Even with all the attention finally being paid to global warming, I believe most people are seriously underestimating the possibility of sudden, drastic, truly frightening changes in our climate.
I've done a lot of reading about the subject that was once popularly known as "chaos theory" and more recently and broadly has come to be known loosely as complexity theory. Among the subjects this encompasses are nonlinearity, self-organizing systems, emergent behavior, fractals, reflexivity, feedback effects, cellular automata, and evolutionary algorithms. (Here is a good introduction, but there are many others books on the subject. Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point seems to be a businessy popularization of some of these ideas focussed on social examples, though I haven’t read it. )
One of the things that you develop when you focus on this subject (I also spent a lot of time back when my life was simpler playing around with fractals) is what has been called a "nonlinear intuition."
To oversimplify greatly, a linear relationship is one that follows a predictable path. If your temperature rises 5 degrees, you get 3 more inches of rain; if it rises 10 degrees, you get 6, etc. A nonlinear relationship enters the picture when, say, there's a mountain range, and if the temperature is above 60, you always get 3 inches of rain no matter what, but if it falls below 60, the clouds can no longer make it over the mountain range and you get zero. So, a 1-degree change at a certain point has drastic effects. That's nonlinear.
I didn't choose that example at random, of course, I read somewhere a few years ago that a relationship like that actually holds true in the Himalayas or somewhere.
And the larger point of course is that weather systems are like that – they are very nonlinear. Pumping x more tons of CO2 into the atmosphere will not necessarily have smooth, predictable effects. Someone once put it like this: if you take one rivet out of an airliner, nothing is going to happen. But if you keep removing them, at some point you will have a sudden catastrophic failure – the airplane will crash. If you pump a little carbon dioxide into the air, nothing happens, but at a certain point, the ice caps tumble into the sea, or the jet stream flips direction, or – who knows? Something crashes.
The result is that we're in a much, much more precarious situation than most people, with their linear intuitions, realize. Spontaneous global eco-collapse is a distinct, though probably remote, scientific possibility. Spontaneous much-bigger-than-anyone-expected eco-disruption is not only a possibility but perhaps frighteningly likely. Global eco-collapse is one of my (slightly tongue-in-cheek) "Seven Paths to Apocalypse" – but this is no joke.
I was hoping Gore would try to capture some of this in his movie, and he did allude to it a little if I recall, but even among that slice of the population that watched it, most, lacking a quirky interest in complexity theory, are not likely to catch the full flavor of the danger we may be facing.
News reports have been suggesting for the past several months that in the arctic we might be seeing just the kind of feedback effects that can lead to catastrophic changes. The melting of arctic ice is
a) reducing the amount of solar heat that is reflected back into space
b) accelerating the release of C02 that had long been trapped in the soil beneath the ice
Both of these effects of melting have the effect of increasing the pace of melting. That is just the kind of self-referential loop that leads to unstable nonlinearity and sudden discontinuities – aka big trouble. Ironically, what is often called a "snowball effect." I bet we're seeing it in the arctic because that's where we're looking most intensely – but it could happen in all kinds of ways in all kinds of places.
Just to get away from the ice caps, for example, did you know that the world’s coral reefs are crucial regulators of oceanic carbon dioxide and calcium, and are home to a quarter of all marine life? Did you know that a quarter of the world’s reefs have been destroyed, for example in the 1997-98 El Nino event, which killed 70% of all corals in the Indian Ocean from Africa to India?
Most of the media attention paid to global warming has been focused on a couple effects of the warming: the rise in sea levels, and the effects on species, such as polar bears. There has also been some discussion of an increase in hurricanes (since hurricanes are apparently nature’s way of transferring heat from the tropics toward the poles).
These are all essentially linear-minded (if totally valid) concerns. Warming goes up, sea levels go up, polar bears die, hurricanes increase. Warming goes up more, sea levels go higher, more polar bears die, more hurricanes hit.
What we should be most focused upon is the very real danger of sudden, unpredictable, radical changes in climactic conditions in some or many parts of the world.
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