The science intersection
This podcast is on a range of issues but generally they fit into one of four categories. The four categories are: Climate change, alternative economic systems, diversity and health. On occasion the podcast has episodes which don't fit into any of these.
The podcast is a mix of science and social science and other elements which impact on well-being.
The science intersection
Climate Security, Part 1: From Extreme Weather to Everyday Lives
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How can a flood or heatwave ripple through people’s livelihoods, health and security and how do we prepare for what comes next?
In part one, Adrian, founder and CEO of Organizational Insight Consulting, joins Rachel to explore climate security through his experience in intelligence analysis. We discuss why climate threats require a different approach from traditional military threats, how their effects cascade through society, and why scientists and intelligence analysts can struggle to understand each other even when working towards the same goal.
From disrupted farming and migration to damaged infrastructure and mental health, this conversation explores the connections between physical events and people’s everyday lives.
Adrian returns in part two for a more story-based conversation, continuing the podcast’s new format.
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https://www.oicllc.org/
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So for this podcast, I'm here with Adrian Wolfberg, who is the CEO and founder of Organizational Insight Consulting. So I want to look at climate change and how your organization deals with issues related to climate change. So can you take back to when you first realized climate change was something intelligent analysts needed to understand how did this happen?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so let me just take you back a step before that because I think that's quite relevant to the question of the difference between traditional knowledge creation and that surrounding climate change. I had been trained originally as a naval officer in traditional military and political analysis of foreign adversaries, kind of established set kind of training program, and the object of one's attention is political and military activity of people who are wanting to cause harm through either military action or through you know diplomatic kind of action as well. So that's the traditional way in which the intelligence program per se, ever since really World War II, has begun with that mindset. And of course, after World War II, the Cold War context established even kind of reinforced a particular mindset in how one viewed the outside world and adversaries. Later in my career, I was put into a very different context of analyzing threats from illegal drug activity. It's a very different kind of problem set because the traditional problem set of military and diplomacy is about just that. And that's based on ideological and power advantages and disadvantages. The problem set of illegal drug transfer has a completely different motivation. It's an economic motivation that's observed through infrastructure and transportation activity, which is just very different than monitoring the movement of tanks or ships or airplanes. So I knew with this exposure to illegal drug activity that I was faced with a different knowledge world, a different data world, different method, different customer set with different constraints and different authorities and capabilities of policymakers to take action or not to be able to take action. So that was really an eye-opening experience which changed the way from traditional intelligence analysis how it operates. So move then into 2022. And at that time I was working at the National Academy of Sciences, and the US Congress had mandated that the National Academy of Sciences had to organize a multi-year effort to better understand how climate affected all sorts of realms of society, politics, economics, health, every every different way and shape. They saw the need to get a better understanding was at the practical level to bring climate scientists together with intelligence analysts. And these intelligence analysts all had come from the Cold War mentality, so to speak. So in 2022, I was the co-lead to manage this program between climate scientists, which which ranged everywhere from physicists, chemists, biologists, to social scientists who were involved in understanding the effect of climate. This included anthropologists, sociologists, and even healthcare professionals, psychologists, mental health, as well as urban scientists and historians. So there was kind of a diverse spread of people from different academic disciplines focused on climate, the effects of climate change. And so that's how it started. And what the Congress wanted the National Academy of Sciences to do was to explore in more depth what the what the effects of the climate specifically could have on societies and what those causal connections were, to better understand these causal connections of climate situations. It may be a series of cascading events. And then ultimately, the ultimate goal was to develop a kind of an understanding about how to how to warn, which is really the primary responsibility of the National Security Mechanism, the intelligence analyst, is to warn people who have the authority to make decisions about what resources, whether it's money, whatever the resources are, that could be apprised from threats originally derived from climate.
