When media muddy the waters

Last night, I caught the last half of 20/20's special "The Last Days of Earth." Much of what they said was pretty accurate, albeit seriously lacking in depth, detail, and source citation. The problem I have with the show, however, is that even I as a layman could see some things they said (or, more often showed) did not help the cause of good science.

If you didn't see it, you can probably guess what it was about by the title and the fact I'm writing about it on this blog -- various forms of apocalypse. They looked at seven, but I can't remember them all and only caught the last four: asteroids, nuclear war, global pandemic, and climate change, ranking the last as the most serious threat.

Common sense says all of those things are in fact real threats; but I'm not sure I'd give them the same order. To me, the most serious in terms of what it can ultimately do to humanity and nature is nuclear war, because, in a very real sense, it combines many of the effects of the other three. The combination of megadeaths plus long-term radiation plus a massive smoke pall plus other "synergies" would very likely destroy human civilization for a very long time and cause major changes in the genetics of human and natural communities alike.

Admittedly, I rank that a little higher than asteroids because, while a really big asteroid can actually sterilize Earth and I don't think we can nuke Earth into sterility, if a nuclear war happens it's our fault. Asteroids are impersonal; nuclear war is not.

Asteroids

Anyway, I'm digressing. 20/20's section on asteroids was simplistic but truthful about the prevailing theory that asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving mammals a chance to take over the reptiles' ecological niches. But the "reporters" then argued that an asteroid of the same size hitting Earth now would burn the crust to a depth of 60 miles. Obviously, that's crap: there's no way our mammalian ancestors would have survived such a strike. They lived semi-nocturnal, semi-underground lives, but not that far underground. The only lifeforms that have ever lived that far down are extremophile bacteria.

You can test the effects of various sizes of asteroids here or here.

It mentioned that people have found around 100,000 asteroids, but didn't mention that we occasionally lose some, are constantly finding some only when they cross Earth's orbit, and suspect there are countless more out there. Chances are, if one hits us, we won't see it until it's too close to do anything about.

Of course, they could be right about the one they mention specifically -- an asteroid that's due to make a close (within the Moon's orbit) pass in 2029. They don't say that will hit us -- general consensus is that it won't -- but that the near-miss might alter its orbit just enough to cause a hit the next time around in 2037. What they don't mention is just how small the risk really is: 1 in 26,000 in 2029 and cumulatively just .00023% chance between now and 2054, during which time it'll have three close approaches. The show doesn't identify that chunk of rock, but astronomers know it as 2004 MN4 or Apophis.

The show's discussion of what people are likely to do if faced with a probable direct hit was kind of interesting, but also fairly predictable. It's pretty safe to assume chaos would reign as the time drew near as people try to do things they'd never before attempted (for good and ill). Nobody said they'd go out and commit crimes (obviously, they wouldn't say it on national TV even if they would do it), but a few said they'd want to have children. Excuse me?!? How can someone be so supremely narcissistic as to bring children into a world they knew was going to get walloped by an extinction-level-huge asteroid?

What was equally troubling was what the show didn't mention -- the probability that some people would try to organize a major space effort to keep humanity alive off-world. Such an effort may well be the only thing that could prevent such widespread chaos, and I've said before that I believe we need a good global space program as insurance against just such a catastrophe.

Nukes

The section on nukes was woefully vague and much shorter than the subject warranted. It didn't say anything about radiation or various other ill effects, although it did point out (accurately, I think) that the nuke threat from places like Iran and North Korea is being blown out of proportion to the risk caused by the thousands of nukes the US and Russia still have on "launch on warning" status. It failed to mention, however, that both nations are trying to create new, smaller, more mobile nukes, especially the U.S. Add that to the simmering problems in the Middle East, and it may be time to revisit the Doomsday Clock's setting of 7 minutes to midnight, which hasn't changed since 1992.

The one really questionable assertion they made was that "an exchange of just 20 missiles would cause nuclear winter for several years." The problem here is that the number of missiles is irrelevant, what matters is the number and strength of the warheads and where they explode -- urban or rural, airburst or groundburst. Burning cities are significantly more likely to spew the toxic smoke into the sky that can block sunlight and cool the land, especially if hit by warheads that explode close enough to the surface for soil and debris to get sucked into the fireball. Even the TTAPS study of the early 1980s predicted a 5,000 MT threshold for nuclear winters, which requires significantly more than 20 missiles.

