To the analyst's surprise, Walter's face showed annoyance rather than pleasure. "Save the planet?" Walter repeated. "I'm afraid you don't understand at all."

"What do you mean?" the analyst stammered, taken aback.

"You didn't get what I was saying," Walter admonished. "Haven't you read 'Jurassic Park'? Or did you just see the movie? Do you remember the confrontation, near the end of the book — they left it out of the movie — between the mathematician, who's been predicting correctly how wrong things would go, and the developer who just doesn't get it? The mathematician says, 'The planet's in no danger. We are. We can't save the planet or harm it. But we might be able to save ourselves.' See?"

"Ah! OK, I do see," exclaimed the analyst, who now did grasp the point. "Global warming isn't a threat to life on Earth. It's a threat to humans' life on Earth. If we don't counter this warming trend we're helping to cause, we could end up with a climate better suited for cockroaches and mosquitoes than for us, and with a whole lot of coastal flooding. A lot of people would die off, but other forms of life would still be here."

"Close, but still no prize," Walter nodded grimly. "Of all disciplines, I'd think you O.R. guys would catch on fastest. Everything you've recognized about direct effects of global warming is right, but there's more. For example, are we prepared for this warming to end in sudden, major global cooling? What would we do about that?"

"Maybe it would just balance out, and things would be fine," the O.R. analyst shrugged, now thoroughly confused.

"But why is global cooling part of the problem?"

"You know that there have been periods of global warming before, right?" Walter said. "Up to now, of course, they weren't caused by humans. But they all ended in sudden cooling. What do you infer from that?"

"I don't know," the O.R. analyst conceded.

Walter chuckled. "So think like an O.R. analyst," he prodded gently. "You don't know all the factors at work here, but there does seem to be a system-level pattern. Isn't that enough to get you to conclude that the pattern is likely to repeat?"

"There's no known mechanism for warming to trigger cooling," the O.R. analyst frowned.

"Exactly, and that's where you're getting stuck," Walter prompted. "But I thought you O.R. guys were the ones who would insist that the pattern itself is informative.

"Suppose," Walter continued, "that a colony of fruit flies has a ritual dance. Every time they are about to look for food, they go to this one place and do their dance. It could be just random association, but once they've come to believe in it, the ritual may actually help them find food, just because they get more motivated and persistent. Anyway, they've been doing it for many generations, as long as any of them can know about — which isn't very long, for a fruit fly. They live for about three days."

"OK," the O.R. analyst assented, not sure where this was going.

"Now suppose," Walter went on, "the place where they do this dance happens to be a sleeping elephant's ear. The most important thing they could possibly know about this is how to tell when the elephant is about to wake up, right?"

"Right!" the O.R. analyst readily agreed.

"OK," Walter concluded, "but they can't remember any experiences with awake elephants, and they don't realize the situation, so how would they know there was an elephant there?"

"Hmm," the O.R. analyst mused. "I have no idea, but this does sound like some of the systems reliability problems I've worked on, where inference about things outside previous experience was part of the challenge. I suppose if the ear twitched from time to time, they might figure out there was more to their dancing ground than they'd realized."

"And there is more to our planet than we've realized," Walter pointed out. "If there is some way the planet self-corrects for too much warming, how would we know? Or maybe there's just some cycle of events that cause sudden cooling, and we're here because the warming and cooling usually average out to keep the planet in a range we can live with. Perhaps the solar system periodically passes through a gas cloud that reduces the amount of heat that reaches Earth. Or maybe we periodically hit a debris field that results in some meteor impacts that trigger volcanic activity, and the dust in the air causes cooling.

"When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the early 1990s, it lowered the average temperature worldwide by a couple of degrees Fahrenheit for about two years. I'd say we need to pay more attention to the factors outside our experience, wouldn't you? And isn't that what you systems scientists are supposed to be especially good at?"



Doug Samuelson is a senior analyst at the Homeland Security Institute in Arlington, Va. This column has not been reviewed by the Homeland Security Institute or the Department of Homeland Security and does not represent the views of anyone but the author.

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