Of the many weaknesses of human thought capacity is this one: the almost complete inability to grasp and think in terms of complex systems. Our climate is a complex system consisting of many complex subsystems. The inability to address climate change is, often, pure stupidity or driven by an ideological blindness. But, sometimes, it is just the limits of human intelligence.
Out climate, as a complex system, consists of many complex subsystems. The five major subsystems of the earth’s climate are: 1) the ocean system(s), 2) the atmospheric system, 3) the land system, 4) the life system, and 5) the behavior of the sun (the last one being completely out of our hands). Each of these has in itself complex subsystems. These all interact with each other to create the climate we live in.
A Simple Example of a Complex System
To get some idea of what’s happening, we can start with a more manageable, moderately complex system – traffic flow into or out of a major urban area during rush hour. The system is defined by the roads, the interchanges among the roads, the traffic management systems (like traffic lights), the relationship of the neighborhoods and homes to the work areas and specific buildings, etc.
The actors in this system are people and people can, generally, be pretty good at following the rules that allow this system to get everyone where s/he needs to go, in reasonable time.
And quite often people just make mistakes.
If everyone drives flawlessly, this system still has its inherent behavior where traffic will jam at certain places, be clear at other places, and change these patterns over time during the rush hour. When an individual driver makes a mistake, there is new behavior in the system as it tries to adapt (through combined individual behavior of many drivers), to the new condition(s) and to keep the traffic moving.
When we are sitting in traffic we are, I am certain, not aware of the immensity of the system we are sitting in and what is happening in detail on those roads and streets that we are not driving on.
Of course, over the years and with the increasing amount of computing power, there are many good models of traffic flow and these models have helped us understand the dynamics of the traffic flow system and have proposed changes to the system to make it more efficient getting you from A to B while making it more resistant to driver errors (and these days, computing power has given us personal tools to see the bigger system and make, hopefully, better driving choices).
The Climate Complex System
Our climate is a very complex system, far more complex than rush hour. For one thing, it spans the entire globe and includes the oceans, the atmosphere, and the living systems. It also behaves on geologic time scales most of the time.
Until it does not.
And this is where we are now and why climate change will likely proceed much faster than we had ever thought and why it is unlikely that we’ll be able to change what is happening any time soon.
Before I give an analogy to what’s happening, it is important to understand that complex systems have what are called equilibria. These are states of the whole system which are stable and often don’t easily change. Some equilibria are very stable, exhibiting only one state. Some are like a cluster of states which are very close together and where the system easily moves from one state to the other without much change. Some equilibria are unstable and once they are reached, the system quickly moves from there to another state.
The key things about a complex system with multiple equilibria are: 1) how easy is it to move from one equilibrium to another and 2) what is the speed with which the system moves from one particular equilibrium state to another.
We think that two things are true because we have been in a relatively stable climate condition for thousands of years: 1) we will stay here for another thousands of years and 2) that moving from the climate equilibrium we have been in for so long to another condition of the entire system will take a long time.
Both of these beliefs are wrong and we’re about to find out just how limited human thinking really is.
The Probable Nature of our Current Climate Equilibrium State
Here is the simplest example I can think of to explain what is likely about to happen (simplified).
Imagine you have a serving bowl on a table. The bowl has a flat spot on the bottom so it can sit without wobbling.
You place the bowl upright on the table and put a golf ball into it. If you let the ball roll down the side it will roll back and forth until it eventually stops at the bottom flat. If you push the ball up the wall, it will always come back to the bottom (unless you push with enough force to get it over the rim, but this is not important now). This is a stable equilibrium. The ball can be anywhere on the flat bottom and not move. We can nudge around a little on the flat part and it stays there. We can move it up the side and it will always return. Leaving aside escaping the bowl entirely, this is an unconditionally stable equilibrium. Furthermore, the work that we have to do to get the ball over the rim and out is large and so it is unlikely that this will ever happen.
Our current climate state of equilibrium is NOT LIKE THIS, although limited human thinking believes that it is.
Our climate is LIKE THIS STATE. Imagine we turn the bowl upside down so that the bottom flat is facing up. Also, let’s assume that the flat has a slight depression in it. When we put the ball onto the flat it rolls gently to the center of the depression and stays there. It is stable. If we nudge the ball slightly in any direction it will return to the center. But, because it is on a shallow depression on the flat, it is easy to nudge it to the edge where it will roll off. And what happens when it rolls off the edge? It leaves the current equilibrium state extremely fast, rolls down the side, and doesn’t come back.