SPEAKER_00So I'm kind of curious about a few things. So one, you said sort of the Cold War mentality. So I'm wondering how that has an impact on how you sort of approach things. So how the Cold War how experience of the Cold War impacted how you deal with things like climate security?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So it's an inverse relationship. And unless you've experienced the inverse, you're you're just going to live within the Cold War mentality. So what happened during the period of the Cold War from roughly 1950 to 1990 was the US was engaged in political economic competition with Russia, with the Soviet Union at the time. And that was well understood from a political-military perspective, which would be the kind of framework that my profession came from, was well understood so that we would know, not exactly, but like 90 or 95% accuracy, exactly what would happen whenever some statement was made or some military movement was made. We would know what the process was, we would be able to envision the second and third order effects. We know what the outcomes would be, we know what the risk would be, we know what the uh in terms of what the adversary would be dealing with. We basically had a photograph, you can actually think about it as a photograph, of a kind of a precise understanding about what's going on at any moment in time. And that was for a variety of reasons. That's because the the mechanisms that US and Allies had in place allowed for really exhaustive insight into a kind of behavior, even though it was not explicit, was able to achieve a deep understanding about what was going on. And that framework as a model of thinking is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, you know, a puzzle that you do as a kid or as an adult, where you have 500 pieces or a thousand pieces, and the box that it comes in has an image of what the puzzle is actually going to look like. And all you have to do is put the pieces together, and the outcome is well understood. And it and the process can be even well understood by different tricks about what the end pieces are and the side pieces are, all sorts of kind of methods of getting to the actual outcome. And that's kind of like what operating in the Cold War was like. And after the Cold War ended, things stopped being like a puzzle and became more like a mystery. There were new actors involved and new uh outcomes, new agendas, new goals, new players, non-state actors, uh, terrorists. This whole illegal drug trafficking was another part of this. Non-state actor, whether it was military, terrorism, counter drug, whatever, did not have any of that. There was no picture of exactly the process of how things work from A to Z. So you had to explore different ways of thinking from the traditional model of the Cold War. And certainly climate security is a radical difference from that Cold War mentality. And so I've seen firsthand people who still live, I mean, they may not consciously be aware of that Cold War mentality, but if they're focused on military and political activity, they're still that shaping uh that's still that influence that still persists. And what I realized when I was involved with this National Academy of Science project was that this Cold War mentality, and and and even extended beyond that, terrorism and counterdrugs and the selling and transportation of nuclear materials, that's that sort of thing, is there's always some human intentionality involved. So that that it becomes an Achilles heel, one of the Achilles' heel in understanding the potential impact of an adversary, is understanding their the human intentions that they have, whether they're realistic, whether they have the capability, whether it's just for some other reason to achieve some other objective, then became very clear with climate security is there is no human pulling the levers in the climate environment. In this book that I wrote that talks about what I'm talking about now, climate security intelligence, climate change is happening. And there's no like human person with levers saying, okay, now I want to start a massive heat wave going over Europe and I want it to last for six months. That's not happening. There's no human intention involved. And so the kind of knowledge that is ultimately going to be helpful to a decision maker to do something, and this something is kind of normally in one of two spaces. Either it's in terms of preparation to reduce the effect of some aspect that one can think well ahead of time, or it's in the preparation to be resilient after the fact when affected by something that is going to affect human society. Realizing that intentionality is no longer part of the way of knowing becomes a real transition in how to think about warning to policymakers or decision makers. You know, these would people be like mayors of cities or governors of states, uh just using the United States as an example, but there would be analogues to the president, you know, the prime minister of a country or the United Nations. These are kind of the people who have the authority to respond to the effects of climate. And so what the people who are assigned to warn these people cannot think in the tr in this intentional-based way. And this is a huge transition in thinking. It's got to be in what are the vulnerabilities that could be impacted by a litany of physical aspects that are caused by changes in the climate. And those litany of aspects run from the gamut of physical damage to infrastructure, which I think is, you know, we're mostly kind of aware of, but to political strife, to migration, to uh changes in agriculture production, uh, to vulnerable uh elements in the society or vulnerable genders in the society. So what you want to look at is how there's the intersection between climate-based knowledge, which is going to come from climate scientists, who speak a very different language than people who are focused on warning policymakers about things that could uh impact humans. And I can talk about examples of why that kind of collision of perspectives uh becomes a challenge in the ultimate need to warn somebody who's not an expert in and who's not a scientist and doesn't even understand the process of producing warning.
