5 April 2023. Greenland | Scenarios

It’s time to refreeze the Arctic // Half a life in scenarios: remembering Napier Collyns

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1: It’s time to refreeze the Arctic

It’s always depressing to get news of Greenland from climate scientists. Because it’s always about data that says that its ice sheets are melting faster than previous projections said they would, and if the Greenland ice sheets go, then catastrophe is just around the corner.

And so, here’s a recent report from scientists modelling the state of Greenland’s ice sheets that says, well, that we’re halfway to catastrophe:

Based in part on carbon emissions, a new study using simulations identified two tipping points for the Greenland Ice Sheet: releasing 1000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere will cause the southern portion of the ice sheet to melt; about 2500 gigatons of carbon means permanent loss of nearly the entire ice sheet.

(The world’s second largest ice sheet, at Tasiilaq, Greenland. Photo by Christine Zenino. CC BY 2.0)

We’ve released 500 gigatons so far. The study was led by Dennis Höning, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The modelling was pretty comprehensive:

Höning’s new study for the first time used a complex model of the whole Earth system, which includes all the key climate feedback processes, paired with a model of ice sheet behavior. They first used simulations with constant temperatures to find equilibrium states of the ice sheet, or points where ice loss equaled ice gain. Then they ran a set of 20,000-year-long simulations with carbon emissions ranging from 0 to 4000 gigatons of carbon. From among those simulations, the researchers derived the 1000-gigaton carbon tipping point for the melting of the southern portion of the ice sheet.

It could be worse. There’s also a tipping point when we release 2,500 gigatons which melts pretty much the whole ice sheet, which leads to seven metre rises in ocean levels.

Reading this reminded me of a piece about the Arctic ice by Sir David King—the former UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser and now Head of the Climate Change Advisory Group—in a magazine’ Minister for the Future that was co-produced by NESTA in the UK and the magazine Prospect at the end of 2022. It’s outside the Prospect paywall.

The whole magazine included 24 short and reasonably radical ideas about issues that could be transformed, across mental and physical health, technology, food, demographics, skills, energy, and so on.

King’s article suggests that we need to refreeze the Arctic. The reason I mentioned his credentials a couple of paragraphs ago is that without them, this suggestion could be taken as being a bit wild, which he tackles head-on at the start of the article:

I’m now used to the stares I get when I suggest refreezing the Arctic—the polite puzzlement, and occasionally less polite reaction of TV news anchors. But this incredulity reveals more about our own attitudes to climate change. Despite the rhetoric, we haven’t yet grasped how high, wide and deep the threat is. If it came in the shape of a Hollywood-style asteroid, all options would be on the table.

Since collective action isn’t working fast enough, he says, buying time needs to be part of the plan: we need anything that might slow the clock. And that includes “sensible, proportionate climate repair.”

This includes refreezing the Arctic:

Not as some aesthetic restoration, but an urgent fix—sealing a crack in a dam that threatens to sabotage our wider efforts if not prioritised.

The rationale is that we have almost certainly already passed an initial tipping point when it comes to the loss of Arctic sea ice:

The loss of summer Arctic sea ice—domino one—is accelerating the melting of ice on Greenland—domino two—which is the problem for sea levels, meaning dominos three through to 100 will almost all involve the devastation of our global cities.

What climate scientists are proposing here is a limited programme of geoengineering, to help stabilise Arctic temperatures,

most probably achieved by the method of spraying salty sea water into the clouds over the Arctic. This will brighten them, reflecting sufficient sunlight in the summer to maintain the sea ice formed in the winter, and cut off this chain reaction at its source.

King also notes that this programme could be carried through by a small group of nations acting together, albeit with some degree of wider consent. He’d hoped that Britain might want to be in this group, although that doesn’t seem likely given the fossil fuel junkies currently running the place.

You can’t look at geoengineering without worrying, of course, which is probably why both Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson have used as the engine of plots for big climate change novels. But I’m also reminded that it’s at least 15 years since I saw Peter Harper of the National Centre for Alternative Technology do a talk where he said that we wouldn’t fix climate change without some “cunning plans”, such as geoengineering, although non-UK readers may not appreciate that his phrase here didn’t inspire confidence.

Sensible, proportionate, climate repair seems like a better idea. And if people like Sir David King are now suggesting this, we probably have to accept that we are going to need it to buy us some time. There are risks—but by now the risks of not doing it seem a lot more serious.

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2: Half a life in scenarios: remembering Napier Collyns

I wanted to mark the death in the past few days of the scenarios practitioner Napier Collyns at the age of 95. He’s almost invisible in much of the literature, but he worked at Shell in the scenarios team—from its earliest days—with Pierre Wack, and then was a co-founder of the Global Business Network with Peter Schwarz when Schwarz left Shell. He was about to hit Shell’s retirement age at the time.