Elsewhere Sagan (as cited by Alan Phillips), notes it could happen with as few as 100 warheads if the targets are predominantly oil refineries and associated structures. Obviously, we don't know for sure... and sane folks don't want to. There's some controversy over the TTAPS calculations, sparking some of the theory's supporters to acknowledge that there needs to be more research done in this area. We've got better climate-study technology and computer simulation capability than we did in the 1980s, let's target it on this threat.

Desmond Ball of the Australian Nat'l University argues even more specifically that even a full-scale war hitting both cities and strategic weapons sites, which Ball estimates at 4140 to 4650 MT, would throw up less smoke than Sagan's nuclear winter threshold of 100 million tons, largely because of where those missile silos are -- in farmfields and tundra, not forest.

Obviously, I'm not citing him to downplay nuclear war's horrors. Even without nuclear winter, it would be by far the worst calamity to have ever hit mankind, and for that reason, I'm still in favor of banning the bomb.

My guess is that a full-scale nuclear holocaust would actually leave most people alive in the short-term, but hundreds of millions, if not billions, would not survive the social, economic, and agricultural disruption, radiation, temporary loss of the ozone layer, diseases, and other problems that can reasonably be expected after such a catastrophe, even if the temperature change is minimal. (Imagine what shape Europe or Japan would've been in for years after WW2 if the US had not created the Marshall Plan. That's the catch -- global nuclear war isn't likely to leave anyone untouched, even nations that don't get bombed, simply due to the nature of fallout and our world's high level of economic interconnectedness.) But I suspect humans will still be here long term, reduced in numbers and cultural complexity and possibly permanently unable to regain today's level of technology, science, and the possibility of reaching the stars.

Pandemic

I can't claim to have anything resembling detailed knowledge of this subject, since I'm not a doctor and have no medical experience of any sort. But as a layman with some knowledge of history, I noticed a couple of things that seemed a little out of whack. In one place, they claim the 1918 Flu Pandemic "killed only 3% of those who caught it." That figure didn't ring true ... but it was. If anything, it was higher than the actual percentage (I came up with about 2.5%). The New England Journal of Medicine reports that "the pandemic of 1918 and 1919 killed 50 million to 100 million people" worldwide. NPR adds, "About 25 percent of the population was infected, with perhaps 650,000 people dying from the virus." At that time, US population was about 104,550,000.

According to the same NEJM article, "more than half the deaths occurred among largely healthy people between 18 and 40 years of age and were caused by a virus-induced cytokine storm (see diagram) that led to the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). ...If we translate the rate of death associated with the 1918 influenza virus to that in the current population, there could be 1.7 million deaths in the United States and 180 million to 360 million deaths globally."

The show also notes that smallpox & other germs could be used as weapons. In its present state, the show said, smallpox kills about 30% of its victims -- a significantly higher rate than the 1918 Flu. Under some circumstances, it's even more deadly -- some evidence suggests the death rate among the biologically unprotected Native American population exceeded 65%.

Climate Change

This was an unfortunate mixture of mostly good spoken fact and grossly misleading imagery. Most obvious was when they spoken of sea level rising if Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt -- 20 feet individually, 40 feet together. That's a pretty severe rise, one that would (as their sources, which includes climatologists and Al Gore, said) inundate south Florida, southern Louisiana, Bangladesh, parts of Manhattan and possibly London, and many other coastal areas. but teh graphics shown at teh same time exaggerated the flooding immensely: they showed blue covering over half of FLorida, huge stretches of the UK, and even mountainous regions of Southeast Asia and Africa far from the coasts.

As TV studios know quite well, people pay far more attention to images than words, a fact that makes such a presentation a major league disservice to the work the scientists are doing. By so exaggerating a threat that is serious enough on its own, it only provides ammunition to the very naysayers the show largely (and accurately) discounted verbally.

Instead of hyped up graphics of biblical proportions, they should have taken the time to show realistic maps of the potential sea level rise, scenery from areas that are already seeing problems, etc. Among those available are these ones from the EPA (note that they only show a 3.5 m rise), or go to places like this (USGS) or any decent topographic map of seashore regions and figure it out yourself from the contours.