SPEAKER_00So would you explore a story of what could potentially happen and what that could mean people's lives, like the effect on people's lives?
SPEAKER_01Physical activity can have second and third order effects directly affect the lives of humans in various ways, shape, or form, which could be political stress, political strife, economic shortcomings, physical collapse of infrastructure, uh health issues, sickness, mental health issues.
SPEAKER_00Have you looked at how second and third order effects play out for people?
SPEAKER_01The physical uh reality of climate that occurs in in the atmosphere maybe manifests itself in the ocean. These are kind of the locations of the soil because of aridity or because of flooding. So those are kind of the first order effects of um the physical climate change. It's not a simple matter of coming up with all the various different scenarios of these second and third order effects, but one certainly can start doing that by the um location, the geography of where one is concerned with. And there may even be priorities, uh, for example, migration. What we know, for example, in Central America, we we've seen this, and we've seen this in in in other places like Southeast Asia, and I'm not going to try to be exhaustive, but where either flooding andor heat wave affects the growth of crops in that region. And the people who tend those crops and grow those crops, that's their livelihood. So what do they do? Well, they they have a couple of choices. Um they have a few choices. Um, the choices that are normally in play are they want to continue to be farmers, but they have to move to where they can do farming. And uh another choice is do something totally different, become something totally different. But in either of those cases, they're probably going to have to move. Sometimes they can just move in in their own country, which may have its own geopolitical effects in a country like Central America, say it's Guatemala, or that leader of that country to deal with. But there could be other consequences where, say, farmers who are growing coffee or who are growing other produce need to move to other countries and therefore have an effect on the economy of the other countries, or maybe try to get into the United States because there's more farming opportunity to be involved with the farming, and there's all sorts of then political economic issues about that increase migration for various reasons. And this is even something that the UK has has dealt with in terms of a need for warning of the effect of climate change on migration and how that could affect the economics and politics of the UK. This is not just any one country. This this kind of second and third order effect can happen anywhere. Political strife, competition for resources. Well, what am I talking about? I'm talking about for like access for water. This could be water rights, could be for agriculture, but it could also be for industrial purpose, for just society in general, for ensuring people have water to drink and to cook with and so forth. There's kind of a wide range of other effects that it can have. And I kind of mapped these out, and that was one of the percents of this National Academy study to just kind of give examples of these first, second, and third order causal effects that have happened, that have been witnessed. And we went through case studies. One was Pakistan, another was Central America, and we completed two of those. And so the the idea is that those then case studies for ways that people need to think about this really difficult to predict causal effects from these initial physical climate events or s or series of events. And so the challenge becomes you know, it's very hard to predict climate effects because they're not intentional. If you if you knew something was intentional, you might be able to extract information in various ways to find out what people's intentions were, and then you could build up a resilience or defeat that adversary's intent in the first place. Climate is very different. There's also the effect on uh security services themselves. This is well understood. Military forces around the world have have bases or ports that are being affected by um rising sea level uh for airfields, for example, or for being flooded in certain areas, or all sorts of things like that. So it has a wide range of effects and different types of different kinds of security. So, like, for example, some kind of climate effects that has a physical manifestation might be some kind of hydrological anomalies such as river flows and groundwater decline. Well, that may have an effect on vulnerability to national resilience systems like the water supply and the electrical grid. A societal impact would be food price spikes. And that could have an effect on people taking advantage of, like in black market and so forth, hoarding or taking advantage of just providing uh food to people who can afford it, so leaving the vulnerable population with limited amounts of food. In terms of governance, there could be slow or inconsistent disaster response, which could lead to strain and incompetent decision latitude. We've we've seen that in the United States. So economic-wise, supply chain disruptions. I think you know that's something that everyone who's who's experienced some kind of climatic condition has seen. And this can have the effect, a political effect of, in a sense, hoarding or nations, you know, increasing prices for the commodities that they're developing to import to other people or to use their national capabilities as a coercive threat to other countries who may not be as uh advantaged as they are. Uh this could be for anything, food or energy or water, so forth. In the military sector, uh decreased readiness due to stress or or storms or infrastructure damage, and that would have a third-order effect of operational readiness to deploy forces in case they needed to be used for whatever the conflict is. I have like uh in this one article, environmental, societal, governance, economic, and security as just examples, and each one of those has about five or six second order effects and and and third order effects. I didn't even include things like mental health, which is a real uh under talked about issue with um climate effect. So I hope I'll I've at least touch on some aspect of both of your questions.