I’m grateful to Christian Crews, the American futurist, who shared the news on the Association of Professional Futurists’ listserv, with the following note:

For many of us who were able to be a part of his extraordinary network he was a generous and thoughtful mentor. For all of us in the foresight and scenario planning field his impact on what we do is immeasurable. While I am saddened today with this news, I look ahead to the stories, tributes, and celebrations of Napier's life.

The fine American business writer Art Kleiner, a friend of Collyns, wrote a touching obituary note on LinkedIn which alluded to this same skill of drawing people in to the conversation:

Over the years he held every room steady for conversations that accomplished subtle but great things. Always he brought himself into the picture, in the most generous way, and that made it possible for others to do the same.

(Napier Collyns. Source: Triarchy Press.)

I met Napier Collyns’ once in the late 2000s, introduced by Noah Raford, and the three of us had a meal in a long-closed Chinese restaurant in the London Bridge area. Despite his vast experience, he was much more interested in listening than talking, and afterwards he generously read a draft of an article on scenarios that I was trying to write. More on that later on, but despite the Shell/GBN history, he clearly had a different view of what scenarios ought to do.

It happens that Ross Dawson interviewed Collyns in 2008, and I’ve gone back to re-read the transcript of that interview. Dawson calls him an “eminence grise”, but it would be more accurate to call him a connector. One of his roles at Shell was to nurture the group of “remarkable people” the scenarios team would draw on from outside of Shell in search of different perspectives.

When Dawson spoke to him, Shell had just produced its first “normative” scenario, ‘Blueprint’, in a pair with the decidedly un-normative ‘Scramble’. (You can read them here). And to be clear, Collyns had long left Shell by this time. My personal view here is that normative scenarios have a value as long as you’re brutally honest about the present circumstances¹, but Collyns had his doubts:

I think there’s a profound difference between normative scenarios and Pierre called action scenarios. The action scenario is that you look into the future, and the better you are at it, the abler you are to see different futures which have real meaning in life and you can believe in and you can believe in them over time. Gradually over time scenarios come and go. You know you have a scenario that seems plausible on day one but by year five or something it’s no longer plausible. Another scenario has taken its place.

Part of his concern is that normative scenarios become forms of prediction. Another part is that if you align with a normative scenario you might exclude perspectives on the future that are valuable to consider. And certainly it takes some discipline to make sure that you don’t do this.

But I think this also comes from his experience at Shell. He’d come into the scenarios team from elsewhere in Shell, and had a strong sense of the culture. Art Kleiner quotes him in his account of the Shell scenarios in The Age of Heretics, about the mood among the company managers when Pierre Wack and Ted Newland had just finished presenting the famous ‘Rapids’ scenarios that anticipated a significant increase in the price of oil:

"We were imagining things which were unimaginable chief among them this impending shortage. And I think we all knew that it would be rejected by the rest of the Group. Ted and Pierre weren't too involved with our colleagues in operations, but I was much closer to some of them; I counted them among my close friends. And now I had to put up with them regarding our ideas as mad. I was reminded of the myth of Cassandra—you tell the truth about the future but no one believes you—over and over and over and over again."

In his note on LinkedIn, Kleiner also writes that Collyns had “made it possible” for him to write The Age of Heretics.

It also becomes clear when you read accounts of the Shell scenarios that one of the reasons that the scenarios team talked about being able to respond to scenarios rather than trying to influence the future, is because of the decentralised nature of the organisation. The Planning group, which the scenarios team was part of, didn’t tell business units what to do. In other words, it was an organisational device to improve acceptance. And some of the benefit of the work was that the managers just got better at thinking ‘scenarically’, as Collyns told Dawson:

(I)f you are a scenaric thinker, you can’t think non-scenarically. And therefore you’ve got the rest of your life. So it’s not a question, do I have enough time in the next three days, or whatever. You have the rest of your life... I mean in Shell, I think what happened was that most of the best managers, after we introduced scenario planning, themselves became natural scenarists. And that’s how they thought.

When he read my draft article on scenarios (it was published in the APF’s 10th anniversary collection The Future of Futures in 2012) he pointed me towards an interview he’d done on scenarios in 2007. The Shell scenarios are often very analytical; the GBN 2x2, adapted from SRN, is often a bit reductive. So I was struck that someone who had spent the best part of 30 years in those two environments had a much more intuitive view of what scenarios were about:

“In my experience, scenario planning is an interpretive practice – it’s really closer to magic than technique. ... Look long enough, hard enough, and the pieces will fall into place. Magic is a very difficult thing – most people spend their whole life cutting magic out.”

When we met, he also demurred when I tried to call him a futurist. “I think I try to help my clients see a much bigger view of the present”, he said. That’s a line I still find myself using a lot when I talk about what futurists actually do.

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There’s a video of Dawson’s conversation with Napier Collins, if you want to watch it:

The photo of Napier Collyns, above, is taken from the cover of Napier Collyns: Memoir of a Networking Man, written by Richard Daglish and published by Triarchy Press.

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1. To use the phrase associated with the radical Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”