How NOT to write an apocalypse story

The Aftermath
by Samuel C. Florman
Thomas Dunne Books, 2001
RATING: * (of 5)

This book has to be the "Left Behind" of scientific apocalypse stories. Where that series preaches religion, this book plods on and on about modern civilization's great achievements and how important it would be to replicate them, even though doing so would be nearly impossible in practice. It's plagued by wooden writing; characters that are largely just names, titles and self-aggrandizing adjectives (about the only place some of them come to life is between pages 64 and 77); abysmal knowledge of human behavior; and list after list after list of minutia.

In short, it definitely violates at least Vonnegut's first rule of writing fiction.

The beginning is fairly typical. We see plausible short vignettes of the last moments of everyday people worldwide who get caught in the firestorms or tsunamis sparked by a massive comet slamming into the eastern Pacific and its fragments elsewhere.

The only problem with that is that the book is set up as a personal journal alternating with a survivor's "official" history, meaning Wil Hardy could not possibly have seen any of those events. Why? Because he's one of about 1500 people on a cruise ship in the Indian Ocean at the time. Most of them are engineers and their families, with a couple hundred crew who are mostly young and single.

While Florman is clearly knowledgable about engineering and some aspects of the history of science, this book falls flat on its face when talking about numerous other areas. For the sake of discussion, let's accept as plausible his imagery of the comet-crash causing an atmospheric firestorm that burns almost everything except for a "safe zone" that barely touches land in eastern South Africa and southern Madagascar. Common sense says such a global fire would spew trillions of tons of ash into the sky and probably blot out the sun for a long, long time.

The Tambora eruption of 1815 is generally believed to have caused the "year without a summer" of 1816, where summer frosts were reported in New England and Europe, halfway around the world. THAT ejected "only" 150-180 cubic kilometers of ash into the sky. Obviously, a comet causing the global destruction Florman envisions would send up FAR more -- he says it's about 16km in diameter (p. 36), more than half again as big as the one that killed the dinosaurs. Yet, he has the darkness and icy cold descending suddenly (despite the oceans' natural heat reservoir) and breaking in just four days.

How is that remotely possible?!?

What's FAR worse is his abysmal comprehension of trauma psychology. Face it: the people on this boat are suddenly isolated, their entire civilization annihilated, friends and any family members not present gone (although I suspect other pockets of survivors would in fact exist), a large chunk of their educations and technology now useless, etc. As he writes, "Her scientific terminology could not soften the horrifying reality that apparently human civilization had been destroyed." But shortly thereafter, the children are playing Bingo and Capture the Flag?!? Sure, the younger ones might not grasp the situation, but kids are extremely good at picking up on adults' cues, and they'd KNOW without doubt they would never go home again. Simply keeping the meals on time will NOT "keep chaotic nightmares at bay" for long.

Curiously, from a psychological POV, the added trauma of having their boat run aground and slowly sink would've been beneficial. Instead of being trapped on a boat with nowhere to go and little practically useful to do (a situation tailor-made for rapid "decompensation" as psychologists say), everyone now had to work to survive. That CAN help stave off traumatic meltdown for many people, but we can still expect to see widespread signs of PTSD cropping up in short order. Not everyone would get its full-blown, seriously debilitating form, but almost everyone would see some symptoms. In Florman's world, almost no one does.

A comparison to a real catastrophe is in order here, for perspective: A woman I spoke to from Mississippi said the simplest PTSD sign --"drifting off" in mid-sentence -- happens frequently to almost everyone she knows who lived through Hurricane Katrina. And they KNEW they could get help elsewhere, even if everyone nearby was "on their knees" as she put it. That lifeline would be GONE, completely and irreparably severed, for Florman's characters.

That said, it IS plausible they'd make the effort to save whatever they could of their books, tech, tools, etc. It's human nature to avoid trashing the past, and they would only really see how irrelevant many of their skills now are for basic survival by experience. Unfortunately, we never see that in Florman's world -- long stretches of the text are meetings between engineers talking about how they'll make those skills reality again, with very little discussion of what skills they REALLY need now, and even less actual ACTION. Even the survival skills they know of come from books and are described in lists.

And that's even after they meet a town of surviving Zulu. Common sense says the cruise people would aim to learn as much as they can from the Zulu -- and that element DOES pop up occasionally -- but their attitude is clearly aimed at rebuilding civilization even before they have a steady food supply, huts to live in, etc. In several places, Florman praises the "need" for some form of bureaucracy, and many pages are devoted to essentially listing how many people will be devoted to this impractical project or that... with no depiction at all of the engineers actually getting to know their new hosts as people or trying to determine what THEY might want from the future. (In fact, the major images they borrow are from the Afrikaners, not the Zulu, and I'd imagine that might offend a few Zulu.)

