural for educators see this idea as cringeworthy. (Our communities are already upset with us, Bill. And these two topics are each controversial in and of themselves. Combine them? Yeah, right. What could possibly go wrong?)

But the Earth is emotionally detached, unmoved by any consideration of love, or hate, or rights, or responsibilities. Any beneficence or malfeasance of human beings the planet accepts without question. It doesn’t judge. In response, the planet simply does “what it’s gotta do.” It obeys laws of motion, conservation of energy, entropy imperatives and the like. No amount of human intervention can stay the drought or the flood, the cold spell or the heat wave. Yet civics can change the societal outcomes – reducing the death, injury, property loss, economic disruption, environmental degradation. And civics can accomplish this most effectively when it incorporates geoscience. Earth’s inexorable response to human actions and ability to dominate human affairs just might focus minds, shift attention from squabbling over abstractions to common search for coping strategies.

It is likely too much to expect that this sobering terrestrial context would dampen or civilize (there’s that root word again) the disagreements that polarize nations and peoples in any short term. But it would take the educational high ground: realism. It would put the emphasis on the needed societal actions. Over time, it might drive us to pay more attention to our sacred responsibilities to others and to our planetary habitation. It might renew interest in civics more broadly. By such means, it might improve the prospects of our children and grandchildren. Which brings to mind a closing quote:

“The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.” – Zeno of Citium

1. [1]  Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, Chapter III. Translated by Richard Crawley. Project Gutenberg.

“For the sake of ten year’s benefit, we must plant trees. For the sake of a hundred years’ benefit, we must cultivate the people.” – Ho Chi Minh

Today’s K-12 schoolkids worldwide will be coping with climate change and its impacts throughout their adult lives. Some will make such work their career. How effectively they are schooled, and how adeptly they apply their schooling to the task of planetary stewardship, will determine humanity’s future every bit as much as will the skills, decisions, and actions of the adult workforce currently in place.

Which raises the question: is the global “Educational Enterprise” – comprising the teachers, the school administrators, and the global mix of national and local governing policy frameworks – up to the climate-change challenge? Will the current generation’s youth leave school adequately equipped and motivated?[1]

Recent LOTRW posts have reflected on the situation domestically, here in the United States. Experts seem to agree that US K-12 climate science education could stand improvement. But the US makes up only some 4% of the world’s population. What’s the condition of K-12 (or equivalent) education worldwide? The state of climate-change education in particular?

Unsurprisingly, it turns out the international state of affairs is no better[2]. Perhaps three-quarters of a billion people worldwide are illiterate. Gender inequality in education, though falling, persists. Teacher qualifications are minimal. In many countries, teacher absenteeism is even a significant problem. Worse still, in these countries, teachers, even when physically present in the classroom, may not actually be teaching.

Surveys find that school-age children think climate change is a serious problem and that children are frustrated by their inability to understand the problem or explain it to others. And most countries pay some attention to climate-change education, many even making it mandatory. However, at the classroom level, teachers feel untrained and under-resourced with respect to the issue; in practice, it often remains untaught. And educational emphasis can vary significantly from nation to nation. Some countries, e.g., China, downplay attention to needed national policy change versus exhortations for individual reductions of carbon footprints.

All these shortcomings were exacerbated by the covid pandemic. Not all school systems remained open. Many went virtual, or closed entirely. Rapidly kluged virtual-education performance was mixed at best, and access limited to the well-off. Student test scores took a knock; return to pre-covid performance remains slow. This recent history bodes poorly for the needed climate-change education.

The needed improvements in climate change education can’t be addressed and resolved internally, within the Educational Enterprise. They arise from larger societal attitudes and policies towards education at national- and local levels[3]. Two policy realities stand out. First, there’s the underinvestment in K-12 education generally. Teacher salaries are poor. And school facilities are too often rundown and under-resourced; teachers too often lack the tools they need. Anyone with the needed subject-matter expertise and desire and aptitude for teaching can be paid far more and endure less frustration in other lines of work.

Second, societies worldwide are leaving problems that should be addressed elsewhere – poverty, security and safety, children’s physical and mental health, and much more – on the doorsteps of the schools. Teachers are expected to shoulder what amount to additional unfunded mandates at the same time they increasingly face conflicting and even vehement community guidance and constraints on what should be taught and how.

Climate change science education is vulnerable to all these threats. Societies remain polarized with respect to the issue of climate change and what to do about it. But the focus – and the heat – of public debate has moved on, to controversies on gender, racism, inclusion, equity; immigration, drugs, guns; and the like. At the same time, recent weather extremes such as cycles of flood and drought, waves of heat and cold have intensified; they’ve graduated from background disturbance to visible disruption. These realities have sharpened minds. Here in the United States, for example, recent Congressional legislation has increased investments in renewable energy and other infrastructure. This has linked the climate change issue to job creation and thus motivates improved education.

