ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — I first heard about global warming being attributable to human activity about 50 years ago. Back then, it was just a curiosity, a matter of academic discussion. It didn’t engage the environmental movement, which marshaled opposition to nuclear and firmly advocated coal as an alternative.

Twenty years on, there was concern about global warming. I heard competing arguments about the threat at many locations, from Columbia University to the Aspen Institute. There was conflicting data from NASA and other federal entities. No action was proposed.

The issue might have crystallized earlier if it hadn’t been that between 1973 and 1989, the great concern was energy supply. The threat to humanity wasn’t the abundance of fossil fuels. It was the fear that there weren’t enough of them.

The solar and wind industries grew not as an alternative but rather as a substitution. Today, they are the alternative.

Now, the world faces a more fearsome future: global warming and all of its consequences. These are on view: sea-level rise, droughts, floods, extreme cold, excessive heat, severe out-of-season storms, fires, water shortages, and crop failures.

Sea-level rise affects the very existence of many small island nations, as the prime minister of Tonga, Siaosi Slavonia, made clear here at the annual assembly of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental group with 167 member nations.

It also affects densely populated countries like Bangladesh, where large, low-lying areas may be flooded, driving off people and destroying agricultural land. Salt works on food, not on food crops.

Sea-level rise threatens the U.S. coasts — the problem is most acute for cities such as Boston, New York, Miami, Charleston, Galveston and San Mateo. Flooding first, then submergence.

How does human catastrophe begin? Sometimes it is sudden and explosive, like an earthquake. Sometimes it advertises its arrival ahead of time. So it is with the Earth’s warming.

Delegates at the IRENA assembly felt that the bell of climate catastrophe tolls for their countries and their families. There was none of the disputations that normally attend climate discussions. Unity was a feature of this one.

The challenge was framed articulately and succinctly by John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate. Kerry’s points:

—Global warming is real, and the evidence is everywhere.

—The world can’t reach its Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 or the ultimate one of net-zero carbon by 2050 unless drastic action is taken.

—Warming won’t be reversed by economically weak countries but rather by rich ones, which are most responsible for it. Kerry said 120 less-developed countries produce only 1 percent of the greenhouse gases while the 20 richest produce 80 percent.

—Kerry, notably, declared that the technologies for climate remediation must come from the private sector. He wants business and private investment mobilized. 

The emphasis at this assembly has been on wind, solar and green hydrogen. Wave power and geothermal have been mentioned mostly in passing. Nuclear got no hearing. This may be because it isn’t renewable technically. But it does offer the possibility for vast amounts of carbon-free electricity. It is classed as a “green” source by many government institutions and is now embraced by many environmentalists.

The fact that this conference has been held here is of more than passing interest. Prima facie, Abu Dhabi is striving to go green. It has made a huge solar commitment to the Al Dhafra project. When finished, it will be the world’s largest single solar facility. Abu Dhabi is also installing a few wind turbines.

Abu Dhabi has a four-unit nuclear power plant at Barakah, with two 1,400-megawatt units online, one in testing and one under construction. Yet, the emirate is a major oil producer and is planning to expand its production from more than 3 million barrels daily to 5 million barrels.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made oil more valuable, and even states preparing for a day when oil demand will drop are responding. Abu Dhabi isn’t alone in this seeming contradiction between purpose and practice. Green-conscious Britain is opening a new coal mine.

The energy transition has its challenges — even in the face of commitment and palpable need. The delegates who attended this all-round excellent conference will find that when they get home.

In the United States, utilities are grappling with the challenge of not destabilizing the grid while pressing ahead with renewables. Lights on, carbon out, is tricky.

It is easy to start hyperventilating over classified documents. It isn’t the classification but what is in the documents that counts. Much marked classified is rubbish.

I have been around the classification follies for years. In 1970, I did what might be called a study, but it was just a freelance article on hovercraft use by the military. I was paid $250 to write it.

In those days, there was no easy way to copy a document. The standard was to put several sheets of paper in a typewriter with carbon sheets between them. Like any other journalist, I started by going to the best library I could access — in this case, The Washington Post library. I read what was available, largely newspaper clippings, and wrote the article.

Arctic, a consulting company, paid me to write it, and I forgot about it. A couple of years later, I wanted the article — probably to use to get other work — and I asked Arctic for it. They said it had been delivered to the Pentagon long since, and I had better ask the commissioning Department of Defense office.