At one point, a character says, "What do we do if the survivors in this very strange corner of the world do not care to join with us in our enlightened enterprise?" That line's a great depiction of both arrogance and the overall clunky writing style. It's arrogant in the same way missionary work is supremely arrogant, because it assumes other ways of living are somehow inferior simply because they're different and/or less complex. It's clunkiness should be obvious; can you imagine anyone actually SAYING that casually? Neither can I, but Florman routinely has characters speak this way.

Such phrasing strongly reminds me of some autistic people I've worked with over the years, and I DON'T say this in any derogatory sense, just as a description. Couple the phrasing with the book's apparent lack of comprehension of how humans really behave under stress and it makes me wonder if Florman is himself autistic.

Even the name they give their makeshift settlement -- situated improbably away from a river instead of on it, and a pretty long hike from the Zulu village -- demonstrates an autistic inflexibility: "Engineering Village." Couldn't they at least have named it after a famous engineer or scientist -- say, Hawkington or Einsteinville? It is, after all, the place they may be living forever, and I could easy imagine many engineers among them wanting to honor scientific heroes.

The Zulu have also suffered, of course: When the newcomers visit the Zulu village (Ulundi), they're shown to "one of the few buildings that remained standing amid charred ruins" by children playing in those ruins.

Again, WTF?!? Somehow, despite their own homes being in ruins, many of their people, crops, and livestock dead (and probably others escaped), and their clan structure wounded, they can supply several deliveries of food to the newcomers, some of whom apparently do nothing but talk. HOW? The fact that this occurs in the Southern summer is helpful, but not enough to make it believable.

Vonnegut's rule #6 (link above) says the characters should have nasty things happen to them "in order that the reader may see what they are made of." There's plenty of nastiness in The Aftermath, but we never really see what the characters are made of, nor how they got to be the way they are. They're all one-dimensional, especially the stereotypical enemy marauder "Queen Ranavolana."

This woman is probably the most implausible character of them all: what little we know of her history is clear on the fact that she's a young American drifter, drug addict, and loser. I find it very unlikely she'd ever be able to convince a bunch of rugged criminals from Madagascar to buy into her story that she's "sent by the Creator to be their savior" and the reincarnation of their island's brutal 19th C. queen, whose name Florman misspelled. She'd be FAR more likely to end up being forced into sexual slavery, especially after civilization's demise.

Florman makes repeated reference to the fact she gives her pirate fleet red sails, even at one point having the cruise ship's captain claim he'd never seen any ships with sails that color. Huh? I find that extremely hard to believe; you can see almost every sail color imaginable at any sailing race or Tall Ships event.

About the only realistic thing surrounding her existence and threat to the engineers and Zulu is the proposal to create a militia; although it seems pretty arrogant to base it on American methods and not on whatever survivors of the South African or tribal police or armed forces there are, if any. There are probably some, and they'd be FAR more likely to have weapons than the cruise ship folks.

At least Florman makes a token recognition of this arrogance, with the captain saying (unheard by anyone), "There are other democracies in the world...." His chronicler, Wil, also privately seems to recognize that the techno-philic obsessions his group has ignore much of their new reality, writing, "To hell with the scientific view and to hell with the demands of technology. ...Why have we survived if we do not carry on, if we do not reproduce...?"

But events showing such recognition of their situation are few and far between. Florman talks blithely about turning lactic acid from corn into plastic, in blatant denial of the fact there wouldn't BE any surplus corn. He has the "good guys" predictably defeating the pirates and planning year-long sailing voyages solely for the sake of exploration around the world ... rather than fishing or some other survival function. (Where are the supplies coming from? Who can be spared to go? what if there really ARE other survivors... and some are pirates? What about basic bad weather, which would probably be VERY unpredictable for YEARS after a massive comet strike? Yes, such trips should eventually happen, but NOT in the first year.) He has sewer and water lines beign built as if by magic, but out of what? Brickworks, sawmills, blacksmithies, and other enterprises "were busy day and night" within the first six months ... despite the fact that many survivors would be in shock, hungry, injured, and have little access to any of the materials for such enterprises. Ninety percent of the planet BURNED, remember?!?

I could go on (and on and on) about how BAD this book is. But I'm sure you get the drift by now. Just file this one in the "don't bother" category.