SPEAKER_00So in in terms of mental health, is that about the stress caused by the effects of climate change?
SPEAKER_01I wouldn't say the stress caused by climate change per se, but the stress caused by the second and third order effects of climate change. To be more accurate. You know, if if if your livelihood is is disrupted, how are you paying the mortgage?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You know, in a very practical sense. If the price of gasoline is going up because the pipelines have been uh disrupted because of flood damage, now you're paying much more for gas, it may not even be available. So how do you get to work? These are kind of the mental health stresses that are typical. Things like how to do uh are schools operating, how do you get kids to your schools? Are kids safe in your schools when there may be physical damage because of you know, fill-in-the-blank, water, winds, too much heat, the air conditioning is not keeping up with the demands because everybody is being affected by by heat. And so are you concerned about how your kids are are are you know surviving, so to speak, in school? In terms of political strife, if there's competition for resources, um there could actually be violence. There could be groups who are wanting to maintain control over what they have, and that could you know manifest itself in in riots or in riots against people or riots against corporations or grocery stores, or you fill in the blank, and and that is a source of then worry about how you're going to sustain yourself and and your family.
SPEAKER_00How would you summarize them for people who had less experience in the field?
SPEAKER_01So the direct effect of a climatic event is the physical damage that the climate has on its first contact with some human systems. So, for example, cyclone or hurricane would have an effect on temporary on rising sea level along the coast. So that's the first physical effect on physical systems uh on land. That's just an example. And so this idea that there's second and third order effects are the idea is that these physical events would have touch points into various human systems. And so what do I mean by that? So in in this case of a rising sea level because of a hurricane, there would be houses that would be destroyed, or essentially be destroyed, uh roads would be uh covered with water, which would reduce transportation. Rescue efforts could be stalled because of a variety of things, the the speed of the water, dangerous materials flowing through the water as a result of housing, houses being tipped over and so forth. So that that would be like maybe a second order effect. And a third order effect because of things like houses being destroyed, um, people having to flee, you could see other effects that we would call third-order effects. People who survived would you know feel just you know awful, their their psychological, their familial ties, everything about their their livelihood. There would be no work, or getting to work would be too difficult. They would be stressed out, they would be wondering where their friends are, where their families are, they would be wondering when they can get back into their house. All these things become examples of psychological and social impacts on their well-being. Well, there's also other things at an organizational level. The ability to get electricity back on would probably be delayed until the water is subsided and uh all the electrical components and the generators and so forth could be safely operated. Another example would be because of poor sanitation, we've seen this, the spread of infectious disease, which would result in people could be dying and you know, further limiting their ability to be participate in the kind of the reconstruction effort. We talked a little bit about already of another third-order effect is uh people fleeing the area. And then what happens to those areas that they flee to? The economics and the politics of these cities or areas that now have to accommodate a number of people that the city or town was not designed and not constructed to be built for and support. So this kind of keeps on going, cascading, these effects cascade. And we just normally talk about second and third order, but there could be fourth and fifth order effects. And not only that, but they could be interacting with each other to accentuate um a second or third order effect, or just to you know create a more complex situation that already exists. The traveling is from the physical action of a climate issue to the many facets of human systems, from uh the individual to the organizational to the societal level, just because of this climate effect. And it's very difficult to be able to predict with accuracy what these cascading second and third order order effects are, you know, even with prior experience. You know, when we talk about the Bangladesh efforts based on their experience to prepare for cyclones, the cyclone that occurred in 2022 was just more than they anticipated. So they did a great job, but it was just not something that they envisioned at that level.