I did that and was told that I couldn’t have the article, nor could I even look at it because it had been “classified,” and I didn’t have clearance.

Like so much else, it had gone into the dark underworld of the classified from whence few pieces of paper ever return.

When James Schlesinger became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971, one of the first things he did was revamp document classification. He told me that the AEC was classifying far more than was necessary and, as a result, the system wasn’t safer but more vulnerable.

His argument was that for classification to work, the people managing classified material had to have confidence that it was truly deserving of secrecy. He directed the declassification of the trivial and increased the security surrounding what was vital.

Schlesinger was succeeded as chairman by Dixy Lee Ray. At the time, I covered the nuclear industry, and Ray became a social friend and a subject.

Once, Ray and I went to dinner at the historic Red Fox Inn in Middleburg, Virginia. After a swell meal, we walked to her limousine in the parking lot behind the inn. She had something in her briefcase that she wished me to have.

But Ray always had her two dogs with her. One was a huge gray wolfhound, and the other was a smaller gray dog, which looked like the wolfhound but was half the size.

The dogs were in the car’s front seat, and a high wind was blowing. Ray opened one back door, and I opened the other. Then she opened her briefcase and was rifling through the contents — some of which were marked as classified with a telltale, red X — when the big wolfhound jumped onto the back seat. He knocked over the briefcase, and the wind blew documents all over the parking lot.

It was a security crisis. Not that Soviet agents were dining at the Red Fox Inn that night, but if any document marked as secret was found and handed to the police, a major scandal would have resulted.

For the best part of an hour, Ray, myself and her driver scoured the parking lot, the grassy areas and the bushes for documents.

In the early morning, I drove back to the inn to ensure we had made a clean sweep. State secrets in the parking lot of a pub make for hot headlines and end careers.

In the age of computers, classified documents — and who knows if they should be marked as such — are much less likely to be put into paper folders.

Once, the Congressional Joint Committee, which oversaw the Atomic Energy Commission, held a hearing in its secure hearing room in the U.S. Capitol, where all the documents before the members and the witnesses were marked “eyes only.” The hearing had to be canceled because no one could say anything.

Also, at one of the major nuclear weapons laboratories, I deduced what a machine I was told was used for conducting “scientific experiments” really was. The director assured the technician showing it, “Don’t worry, King is too stupid to know what it is.” He was right, and another state secret was saved.

A perfect storm is gathering over the electric utility industry in the United States. It may break this year, next year or the year after, but break it will.

That is the consensus from utility executives I have been talking to over the past month. Several issues together amount to a clear danger of widespread blackouts and brownouts in the coming years. They come under the rubric of “transition.”

There are, in fact, two transitions stretching the electric utility industry. One is the climate imperative to turn from fossil fuels, primarily coal and natural gas with a smidgeon of oil, to renewables, almost totally wind and solar.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reckons that electricity from solar and wind will rise this year from 24 percent to 26 percent and that natural gas, the workhorse of the generation mix, will fall from 38 percent to 36 percent. The balance is dwindling coal use at 19 percent, and nuclear, hydro and geothermal generation making up the rest.

That leaves a significant need for new renewable generation: That is the first transition. It isn’t going as fast as the environmental lobby, or the Biden administration, would like, nor even as fast as the utilities would like. It has been substantially crimped by the supply chain tangle.

The American Public Power Association and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association have been vocal about the shortage of pole transformers. The supply has dried up. Without transformers, new hookups are impossible and old ones are threatened if the transformers fail. The waiting list for something as simple as a bucket truck is three years.

Recent legislation has poured money at an unprecedented rate into the development of renewables, but none of it will help in the short term. It is a case of trying to force more of something into a bladder that is expanding too slowly and that can’t expand faster because of multiple restraints. A utility executive told me that the money is, if anything, making matters worse.

One of the things most concerning to the utilities is the fate of natural gas, both for its availability and price. Gas remains the principal go-to fuel for utilities. Many regard gas as a storage system even if they aren’t burning it to generate power daily.

Gas is special because it is relatively clean, it can be stored, and it can be installed in a short time at many locations. It doesn’t require trains, as does coal, and it works in any weather if the plants have been properly weatherized. Also, gas is very efficient so more of it can be transformed into electricity through so-called combined-cycle plants. It beats coal and nuclear hands down on the simplicity of the infrastructure it needs. Its efficiency is rated at about 64 percent versus 32 percent, or thereabouts, for coal.

