The Cascade
If we continue to react to climate change the way we’ve reacted to Covid, there is no way forward that isn’t catastrophic
Cascade Collapse, notes 2030–2060 — or “What’s so bad about a 2–3 C increase in the global average?”
I began this as a scratchpad document because of how often I’ve been asked to explain some of the basic principles that make “just” a few degrees C in global average temperatures such an existential threat, or why I am so concerned about our future.
Although much of this reads as fairly obvious to me, based on responses I thought it might be worthwhile to share it publicly, with a few caveats. This isn’t an essay or research project, but rather a collection of indicators used as illustrations of a larger picture of systemic effects, and how a couple of the pieces interact. For reference links I’ll mostly be using publicly available news articles, although most should have link and attribution to actual studies. I intend to keep these notes accessible and straightforward.
While I’ve studied and written on systems theory concepts and other related topics for other projects, I’m not a climate scientist, and I’m sure there are climate scientists and science journalists who have put it more clearly. However, I’ve also been surprised how little I’ve seen people tackling the larger picture created by all the moving parts, rather than focusing on one piece of the puzzle and giving lip service to the rest.
That is what I’m intending to point towards, and as a result I won’t be focused so much on the details, as they’re provided for illustrative purposes.
Background Topics:
- Discussion of cascade in networks, overview video presentation
- Cascade Failure wiki
- Phys.org overview
- Global Tipping Points:
Here we call the linkages between tipping systems and/or other nonlinear components as tipping interactions, which could have a stabilising or a destabilising effect. The most extreme case is the situation in which the tipping of element ‘A’ causes a subsequent tipping of element ‘B’. Eventually, a tipping cascade might result in a fundamental change in the Earth’s equilibrium climate.
For example, disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) can lead to an abrupt shift in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), while an abrupt change in AMOC strength can lead to an intensification of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Interactions between climate tipping systems could effectively lower the thresholds for triggering a tipping event as compared to those individual tipping systems in isolation (Wunderling et al., 2021a; Klose et al., 2020). Moreover, one or more tipping events could activate processes leading to additional CO2 emissions into the atmosphere; permafrost thaw and forest dieback are typical examples of such additions of stored CO2 into the atmosphere via positive amplifying feedbacks (Wunderling et al., 2020; Lenton et al., 2019; Steffen et al., 2018).
“What’s a couple of degrees matter anyway?”
Current estimates range between an average of +2 to 2.8C by end of century with some mitigations in place, however +2C will likely be reached between 2050–60 even with moderate improvement in emissions. +1.5C will likely be first reached within the next 10 yrs, and established as a norm sometime in the following decade. +2.5–3 C is likely by 2100 in the case of mitigation efforts that are currently lagging further behind than the “Greenwashed” messaging might imply.
The worst outcomes (+5C or more) are becoming increasingly unlikely if mitigation continues and there aren’t unforeseen runaway effects, however I’d like to consider what this sort of pyrrhic “victory” will actually look like, for ourselves and our descendants.
Of course, the average across a planet will be very unevenly distributed in point of fact, which is why we are already seeing more than 2 C in certain areas. What these numbers actually mean is less clear to most, and is often framed in anemic ways like “increased chances of severe weather.”
To understand why it matters, you need to think about how complex systems behave.
Physical Processes
For starters I want to highlight some although certainly not all of the large scale physical processes that seem to be in play.
Simultaneous Rapid Climate Shifts, first-tier results e.g.
- Melting e.g. Greenland, Antarctica, Glaciers. Note melt-rate 100x previous estimates. Secondary melt effects like Albedo, North Atlantic current etc etc (which may ultimately Europe radically colder, and produce increasingly chaotic weather patterns if it ceases) further pushing on the melt and collapse of ice shelves.
- Significant sea level rise will lag behind many other factors, but future melt is also effectively “baked in”, even with extreme mitigations. Think of stopping an oil tanker moving at speed — it can take miles after the engines are reversed.
- Flooding including areas not previously prone to flooding.
- Desertification and drought including areas not previous prone to either.