In geologic terms, it is easy to roll the ball of our current climate equilibrium to the edge where, very unhappily, it is going to leave the current equilibrium state VERY FAST and go to another state that we can imagine, but not truly predict.
There are three things to note here: 1) it is relatively easy to move the ball out of this bowl-upside-down equilibrium, 2) when it leaves, it will leave fast, and 3) we don’t have a clue when it will stop or where it’s going.
On geologic time scales, fast here can mean just years, not centuries.
Nudging Ourselves Off the Edge
Let’s take our analogy a step further. We have a BB gun and we shoot a BB at the golf ball. Our BBs are super light so the golf ball doesn’t move much and kind of rolls back and forth on the flat of the bowl eventually resting at center. Then we move to another random location around the bowl and shoot again. The ball will repeat its behavior. And during a long-time climate equilibrium this is what happens. Seemingly random, but small changes occur in the climate (like mini-ice ages) due to the complex interaction of complex subsystems, but the basic climate equilibrium spot doesn’t change.
Now, suppose we take a shot and the ball moves sideways a bit. But before it returns to center, we take another shot and the ball moves farther away from center. We keep doing this, never allowing the ball to come back, but always pushing it away from center just a little bit with each shot. Eventually, a continuous series of small nudges all in the same direction and all close enough together in time so that the ball can’t roll back, will push it over the edge. And then, as we know, it has left this equilibrium point and gone somewhere else, fast.
This is what we have been and are doing. We are moving the climate equilibrium which we have prospered in for thousands of years into another state with a series of small nudges that cumulatively are pushing us over the edge. Once the climate rolls over this edge its movement to another climate state, or equilibrium, will be very fast. And we can’t stop it.
Here is one simple example of a subsystem in the climate system. Most everyone knows that the Gulf Stream brings moderately warm, equatorial water across the Atlantic to Europe making the climate there, even at the high latitude, fairly mild. If the Gulf Stream stops flowing, what conditions will Europe face? But, even more important, if it does stop flowing, do we human beings have the capacity to restart it? No. What about all of the other subsystems that, together, make up our current climate? Can we restart or restore those if they fail or change their behaviors? Unlikely all, but maybe some of them, like large forests. Unlike the traffic system, the climate system takes input from us, but largely operates independently of us (as it obviously did before we arrived on the scene).
And we, even those most involved in climate change, cannot really grasp the complexity of our global climate system, what the equilibrium points are, how fast or slow we move from one to the other, or what the series of nudges is that pushes the ball over the edge. What we have is evidentiary data that says that what we are collectively doing is bad, is increasing the average global temperature which will likely lead to other bad things. But we don’t know what, not exactly.
And because we can’t really understand the climate system, we can’t really specifically predict what is going to happen, and because of this, only a portion of humanity will agree to make the necessary sacrifices to give us a chance at reversing the damage. People just won’t understand the behavior of the global climate system in order that they can limit focus to their immediate surroundings and needs. The level of pain that will be required to change behavior is going to be staggering.
If I may just use a somewhat off topic example. Somewhere between 50M to 70M people died in WWII before most the world was willing to say enough and change their behavior to evolve, two steps forward and one step backward, to the second half of the 20th Century, by comparison more peaceful and less deadly.
To solve the problem of this very complex system, which is being shifted to another equilibrium by a collective series of nudges spread out all over the world and over many decades in time, but all affecting the same complex system and its subsystems, is nothing like anything the human race has ever collectively accomplished. If it were an alien invasion (to borrow from SciFi) the enemy would be clearly identifiable and we might find, as in the movies, real global cooperation. But, the behavior of a complex system is too difficult to grasp or identify or even explain.
It will take far more leadership and cooperation than even the current accords can imagine and far, far more than the current leadership of the US has the capacity or willingness to understand.
And this is the great failing of human beings. We simply cannot see the cumulative effect of a series of small, seemingly unrelated actions, on the complex state of a big system like our climate. And because of this failure, we are facing what is almost certain to be a severe and possibly very deadly change in our environment.
It is possible that our new climate equilibrium will be as benign and, more or less, as safe as the current one has been. If so, we will be miraculously lucky. If not, saying that it’s going to be hard is a severe understatement.
Note: Others have discussed climate change in these terms. There are references to be found on the Internet.