The moment offers opportunity to scientific and professional societies such as the AMS (which has long made K-12 education in weather, water, and climate topics a priority, offering a variety of resources to educators and students). The increased breadth in interest in the topic should portend an expanded range of possible funding sources for support of AMS educational work, not just in the United States, but abroad. To the extent AMS educational initiatives integrate use of AI into the content and materials (along lines advocated, say, by Sal Kahn), they will find wider application and greater demand not just domestically but internationally.

(A final aside: Annually, the United States government spends about $50 billion in economic and military assistance to foreign countries. Of this total, some $40 billion dollars is designated for economic assistance – including about $25 billion dispersed by USAID. A little over $1B/year is targeted at educational assistance – clearly an important investment in the world’s future, viewed in light of the issues raised here.)

Time to cultivate the people!

[1] For the small minority entering directly-climate-change-related fields professionally, ”equipping” means the basics of science and mathematics. The majority of young people who will go on to careers in other fields will also need an awareness and understanding of climate-change issues that can guide and sustain political support for climate-change action at national and international levels.

[2] This matters. A World-Bank blogpost makes a persuasive call for better education, citing a Pew Research Center survey suggesting that people with more education tend to be more concerned about climate change.

[3] For example, a UNICEF study notes the many ways climate change education in India is affected by and intersects with conditions in the larger society.

In the mists of “ancient history” (as defined by Gen Z or Generation Alpha, that might be the 1980’s or a bit earlier), Dick Hallgren, who directed the National Weather Service at the time, was fond of saying that the United States faced a greater set of weather hazards than any nation in the world. We had as many tropical storms making landfall as the other low-latitude countries. Our winter storms rivaled those of Russia and Canada. Our vast land, with its thousands of watersheds, was always facing the woes of drought and flood at any given time. The United States, alone among nations, had a monopoly on the world’s tornadoes – especially the severe ones. And so on.

But in the few decades since, the U.S. weather threat has been turned on its head. On the summer morning I started writing this, warnings spoke to severe weather of a different sort: enduring, stultifying heat over much of the South, and dangerously high levels of air pollution spanning the Midwest, Northeast, and Middle Atlantic States – the latter a result not of any local weather conditions but rather the result of downwind airflow from Canadian wildfires hundreds of miles distant.  And those severe thunderstorms that have always been the hallmark US warm-season threat to life and property? They’re now prayed-for as possible saviors – breaking up the weather patterns maintaining the heat and bad air.

Whoa!

A lot to wrap our minds around. Really calls for a limber mind. But maybe we’ve seen this all before, just in different context. This kind of thing is nothing new to gamers, who constantly reframe their thinking as they master successively more challenging video game levels and move from one to the next. Real-world living has much in common with their virtual reality.

In effect, all of us, whether or not we identify as gamers, have willy-nilly moved to Earth Reality’s Next Level. Today’s pace of Earth’s Reality Game is faster, and the stakes higher, than a century or even a few decades ago. Much more is demanded of national and individual players to survive, let alone prosper. For starters, we find ourselves in an environment where the cycles of storm- and quiet and larger patterns of flood and drought are substantially more intense than those familiar from recent memory (think last winter’s epic snowfalls across California and the long-term threat to the Colorado River’s water allocations compared with historic norms).

Fact is, weather is only one facet of Earth’s Reality Game 21^st-century level. Urbanization and dependence on critical infrastructure have changed human vulnerability to natural hazards. As populations and resource-use per capita have increased, so have the scale and dimensions of human environmental impacts. Fossil fuel consumption is changing climate. Drawdown of underground aquifers is detectably changing the Earth’s spin. Mining and processing of lithium and other rare-earths needed to make the global switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy pose their own environmental risks.

Earth’s Reality Game 21^st-century level itself is only one component of an even-more-daunting 21^st-Century Reality Game. That meta-game adds additional challenges: pandemics, war, immigration, and more. That’s the set of problems we must solve simultaneously in order to live and prosper on today’s real world

Fortunately Gen Z and Generation Alpha are gamers – their young, pliable brains are daily being hardwired with a gamer mentality. The active play is not the whole story. Gaming is woven through the fabric of their young lives:

“…younger generations show notable differences from older generations when it comes to engagement with gaming. Not only do they invest more leisure time, but they are also more likely to spend money on games and engage with gaming in many diverse ways outside of playing. Gaming has become part of their everyday lives as they also look to games for many other reasons.”