SPEAKER_00As you mentioned Pakistan, I think I might use that for the second question. Could you kind of walk me through a little bit of the scenario that happened in in Pakistan and what the um different experts kind of discussed and what was difficult for people to grasp in terms of sort of making decisions about it or thinking about implications?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'd like to take the conversation a little bit higher, one step, one step up, if I may, but it it addresses the issue of what makes knowledge integration difficult dealing with climate security. In this National Academy of Sciences effort, this ongoing effort that lasted for two years, I'm just gonna put into uh two different groups, make it binary, the climate scientists, whatever flavor there they were, whether it was physical scientists or social scientists, and the intelligence analysts. And I'm gonna just go through some examples of language that's used. This is kind of very at the rudimentary level, but this is where issues begin to complexify the challenge for knowledge integration between these different sets to as whatever they would apply to, whether it's whatever geographic region it is. So I'm just going to start off with the word pathway. Climate scientists they use the word pathway to mean the causal connections, the you know, A causes B causes C between phenomena. And it helps explain how one climate condition that has a physical manifestation could affect another climate effect. You know, for example, and I'm just making this up because I'm not a climate scientist, warm air may affect the temperature of oceans. And so in conversations as they were happening in this room, climate scientists use the word pathway. But in the intelligence analysts in the room were kind of like a deer in a headlights. They didn't know what they were talking about because pathway is not a term of art in the analytic sense. Intelligence analysts are going to be thinking about how a human is trying to cause harm to somebody else. And they they're thinking about how that operationally, how that threat manifests itself and what the sequence, what the operational sequences are for the adversary to move from that intent through various operational aspects towards objective the adversary has and what effect it may have on the recipient of that. So when a climate scientist talks about pathways, you know, what they're describing is this causal relationship within a climate context in the physical world. Well, the intelligence analysts they don't use the word pathway, but they're listening for what they want to hear is what the causal connections are, the sequences of intentional human actions are through physical manifestations of how that threat would be employed to harm uh human populations. I was in the room listening to this, and I'm going to give more examples. You know, I would think that somebody would have said, gee, I don't understand what you mean by pathway. Would you please explain that? That never happened. And the climate scientists, you know, I can only assume, you know, what was thinking in their mind, but from being there for a couple of years, you know, I could make an inference about what's going on because it's a very common phenomenon. And that is, well, gee, I'm working in this world, I understand this language, you're in this room, I am and with kind of the same goal, so to speak. So I'm assuming that you know what I'm talking about. That's the assumption that's going on. This is like a pervasive human human phenomenon that it goes way beyond climate scientists. It's that what we know, we assume other people know as well. Why am I going over all this? Well, if you can imagine people wanting to integrate knowledge for some common goal, the integration itself uh requires coming up with some shared understanding. Well, if you have language that's preventing intentionally or unintentionally, and and here it was unintentional, you're not going to get very far. And over two years, they didn't get very far. So another one is confidence. So this one I think people you know may have a more concrete uh understanding about these differences. So in scientific settings, confidence usually has some kind of statistical meaning tied to measurement or validity, the sample characteristics. And if you've you know taken biology classes or chemistry classes or physics classes, you've probably been introduced to some aspect of this. In intelligence analysts, that's not at all what confidence is about. It's about the quality of the information that is supporting a subjective judgment because of the lack or the absence of certainty involved with intelligence analysis. We don't, you know, the world of intelligence is faced with humans who are trying to deceive and prevent disclosure of what they're trying to do. In the world of climate science, there's not that intentional effort to hide things from what's going on. You you measure what you can measure, and that's provides the kind of level of certainty that you have. So analysts have to make judgments, but there's always uncertainty and there's always ambiguity. And so this judgment