catch the ball
Climate Change Is the Express Train to Hell — And We’re On It | by umair haque | Sep, 2022 | Eudaimonia and Cohttps://eand.co/climate-change-is-the-express-train-to-hell-and-were-on-it-2b97b850d9f3people assume that the future distribution of temperatures is something like a bell curve, and in the center is the “likeliest” amount of warming, which is moderate. At the tails of the curve lies the “extreme” scenarios, which are “unlikely.” Assuming all that, people are constantly shocked and surprised by how fast and hard climate change is hitting. And that is because this mental model is wrong. The future distribution of temperatures is emphatically not a bell curve. It’s something much more problematic, and even frightening when you really think about it. It’s the precise opposite of a bell curve: a bimodal distribution. Not shaped like a gentle bell, but the diametrical inverse — a U-shape.
That means, in practice, that climate change is something very much like an all-or-nothing process. Either there’s a lot of it — or there’s a little. But a little is what we’ve got now — about 1.5 degrees or thereabouts, and that’s already mega-catastrophic. So what does “a lot” mean? And how is it to happen? Why is climate change risk not bell-curved, but bimodal?
Because climate change is a nonlinear process. We humans don’t do well with those, and I’ll come back to that — but briefly, we’re used to linearity: linear growth in economies, populations, and so forth. Here, when it comes to climate change, we’re dealing with something much, much more dangerous, something existentially, ontologically different — something fundamentally nonlinear in its very essence. We are totally unused to that, mentally, socially, culturally. What else is nonlinear? A pandemic, for example. Nonlinear processes can suddenly tip, explode, burst, bifurcate — shattering the boundaries of our assumptions of linear “normality.”
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We’re making a mistake. Climate change isn’t the regular train. We’re about to catch the express train to hell. We can’t just stop anywhere we like, we’re discovering. The next stop? It might be way, way further north than we want to go. It might be in such a desolate place that our very survival is in question.
Everyone should understand this logic. Too few do. Now you know. Because the obvious conclusion is: we had better stop as much of that nonlinear process of acceleration, now, as we can, because once this ride starts in earnest? There’s probably not going to be a next stop, except hell.