Many utility executives believe gas should be the primary way we store energy. They advocate maintaining a robust gas infrastructure so that it can come online quickly when needed and can run for as long as needed, unlike batteries.

But national gas policy is confusing. We want gas to be sent to Europe but not piped to New England, which may have an electricity deficit this winter, if not the next.

The second transition, working in tandem with the first, is electrification.

The United States is already headed toward a totally electrified transportation system, but heavy industry, like steel and cement, is also switching to electricity. Demand is showing the first signs of explosive growth. By 2050, demand will have more than doubled, according to many surveys.

While that alone is destabilizing, there is a wild card: the new unpredictable weather behavior.

This winter so far, we have had floods in California, freezing in Texas, tornadoes in the Midwest, and record snowfall in Buffalo. Add this to the other variables in electricity delivery, and you have a very troubling picture with such things as attacks on substations, cyberattacks and that pesky supply chain.

My advice: Keep spare batteries handy and a good supply of canned food. If you are sitting in the dark, you don’t want to be hungry.

There are no new years, just new dates.

As the old year flees, I always have the feeling that it is doing so too fast; that I haven’t finished with it, even though the same troubles are in store on the first day of the new year.

Many things are hanging over the world this transition. None is subject to quick fixes.

Here are the three leading, intractable mega-issues:

First, the war in Ukraine. There is no resolution in sight as Ukrainians survive as best they can in the rubble of their country, subject to endless pounding by Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is as ugly and flagrant an aggression as Europe has seen since days of Hitler and Stalin.

Eventually, there will be a political solution or a Russian victory. Ukraine can’t go on for very long, despite its awesome gallantry, without the full engagement of NATO as a combatant. It isn’t possible that it can wear down Russia with its huge human advantage and Putin’s dodgy friends in Iran and China.

One scenario is that after winter has taken its toll on Ukraine, and the invading forces, a ceasefire-in-place is declared, costing Ukraine territory already held by Russia. This will be hard for Kyiv to accept — huge losses and nothing won.

Kyiv’s position is that the only acceptable borders are those which were in place before the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. That almost certainly would be too high a price for Russia.

Henry Kissinger, writing in the British magazine “The Spectator,” has proposed a ceasefire along the borders that existed before the invasion of last February. Not ideal but perhaps acceptable in Moscow, especially if Putin falls. Otherwise, the war drags on, as does the suffering, and allies begin to distance themselves from Ukraine.

A second huge, continuing crisis is immigration. In the United States, we tend to think that this is unique to us. It isn’t. It is global.

Every country of relative peace and stability is facing surging, uncontrolled immigration. Britain pulled out of the European Union partly because of immigration. Nothing has helped.

This year 504,00 are reported to have made it to Britain. People crossing the English Channel in small boats, with periodic drownings, has worsened the problem.

All of Europe is awash with people on the move. This year tens of thousands have crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa and landed in Malta, Spain, Greece, and Italy. It is changing the politics of Europe: Witness the new right-wing government in Italy.

Other migrant masses are fleeing eastern Europe for western Europe. Ukraine has a migrant population in the millions seeking peace and survival in Poland and other nearby countries.

The Middle East is inundated with refugees from Syria and Yemen. These millions follow a pattern of desperate people wanting shelter and services, but eventually destabilizing their host lands.

Much of Africa is on the move. South Africa has millions of migrants, many from Zimbabwe, where drought has worsened chaotic government, and economic activity has come to a halt because of electricity shortages.
Venezuelans are flooding into neighboring Latin American countries, and many are journeying on to the southern border of the United States.

The enormous movement of people worldwide in this decade will have long-lasting effects on politics and cultures. Conquest by immigration is a fear in many places.

My final mega-issue is energy. Just when we thought the energy crisis that shaped the 1970s and 1980s was firmly behind us, it is back — and is as meddlesome as ever.

Much of what will happen in Ukraine depends on energy. Will NATO hold together or be seduced by Russian gas? Will Ukrainians survive the frigid winter without gas and often without electricity? Will the United States become a dependable global supplier of oil and gas, or will domestic climate concerns curb oil and gas exports? Will small modular reactors begin to meet their promise? Ditto new storage technologies for electricity and green hydrogen?

Energy will still be a driver of inflation, a driver of geopolitical realignments, and a driver of instability in 2023.