that's made, these inferences that are made, are in a sense subjective, but based on you know, prior experience, logical reasoning, and and so forth. They're not, and sometimes they appear to be quantifiable, but they're not based on any quantifiable evidence, like a climate scientist's evidence is based on. So, like the tolerance for uncertainty is completely different for the physical scientist and the intelligence analyst. The scientist seeks to reduce the uncertainty before making some kind of strong claim. In intelligence, there's almost always not that luxury, and that you have to make judgments while uncertainty is still present and ambiguity is still present. And that and that judgment is based on kind of subjective inference that just requires supporting evidence that that hopefully that the recipient of that would be convinced of. That's another term that was used that caused a lot of confusion or in terms of what was important and what's not. And so these really showed you know the difficulty because both of these communities have to work together. And probably the community that's going to face the policymaker or the decision maker is not going to be the climate scientist, because the climate scientist is not the one who has trained and educated to have an understanding about the effect on human systems, whereas the intelligence analysts, national security, doesn't matter what country you're from, are trained and educated in that regard. These are some of the kind of structural dilemmas or the structural effects that we have to move through. And this book that I wrote, Climate Security, Intelligence, and this article that is going to come out, it's called Climate Informed Warning, a shift from intent-based intents to vulnerability-based risks, are all about this shift in boundaries, and these are radical boundary differences, and and the need for integrating such knowledge that comes out of these radically different boundaries. And this is going to take time to practice and to experience, and it's not going to happen overnight. And it's at a different strategic level than just say, in say, in a military operation or in a in a city, is concerned about just a very um kind of narrow effect in a small amount of time of say flooding from um rising seawater and how that would affect a city or a military base or so forth. But that's a very tactical kind of situation that could would benefit from rapid updating of the rise of the seawater, the status of evacuation, all these kinds of things would benefit from real-world up-to-date information. I'm talking about the much deeper aspect of how we know knowledge and how that knowledge gets integrated across various boundaries and the challenges of communicating that to decision makers who have much less power to make changes than, say, the president or the prime minister of a country who has military actions available to them or diplomatic actions, etc.
SPEAKER_00Could we go back to the Pakistan example and so what different experts saw there and what was sort of difficult in terms of decision making? I'm assuming you use that as a potentially as an example of something where this could happen elsewhere or this could kind of escalate.
SPEAKER_01That particular project was more focused on climate information and not the decision-making aspect. The Central America project tried to move that a little bit forward to understand the you know the second and third order effects. The project ended after that second year because of uh changes in the political system in the United States, unfortunately. The idea would have been to continue these case studies into decision making and how that would manifest itself and how the challenges, and it never got to that point, unfortunately. But because I, you know, I had been an intelligence officer and I had seen how non-traditional like counter-drugs, counter-narcotic prosecution, that knowledge had to be created and integrated to and given to a really different set of decision makers than military people. This was law enforcement instead. I could see the challenges right off of the bat, and that's kind of where the book that I wrote incorporates those aspects that the National Academy project was not able to continue to use real-world cases.
SPEAKER_00Thank you to Adrian for joining me and sharing his experience of climate security, and to you for listening to the Science Intersection. Adrian will be back in the next episode where we'll take a more story-based approach as part of the podcast new format, exploring what these issues mean for people's lives. If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow the podcast and share it with someone who might find it interesting. If you'd like to support the show with a donation, you'll find the link in the description. Every contribution helps me keep these conversations going. Adrian's website is also in the link in this description if you'd like to learn more about his work. And if you'd like to join me as a guest on the podcast, you can get in touch through my website, which you'll find there too. Thanks again, Adrian, and I hope you'll join us for the next episode.