There are two more pieces of good news. The first is that these same young people are also increasingly AI-savvy. Secondly, they’ll be the backbone of the workforce tasked with solving the 21^st-century’s challenges (the Internet offers myriad perspectives; here’s one from an Indian source). They’ll bring to bear tomorrow’s tools to solve tomorrow’s problems.

The task remaining for the rest of us is to do what we can to encourage some fraction of these younger generations to use their skills and tools to work on natural resource-, hazard resilience-, and environmental dilemmas. That’s going to happen only if K-12 public education embraces AI.

Don’t take my word for it. This past May, Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, gave a TED Talk entitled How AI could save (not destroy) education.  In fifteen minutes, he provided an inspiring view of how this could be achieved and why we should care.

What are we waiting for? Ready Player One…[1]

[1]You probably recognize this as the title of the Spielberg movie, based on the Ernest Cline book. But where did the title come from? We’re told The title Ready Player One was inspired by old, classic arcade games. When you used to put your quarter into an old arcade game it would often say, ‘Ready, player one,’ and that was kind of the last thing that you would see before you were immersed in this two-dimensional world of the video game.

Two weeks later, still wrapping my head around that initial LOTRW “interview” with a simple AI chatbot^[1].

Some impressions, beginning with the general but then focusing on climate-change science education:

Regarding the big picture, in the case of generative-AI, the expression “game-changer” comes to mind. For me personally, the enthusiasm and sense of wonder evoke memories of several other transitional moments in the same evolutionary tree: switching from handwriting and typing to word processing; from hand-drawn transparencies for professional presentations to powerpoint; substituting library-and book-based study to largely-online search, enabled by search engines (eventually and most notably Google). Each of these arguably made me more productive and effective, but also changed the direction of my work and thought. AI promises to do the same (most likely, for both better and worse).

As in those instances, I recognize I’ll never begin to master this new technology but will only harness the  merest fraction of its capabilities. I also dimly grasp that even that level of effort will require a significant reconfiguring of my brain and the way I operate.

Such overhaul isn’t getting any easier with age! A recent Economist article on aging demographics worldwide (in the print edition ominously entitled The Old and the Zestless, and worth reading in its entirety) notes that “Younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, meaning the ability to solve new problems and engage with new ideas. Older people have more “crystallised intelligence”—a stock of knowledge about how things work built up over time.”  But the potential rewards make it worth the effort and dwarf any attendant personal risks. After all, the Roman Cato undertook to learn Greek when he was eighty, and when asked about it supposedly replied it was the only age he had left.

The vanilla-flavor of the current AI-answers leaves no doubt as to their robotic DNA. But today’s rudimentary capability is destined to grow more powerful with time – “learning” to handle and respond to more comprehensive queries on more complex matters. The future clearly belongs to societies, nations, private- and public-sector institutions, and individuals most adept at harnessing AI’s benefits while mitigating its risks. The power of AI and its potential for disruption worldwide could mean the reworking of every aspect of global society – realignment of geopolitics, economies, institutions, and all the way down to personal prospects.

In such a future, information technology poses the two greatest challenges/opportunities for American K-12 public education: (1) preparing young people for careers/lifetimes in an IT/AI-dominated world; (2) harnessing IT/AI to accelerate and augment learning in every discipline.

But here’s the thing: it’s not just that we don’t want to miss such a singular upside opportunity. America’s students succumb daily to IT’s downside risks. On average, today’s teenagers spend almost 9 hours a day online. They’re enticed into the seductive virtual world of gaming, with its absorbing pleasures and near-instant gratification. Their curiosity takes them down countless labyrinthine internet rabbit holes. Social media can transport them to ecstasy and or plunge them into the depths of despair depending on the latest posts from their peers. Each key click can distract them – loosen their focus on the pressing and near-intransigent real-world problems – inequity, poverty, polarization, and yes, climate change – that their generation must address. Taken as a whole, these attributes constitute a mental health threat to the young.

And all this before we get to artificial intelligence (AI) – which looks set to take IT’s pull to an entirely new level. Perhaps most worrisome, the people who know the most about AI seem to be the wariest, even the most alarmed, about where AI may take us. We haven’t seen this level of angst from scientists and engineers since Robert Oppenheimer and his crowd fretted about the development and use of atomic weapons in World War II.

Unsurprisingly, the Educational Enterprise sees reason to fear. But attempts to ban AI from the classroom are unlikely to bring teachers any joy (references to King Canute and the tide come to mind). Perhaps, then, it’s worth exploring the opposite approach.