Add to worsening weather and the need to curb carbon emissions, and energy is as volatile, political, and controversial as it has ever been. And that may have started when English King Edward I banned the burning of coal in 1304 to curb air pollution in the cities.

Happy New Year, anyway.

While the rafters are ringing with praise for the nuclear fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, let me inject a sour note. This isn’t the beginning of cheap, safe, non-polluting electricity.

It is a scientific milestone, not an electricity one. Science tantalizes, but it also deceives. Often the mission turns out not to be the one for which years of scientific research were aiming.

I would remind the world that science stirred great hope — futilely — with the idea of superconductivity at ambient temperatures after some laboratory success.

The history of fusion is a clear illustration of expectation dashed, revived, resurrected and dashed again. Now there is some hope with a stunning lab success: the first future experiment with “gain,” meaning more energy came out of the experiment than went into it.

Fusion has been the goal, the light at the end of the tunnel, for nuclear researchers for more than 60 years. In that time, there have been false prophets, failed attempts, elaborate claims and just hard slog.

That hard slog has shown what is possible: more power has been achieved in a fusion experiment for a fraction of a second. That is a huge success, but it isn’t limitless electricity, as some have heralded.

Fission — which makes possible our power reactors and warships — is splitting the atom to release heat, which is converted, via steam, into electricity.

Fusion, beguiling fusion, seeks to do what happens in stars and the sun — fusing two atoms together to produce heat, which, in a reactor, would be used to create steam and turn turbines, making electricity.

Governments and researchers have salivated over the possibility of fusion for decades, and it has been well-funded worldwide compared with other energy sources.

Getting fusion temperatures at or above those on the sun must be achieved to fuse two deuterium atoms together. Deuterium, also called “heavy hydrogen,” is an isotope of hydrogen. If you can do that and sustain the reaction for months and years, you can design a reactor that would create steam, or use some other fluid, to turn a turbine.

There are two approaches scientists have used to get fusion. One is inertial fusion, used in the breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, near San Francisco, which involves hitting a pellet with a concentrated beam of energy: The lab used 192 super-powerful lasers to get fusion.

In the early 1980s, I spent time at Livermore and watched an experiment to hit the target with big accelerators. There were, as I recall, eight of them the size of cars. The research scientist showing me the facility said that accelerators the size of locomotives were needed to continue the experiments.

The other approach to get fusion is the tokamak, a Russian word describing a doughnut-shaped machine where plasma is superheated with electricity, and the whole thing is held together in powerful magnetic fields. This is the technology being pursued internationally by a 35-nation consortium at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in Cadarache, southern France.

This tokamak, or toroidal approach, is the one most favored in the community to succeed eventually as a source of heat to make electricity.

Also, a lot of solid work on fusion has been done at the General Atomics facility in La Jolla, California, and at research facilities across the United States and worldwide. I visited the General Atomics site many times, crawled inside the machine, and wondered at the math and science that have gone into the pursuit of fusion.

Back in the 1970s, physicist Keeve “Kip” Siegel believed he could achieve fusion with simple, off-the-shelf optical lasers. He died of a stroke in March 1975 while testifying before the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy in defense of his laser fusion research.

Bob Guccione, founder and publisher of Penthouse, hooked up with a former member of Congress from Washington state, Mike McCormack, and together they sought to promote fusion.

Two eminent scientists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, thought they had a breakthrough with so-called cold fusion. But this chemical process hasn’t panned out.

When I was looking at that fusion experiment at Livermore in the early 1980s, the researcher showed me a wonderful new way of communicating with other scientists around the world on his computer. I thought it was just a Telex on steroids and went back to questions about fusion, despite my guide’s enthusiasm for the new communications system.

It was the internet, and I missed the big story — as big as a story can get — to keep reporting on fusion. You can see why I may be soured.

 

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Photo: During the Dec. 13 press conference announcing ignition, Department of Energy Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration Jill Hruby said in achieving ignition, LLNL researchers have “opened a new chapter in NNSA’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program,” enabling scientists to modernize nuclear weapons and unlock new avenues of research in nuclear science.

In medieval times, aggressors cut the water supply and poisoned the wells. In the 21st century, they go for the electric supply.

