By Donella Meadows

–December 31, 1998–

My Y2K friends — the people who obsess about the disasters that will happen a year from now, when our computers fail to turn over properly to the year 2000 — are mad at me.  They want me to be a lot more worried than I am.  (I’m medium-worried.)

I understand how they feel.  I want people to be a lot more worried about global warming than they are.  (I’m worried sick.)

Which has got me thinking about what we worry about and why and how we react to each other’s cries of warning.  It is an age-old problem, how to react to a warning.  Humanity has built up a thick layer of myth on the subject.

We all know about Chicken Little, who got hysterical over nothing.  A handy story for people who are determined not to worry, such as the oil and coal companies, who want global warming to go away.  So they accuse the climate warners of being Chicken Littles, despite the fact that many of them are strikingly unhysterical scientists.

Chicken Little was also the epithet thrown at the first programmer to make loud noises about the Y2K problem.  That was back when there was actually time to do something about it.

Then we have the legend of the boy who cried “wolf” so often that he desensitized everybody to the threat of wolves.  The important difference between him and Chicken Little is that there was a real wolf.  The boy was operating more from fear than from knowledge about the actual whereabouts of the wolf, but his fear was justified.  The moral for worriers is: watch your timing.  The moral for non-worriers is: just because a warning was wrong last time doesn’t mean it will be next time. Remember the chilling Greek myth about Cassandra?  She had the ability to predict the future combined with the curse that nobody would believe her.  Her forecasts of disaster were always ignored and always accurate.

The Y2K folks feel like Cassandras, I’m sure, and my heart goes out to them.  When it comes to global warming I feel like Cassandra.  But I can see that the extreme edges of both the Y2K and the environmental movements do sound like Chicken Littles.  The media don’t help, as they first ignore warnings, forcing the alarmists to raise their pitch to attract attention, then catch on to the story and raise the pitch still further.

So which are they, these Y2K folks, these global warming folks?  Chicken Littles?  Cassandras hoping we will break the myth and listen to them?  Are there real wolves?  How is the ordinary busy person to figure that out?

I think we could, if we weren’t so busy trying to handle our own small crises close at hand amid a chorus of alarms about global crises, from economic meltdowns to species extinction to incoming asteroids.  If we could only focus, most of us have the sense to sort out real problems from hype.

We know we should discount the extremists and the popular media — though it’s hard, because they make so much noise.  We should listen to the quieter people who know what they’re talking about.  The people I believe on the Y2K story are the programmers who wrestle with the actual computer code.  (One of them once told me that she wondered why anyone trusted computers enough to get on an airplane.)  The people I believe on the climate issue are climatologists, not economists, not coal companies.

We know to look for suspicious motives, though they are often hidden.  It took some journalistic investigation to discover that the most visible greenhouse skeptics are virtually all in the pay of fossil fuel interests.  It’s not hard to figure out that the calm official who knows beans about computers but is assuring us that Y2K is no problem in his organization (or that global warming might be good for us) is just covering his you-know-what.  (A new myth is emerging, started by tobacco and nuclear power and chemical company executives, assuring the public that there is no danger, NO DANGER.)

We know we should be especially concerned about warnings of a long-developing problem with a long reversal time, but those are the hardest warnings to respond to, because they require us to fend off disaster long before there’s any problem in sight.  In the meantime, there are so many other things on our to-do lists.

Global warming falls squarely in the category of the slowly unfolding disaster, which is why I sometimes feel like Cassandra.  There is hope, however, in the fact that everything we can do to stabilize the climate will bring us short-term benefits as well, as we switch from polluting, sickening, war-inciting, dangerous fossil fuels to solar energy and high efficiency.

There’s an upside to the Y2K problem too.  The short-term, necessary fix is to rewrite the code, which has a high probability of creating still more problems a bit farther into the future.  The long-term fix is to design our critical systems to be less coupled, more resilient, less dependent on technologies beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend fully.

When warnings come at us there’s a temptation to feel assaulted, feel helpless, want to shut one’s ears and get back to business as usual.  But it’s worth taking time to check them out.  There are real wolves out there.  There may also be unexpected opportunities.

Copyright Sustainability Institute 1998