Which brings us to the climate-change bits. Let’s imagine, for example, that in the classroom of the future pupils will be expected to demonstrate ability to use IT and AI in the same way that students in the past were expected to be facile with reading, writing, and arithmetic. In such a world a science-class module on climate change could ask students to submit capstone individual reports along lines notionally like the following:

• What are the causes and signs of climate change in our local area? What is the future outlook?
• What are the present and possible future impacts of those changes on our community?
• What coping strategies might be necessary? Doable? or desirable?
• Which do you favor and why?
• Explain how you used IT/AI to develop your report and inform your conclusions.
• (for extra credit) where would a bit more understanding of climate science and climate impacts be helpful? ^[2]

I tried out these questions on ChatBox, using a ham-fisted, simple approach, particularizing them to three counties: Fairfax County in the DC suburbs, where I live today; Boulder County in Colorado, where I worked for twenty years; and Franklin County in rural Tennessee where I lived as a child between 3-8 years of age. Generally, the AI answers seemed factual, nicely organized, coherent, and crisp — providing a useful portal to further study. The exception, unsurprisingly, was Franklin County. But when I substituted the University of the South (where my father had taught mathematics) that is situated there, material turned up.

For a young technology, the AI performed well.

Seductively so. The results were so clearly and simply expressed and so polished that it was easy for me to take them at face value versus question them or build on them to realize deeper insight. And (forgive the snarky comment) in some ways they call to mind Captain Obvious. (I’ve subsequently asked AI for self-criticism — to characterize the shortcomings in its answers. It gives bland acknowledgments of its limitations but then occasionally confesses additional bits of useful detail.)

Three closing thoughts. First, climate-change science was once (and still is) considered a controversial, polarizing issue. From time to time, individuals and groups, even some state governments, have made efforts to keep it out of the classroom. Today there’s more controversy in the classroom than ever. But the battleground has shifted to other, more visceral topics. Climate-change science looks tame by comparison – it’s losing its power to inflame minds.  Ironically, it may prove over time to be relatively “safe-place” to test and develop new educational ideas.

Secondly, in the future AI-enabled world, the educational challenge is not how to exclude IT/AI from tainting the educational process, but rather how to ensure that students from every income class and social circumstance have equal access to the tools they’ll need to master for their future lives and careers. A tough nut to crack. In the old days, I’d have just thrown up my hands. But today, I asked my long-time search-engine buddy

How can we make the world more fair?

Got this answer: You can help ensure everyone has access to education, health care, housing, and other basic needs. You can also help vulnerable people worldwide by working on issues like climate change or gender equality, or refugee rights, which came from a single link.

My new friend ChatBox, true to form, was more voluble (again, quoting verbatim):

As an AI language model, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, but here are some ways that people can work towards making the world more fair:

1. Education: Providing access to education for all individuals, regardless of their socioeconomic status, can help level the playing field and provide opportunities for people to improve their lives.

2. Economic equality: Addressing income inequality and ensuring that everyone has access to basic necessities such as food, shelter, and healthcare can help reduce poverty and create a more fair society.

3. Social justice: Addressing systemic issues such as racism, sexism, and discrimination can help create a more just and equitable society.

4. Political reform: Ensuring that political systems are fair and transparent can help prevent corruption and ensure that everyone’s voice is heard.

5. Environmental sustainability: Addressing climate change and protecting the environment can help ensure that future generations have access to the same resources and opportunities as we do today.

Hmm. Well said… and interesting, given that I made no mention of climate change, that it saw fit to bring in that dimension.

Returning to The Economist article quoted above for the final word:

…Technology can also provide ways to cope with demographic change, from telemedicine to the increased use of robots in service industries. Such innovations can undoubtedly ease the difficulties presented by an ageing society, whether by directly contributing to the care of the elderly or by automating the roles of young workers. But the shrinking number of innovative young thinkers will, ironically, reduce the number of such valuable new ideas.

A shortfall in human innovation may also be less damaging if offset by new ideas conceived by artificial intelligence. There seems no doubt that machines will soon be working out how to make incremental improvements in existing processes—indeed, in some spheres, they already are. Whether machines will ever learn how to generate disruptive new ideas, however, remains a matter of debate…

[1]First, a point of clarification. The quoted ChatBox material was just that: actual, verbatim, unedited responses from the app. I didn’t ghostwrite them, contrary to some reader feedback suggesting otherwise. (That feedback hints at something vaguely disturbing about my writing style, or lack thereof; pretty sure I don’t want to go there…)

[2]Teachers might well ask: what about the stupefying task of grading/evaluating the individual student outputs? In the imagined future here, teachers would solve that problem of tomorrow using tomorrow’s tools; they wouldn’t be limited to the tools of today. They would presumably enjoy commensurate AI/IT assistance in monitoring the students’ work – for example, extensions of the kinds of tools used currently and under development to enable flipped learning. Roles and expectations would be different; teachers will likely be less needed as the-sage-on-the-stage and more the-guide-on-the-side.