The aggressors today know that electricity is a vital commodity; without it, civilized life fails, suffering begins. It is a war of special cruelty against the civilian population.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose forces haven’t fared well on the ground against the Ukrainian military, has turned to the civilian population. He has unleashed a vicious campaign against Ukraine’s electric grid.

The unfolding result — winter is just beginning — is untold suffering. There is no quick fix, no way to fly in electricity as you can fly in food and munition, and no equal retaliation. The vulnerability lies in the nature of electricity itself. It is a quintessentially complex, real-time system.

When an electric system is harmed, it is incapacitated for months and even years. A storm passes through, trees fall on the lines, and crews repair them quickly or bypass the damaged transmission.

But when the guts of the system — the sophisticated interplay of wires and substations, turbines, power electronics and myriad connectors — are damaged, power can be off for months, and that assumes that there isn’t a war raging.

This vulnerability has just been exhibited by an attack with firearms on a substation in North Carolina. A turbine was shot up, and 30,000 people will be without electricity for days and possibly weeks. That scenario is with the full resources of U.S. power companies, working in unison, to help restore power.

Imagine trying to get power back online with precision weapons raining on parts of a grid? Realize that much of a bulk power supply system is bespoke; that big things like turbines aren’t sitting on a shelf. They are usually made to order, mostly in China nowadays.

If you have the stomach for it, imagine the suffering in Ukraine at the start of winter: no light, no heat, no water because electricity pumps city water. Europe is set for a brutal winter, but nothing like the catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine.

First, Europe, like much of the world, is trying to move from fossil fuels to renewables. But it has been a messy transition, especially in Britain, where the expectations for a smooth transition were too rosy.

The British failed to build enough gas storage in the hope it wouldn’t be needed; shilly-shallied for years about committing to new nuclear power; and had an absolute confidence that the wind in the North Sea was a steady force.

Then things went wrong for Britain.

The first was the wind drought of last autumn in the North Sea and across Europe. It had a particular effect on Britain, which had to use more of its gas reserves to get through — and so was set for near disaster when the Russian war against Ukraine erupted nine months ago, pushing the price of gas up tenfold. British electric prices have soared, and the government has had to promise to pay substantial subsidies to affected households.

Germany, though, is the poster child for what not to do.

First, Germany has allowed itself to rely on Russia for nearly 40 percent of its natural gas — a principal fuel for electric generation — while, at the same time, closing its very reliable nuclear power plants. Germany also imports large quantities of petroleum and hard coal from Russia.

Germany isn’t only a problem to itself, but it also may be one for its neighbors in Europe. It is the richest country in Europe, and there is some fear that it will use some of its wealth to buy gas and push prices higher. That hasn’t happened, but it is a fear expressed across the energy sector.

Another fear is that as Germany needs so much gas to keep its industrial machine going that it will break ranks and cut a side deal with Russia, throwing Ukraine under the bus. But that hasn’t happened either.

The big challenge for Europe is how it will defend the remains of the Ukrainian grid, how fast it can help Ukraine restore power to the whole country, and how it might block the merciless aerial assault.

That is a political and security question for Europe and the United States: How far will the allies go in risking a nuclear war?

The lesson of Ukraine is clear: Protecting the physical infrastructure of the electric supply, the grid, is as much a part of national security as is cybersecurity.

Trying to predict the future of the internet or even to see how it will become a reliable source of fact, like old-fashioned newspaper and television reporting, is to my mind the equivalent of standing on the sand spit at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and predicting the future of aviation.

As the effect of the internet evolved, publishers of yore wished it away. I was one of those. Although I did tell the Newsletter Publishers Association way back that putting a print story down a wire wasn’t enough, that they should develop products for this new medium.

A few were up early and caught the worm while newsletter publishers like me slept in — notably The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Economist. They embraced and adjusted their offerings for the internet.

They are all publications that traditionally have had a preponderance of readers interested in issues beyond local coverage. The Wall Street Journal has always had a business audience and adapted quickly.

The New York Times was able to leverage its global and national followers and convert them to reading online. The Economist had an obvious business and world affairs audience to tap into.

The Washington Post’s internet adoption was more dynamic.

When the Graham family sold The Post to the then-richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, many of us believed he would be another rich man buying a newspaper to keep it going and to reap the social opportunities that go with the franchise. But Bezos saw the future and poured money into the Post, not to keep it alive but to expand it hugely in the cyberworld. He was right and has pulled off a publishing coup.

