Well, Someone Got It Right -- Way Back Then

San Francisco -- During the past eight years, the idea that people with expertise could make reasonable estimates of "what would happen if" has taken a big hit. The Bush administration, of course, was particularly bad at foreseeing consequences in places like Iraq -- so bad that it made light of the whole idea. ("Stuff happens.") But the failure to foresee the meltdown of the financial system had the fingerprints of experts from both political parties and several ideological stripes.

So does anyone ever get it right? Yes, actually, and in the environmental arena this is particularly true when thoughtful science is brought to bear. President Obama's newly appointed science adviser, John Holdren, is an old friend of mine. I just got a copy of this prediction he made with Peter Gleick 28 years ago -- way back in 1981. Take a look. It turns out that wars in Iraq, the emergence of global warming as a crisis, and the fear of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists were not only in principal foreseeable, they were foreseen:

…the most important environmental liability of oil as an energy source is probably not air pollution or oil spills but the chance that war will be waged over access to the world's remaining supplies. The most important environmental liability of coal is not the occupational toll of mining or the public toll from coal-transport accidents (the most easily quantified impacts of coal), or the direct damage to public health from airborne sulfates (quantifiable in principle, but highly uncertain in present practice); rather it is the threat of global climate change posed by accumulating atmospheric carbon dioxide, the consequences of which (through disrupted agricultural productivity) are potentially enormous but highly resistant to convincing quantification. The most important environmental liability of nuclear fission is neither the routine nor accidental emissions of radioactivity, but the deliberate misuse of nuclear facilities and materials for acts of terrorism and war. (American Journal of Public Health, September 1981)

Of course, what's equally stunning is not that Holdren and Gleick predicted these dangers more than a quarter of a century ago -- it's that so many commentators still deny their relevance today.