Compounding, Curvy Lines and British wine
As we look 10 to 50 years down the line, our caveman brains keep us from understanding the potential of the climate breakdown. Our need to compartmentalize and simplify is incompatible with the complexity and interconnected nature of the climate breakdown’s devastating compounding effects. Quietly inching closer, the cumulative of the seemingly individual, independent impacts could manifest into social and economic issues that prove just as damaging as any of nature’s concoctions. These are pictures the public has yet to paint.
We only seriously consider what we know to be true and the more problems that interconnect and compound the more unknown variables will arise. Consequences don’t play out in a vacuum, they build and react to each other. We try to find simple answers to complicated questions, putting our hope in one-sided solutions. Sharpening our minds to the true nature of this challenge could be one of the best ways to start solving it.
Resisting Simplicity
Our default in imagining tomorrow is that it’ll look a lot like today. We imagine our dreams, ambitions and futures vividly untouched, and climate as something separate. Seminal systems thinker Donella Meadows explores this; “There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers, not fractions, to uniform not diversity and to certainties, not mystery… self-organizing, non-linear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable”. In breaking down her language we find invaluable tools to rewire our thinking and better understanding our future.
To start, “Non-linear” is referring to when the straight lines on the graph start to show off their curves. “Feedback [loops]” are when reactions return to then affect themselves, think people pulling money out in stock market crashes or panic in a movie theater. A common example in climate is the Albedo affect and how as more glacier ice melts, the color of the ice gets darker and reflects even less heat, accelerating further melting. A more relevant example is forest fires; with more drought and less water running through the Colorado River, forests are dryer and soil less capable of absorbing water, leading to an increase in fires far past their natural cycle which then releases all the carbon they store, further increasing the frequency and intensity of forest fires.
Next, tipping points, a soon to be climate buzzword. When thinking about tipping points imagine rolling a ball up a hill, if you push the ball up a bit, it simply rolls back into your hands. A tipping point is once you reach the top and the tiniest extra breeze will push the ball out of your control. Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, describes it as; “where a small change makes a big difference and changes the state or the fate of a system.”
When we hear about how the worst impacts of climate breakdown could be irreversible by 2030, we’re talking about tails. While this is a vague stat (and we always want to be critical of those sneaky general statistics) tails refer to how emissions don’t just go away but stay in the air long after emitted. Carbon dioxide lasts 20-200 years in the atmosphere, methane 10 years, and nitrous oxide around 115 years before being inhaled back into mother nature’s lungs, aka oceans, forests and peatlands, etc.
It’s intuitive to think that we have time to cut emissions once things start getting really bad, but right now we’re locking in the emissions for decades to come. Going carbon neutral by 2030 is so the repercussions and effects won’t be locked in for 2050, not 2031. Yes, innovation around Direct Air Capture and Geo-engineering is promising and potentially critical, but it’s also baked into a certain kind of thinking. One in which we get to rationalize to ourselves that we don’t need to make any drastic changes, innovation will come to our rescue. The rate of change also means that the difference in magnitude between 1.5C to 2 and 2 to 3C are very different. The rate also isn’t uniform with studies finding temperatures in Russia, China and India potentially hitting 4-5C, 3.5-4.5C and 3-5C while we record it hitting “3C”
Embracing Non-linearity and the Unknown
The last and most important bit of jargon – “inherently unpredictable”. The water will begin to boil over as the natural world collides into the social. Low probability, high impact events (often referred to as black swans) have affected modern society more than anything else, think the 2008 Market Crash, 911 and CoVid 19. As we’re reminded of the edges in which economic and political systems function, we don’t know how displacement, drought and crumbling infrastructure will play out. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision or attribution to the political battles that inevitably manifest from discussions around migration. All you need to do is look back to the Syrian refugee crisis, in which drought was a huge initial driver, to see the economic strain and polarization it cast across Europe. The knock on effects won’t happen all in a line but all at once.
The same goes for ecosystems. Due to how mind-bogglingly complex and interconnected our natural world is, the margin of error in predictions is high. In the natural world, climate tipping points still vary both in when and how they’ll tip and how those will interact with other ecological systems but being 5% off from predictions means little. As Climate Strategist Iain Watt illustrates, “What if we get churn, rather than linearity? If future climate jumps from turnip weather one year to grape weather the next, we don’t get turnips and grapes, we get failed harvests…”.
The Saiga Antelope in Kazakhstan is a prime example of unexpected consequences. Higher humidity and temperature patterns made previously harmless bacteria in the animal’s microbiome deadly, leading to an outbreak that killed more than 60% of their population. Just because we don’t know the extent to which the following examples will take place, doesn’t mean we don’t plan for them. We wear seat belts in case the car crashes, even though the likelihood of getting in a car crash is lower than some of the worst effects of the climate breakdown. CoVid-19 helped society begin to understand exponential curves, uncertainty, and how just because we’ve never seen something before, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
With the enormous potential consequences on the climate breakdown, even if the effects aren’t fully realized is it not worth acting on? Cambridge climate scientist, Mike Hulme, reaffirms, “given its huge impact and irreversible nature… to err on the side of danger is not a responsible option.” 2050 is often thrown around as a date for all the negative repercussions to come to fruition; however, plenty of that change will happen on the pathway there. That year is also when my kids are supposed to be going to their senior prom, learning to drive and getting uncontrollable boners. But as we continue to conceptualize the climate breakdown as if it’s an incremental challenge, the problems of today will begin to look a whole lot different tomorrow. So keep an eye on how the compounding compounds and factor in the unknown, because nature doesn’t always react in straight lines.
This article is apart of both our climate buzzwords and new framing series, read the next article all about the ecological tipping points here and more on the sociological feedback loops in the next article.