What wasn’t seen by anyone I knew in the publishing world and isn’t in the literature is no one understood how the internet would suck up nearly all the advertising dollars.

The pure internet companies, peripherally in publishing, have vacuumed up the advertising, creating great wealth for their owners.

While they haven’t had a background in publishing, and haven’t even thought of themselves as publishers, they have added news — often generated by legitimate news organizations — as a giveaway, which they haven’t paid for; if you write for a newspaper or a magazine, you have been ripped off by an internet publisher.

The irony is that back in the 1980s and ’90s, newspaper and television properties were highly valued and selling for multiples never dreamed of. It was the time when Al Neuharth was building the Gannett chain and launching USA Today. I knew Neuharth, himself a newspaperman through and through.

Now that empire has been sold and many of its once-proud local titles are closed or look more like pamphlets than newspapers. The advertising, and with it the revenue, has gone to the internet behemoths.

But they aren’t newspapers, and their owners aren’t publishers. They are aggregators, and thanks to the wonder of the internet, they have a global presence and penetration beyond the wildest dreams of Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and the Sulzberger dynasty.

I salute those publications that are taking the fight to the internet by creating daily online editions and keeping the craft-of-old alive.

These include The New Yorker and The Spectator, an English magazine trying to get an American presence.

On a recent visit to Edinburgh, my wife and I ducked into a newsagent, the traditional British shop that sells newspapers, magazines and sundries, to buy some newspapers. Hanging above the shop’s entrance was a large blue sign advertising The Scotsman. The owner told my wife that he didn’t sell newspapers anymore, and nobody needed to read them.

If you know there is a war going on in Ukraine, it is because the traditional media has told you so, because brave reporters are there on the spot, not online. Repeat this line for Iran, China, Mexico to say nothing of Washington, Toronto, London, Rome, Moscow and Beijing.

We need the old media, often called the mainstream media. We earned that moniker. The Hill, Axios and Politico show where journalism might be headed nationally. But who will cover the statehouse, the school board and the courts? In the dark, all those institutions stray.

In a courthouse in Prince William County, Virginia, I asked about press coverage. The woman showing me around sighed and said, “We used to have reporters, they even had their own table, but not anymore.” Lady Justice had closed one eye.

Has the internet of things — the vast, interconnected, computer-centered ecosystem of today — reached a point where it is so complex, so multilayered, has so many architects, and has so many national interests embedded in it that it has become a threat to itself?

Will the electric grid, the financial system or the air traffic control apparatus implode not by the hand of a malicious hacker but because the system — which is now systems of systems — has become the most subtle threat it faces?

Worse, as the speed of telephony increases with 5G, will that speed up the system implosion with devastating consequences?

Will this technological meltdown be triggered from within by a long-forgotten piece of code, a failed sensor or inferior products in vital, load-bearing points in this system?

This kind of disaster from complexity is known as “emergent behavior.” Remember that concept. Likely, you will hear a lot about it going forward.

Emergent behavior is what happens when various objects or substances come together and trigger a reaction which can’t be predicted, nor can the trigger be predetermined.

Robert Gardner, founder and principal at New World Technology Partners and a National Security Agency consultant, tells me that the computer ecosystem is highly subject to emergent behavior in the so-called complex, adaptive system of systems which is today’s cyberworld. It is a world which has been built over time with new layers of complexity added willy-nilly as computing, and what has been asked of it, has become a huge, impregnable structure, beyond the reach of its present-day architects and minders, including cybersecurity aficionados.

In At The Creation

Gardner, to my mind, is worth listening to because he was, if you will, in at the beginning. At least, he was on hand and worked on the computer evolution, starting in the 1970s when he helped build the first supercomputers and has consulted with various national laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. He has also played a key role in the development of today’s super-sophisticated financial computing infrastructure, known as “fintech.”

Gardner says of emergent behaviors in complex systems, “They can’t be predicted by examining individual components of a system as they are produced by the system as a whole — facilitating a perfect storm that conspires to produce catastrophe.”

Complexity is the new adversary, he says of these huge, virtual systems of systems.

Gardner adds, “The complexity adversary does not require outside assistance; it can be summoned by minor user, environmental or equipment failures, or timing instabilities in the ordinary operation of a system.

“Current threat detection software does not seek or detect these system conditions, leaving them highly vulnerable.”

Gardner cites two examples where the system failed itself. The first example is when a tree branch which fell on a power line in Ohio set in motion a blackout across the Michigan, New York, and Canada. The system became the problem: It went berserk, and 50 million people lost power.

The second example is how something called “counterparty risk” sped the demise of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street colossus. That was when a single default embedded in the system initiated the implosion of the whole structure.

No Nefarious Actors

Of these, Gardner says, “There were no nefarious actors to defend against; the complex, heterogeneous nature of the systems themselves led to emergent behaviors.”

Going forward, the best practices in cyber hygiene won’t defend against catastrophe. The entwined systems are their own enemy. Utilities take note.

And the danger may get worse, according to Gardner.

The villain is 5G: the super-fast phone and data system now being deployed across the country. It will come in what are called “slices,” but for that you can read stages.

· Slice one is what is being built out now: It is faster than today’s 4G, which is what phones and data use currently. It features mobile broadband.

· Slice two, called “machine to machine,” is faster yet.

· Slice three will move vast quantities of data at astounding speeds which, if the data is damaging to the system and has occurred at an unidentifiable location, represents a threat to a whole tranche of human activity.

Self-destroying machines will be unstoppable when they have 5G slice three to speed bad information throughout their system and connected systems. Tech Armageddon.

A great voice is stilled. James “Jimbo” Bohannon died of cancer of the esophagus on Nov. 12. Only weeks earlier, he had to resign from his “Jim Bohannon Show,” the overnight broadcast that aired on 500 radio stations, largely AM, weeknights from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. ET.

Jim was a big man with a big voice, a big curiosity and a big heart. Over most of the 29 years that his show was on the air, I had the pleasure of being a guest from time to time.

At first, my wife, Linda Gasparello — a writer, broadcaster and an occasional guest on the show — and I would journey to a studio in suburban northern Virginia — the building always looked forbidding in the dark of night. Later, the show moved to the CBS studios on M Street in Washington. But in recent years, Bohannon broadcast from his home in Westminster, S.C.

As with most of us in the trade, I believe “in studio” trumps virtual. But one of the pleasures of radio is that it is portable and can be done with a phone anywhere. Before Jim took over the show, it was the springboard for Larry King, who once interviewed me in a bedroom in the Algonquin Hotel in New York. That was odd, but I was used to guesting on the radio from odd spots, like sitting in a parked car in a hotel lot overlooking the River Moy in Ballina, Ireland.

Jim’s show was a mixture of guests, whom he interviewed with genuine curiosity and gruff respect for views other than his own, and call-ins. He also was kind. I asked him to interview a friend, Ryan Prior, who was establishing a charity to support Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research and medical education. Bohannon asked informed and perceptive questions and elicited an interesting hour of broadcasting with his skill as an interviewer.

He was less indulgent of crazy folks. If you do call-in radio, you get crazies. When their rants began, Jim simply cut them off. No apology, but no indulgence either. Some were regulars and went to lengths to circumvent the security provisions of Westwood One, the show’s syndicator.

One technique was to use a different phone for each attempt, say a wife’s or a neighbor’s phone. I once said, “George, in St. Louis, did you take your medicine today?” Jim chuckled, but I doubt he would have addressed a caller that way. Jim had a superficial toughness — he was a Vietnam veteran — but his kindness always broke through.

Unlike many in the star business, Jim didn’t yearn, that I could discern, to emulate his predecessor, Larry King, becoming a television star. Like many, if not most, broadcasters, he loved radio. It is flexible, mobile and not slaved to technology and big crews.

That isn’t to say Jim didn’t enjoy doing television, but he was a radio man, having started in it, like many, when he was in high school — in his case, in his native Missouri. He found his footing in Washington, where he did some television and a lot of radio before taking over the late-night slot that uniquely fitted him.

Jim seemed supremely happy in the wee hours. So were his listeners from coast to coast who enjoyed his camaraderie, humor, wisdom and masterful interviewing.

The one talent that great commercial broadcasters must have is the skill in “hitting time” to accommodate syndicated radio advertising. Jim seamlessly guided his interviews to a full stop without the interviewees knowing they had been diverted to silence. It takes skill to do that. It also takes skill — and the love of craft — to be fresh night after night; and skill to elicit gems of truth and wisdom from reluctant subjects.

Jim had those talents, but I shall remember especially his talent for friendship. He has signed off but won’t be forgotten by those who knew him and shared the time of stars in the sky with a true star of the microphone.