- Acidification of oceans, signs at poles. Also linked with Inter-global effects of arctic ice.
- Permafrost collapse & methane acceleration.
Think of all these factors operating simultaneously and in tandem. All these and similar simultaneous factors involved in feedback systems that pushes and accelerates 2nd tier results:
- Crop yield reduction, then collapse of food webs after initial commodity price spirals after globalization/offshoring can no longer compensate for rate of change. We are already starting to see the initial leading indicators of this process underway.
- Drier dries and wetter wets, also compounded effects of sudden deluges in drought stricken areas. (Wetter dries? Such as the atmospheric river deluges in California).
- Effect of atmospheric rivers on ice extent in the arctic.
- Glacial lake outburst, other melting effects.
- Economic instability, crashes, and their effects of human behavior and society, which like the other factors can drive more secondary and tertiary effects (which themselves can, etc).
The effects of unprecedented changes across the board on economic stability, within an already critically top-heavy economic system, are varied and hard to predict in the specific, but in the abstract it’s clearly only a boon for disaster capitalists with the assets to burn, and a very short-term one at that.
At first this will likely appear as a secondary invisible “inflation” driver (pressure on supply, bottlenecks on distribution). By the time it reaches critical mass with basic resource availability, it’ll become clear what was and wasn’t actually a “market effect” (in economic terms, from within the system, rather than external, although supply/demand factors are also inextricably tied into climate change so this distinction is likely only notional).
- Various high risk, low probability events in any given year, but the degree of incidence predicted will make that probability a near certainty given sufficient time. For example, Pandemics (knock on effects from disability, degrading healthcare infrastructure) + new vectors created by ecosystem responses to rapid change (new habitats, etc). Increased opportunity for malaria is one of many examples, although it is the unknown unknowns here that are particularly concerning.
- Unprecedented populations of refugees and migrants, trying to survive in the current geopolitical disorder. E.g. look at the recent crisis in Pakistan. The water crisis in the US west alone could create 40 million climate refugees within ~10–20 years at current rate.
- Deforestation, destruction of wetlands, poor residential choices affecting entire ecosystems. Further reducing carbon sequestration.
- Increasingly extreme and chaotic storms, e.g. hurricanes. Storms holding and thus dumping more water, possibly on drought stricken land. Storms unleashing climate effects not normally seen in a given geographic region.
- Authoritarianism and nativism, wars (e.g. Syria, Ukraine), political instability have all been connected with climate change as a driver. In the case of increasing resource scarcity, it becomes a near certainty that there will be more conflict, both within and between nations.
- Population / ecosystem diversity collapse, for example amongst insects. Some species may develop regional advantages, although the likely rate of change may outstrip the capacity of all but the most adaptive. Possible collapse into near monocultures, which are more brittle. (Much of what has already occurred in this direction is the result of industrial farming practices, not climate change, however, climate change may become an increasingly potent factor).
- Unpredictable ecosystem changes such as Borealization.
- Wet-bulb temp maxes to be exceeded in tropics. 2C warming will make more areas unfit for human habitation while simultaneously pushing the need for migration.
- Fires (est ~50%+ more by 2050), air pollution As with many of these effects, these could be improved partially by local policies unrelated to climate change, but so-called climate change makes those changes increasingly unlikely within the context of social networks.
- Air pollution. An under-considered factor, which already results in a significant loss of life and pressure on healthcare systems.
All of these factors point towards obvious 3rd+ tier effects — already beleaguered healthcare systems are further crippled, which spills over into other systems and regions, contagions that might have been contained won’t be which also drives migrations, etcetc.
These (and similar) themselves will in many cases push and accelerate many of the other co-factors simultaneously. They aren’t individual events but a part of a complex web of deeply interconnected systems. Knock on effects push knock on effects, often in unpredictable or unexpectedly radical or rapid ways.
Cascade:
(Source PNAS)
None of this is unicausal, all these are “drivers”, and sometimes, “multipliers”. That is, climate change makes certain things more or less probable, may increase the scope or severity of their onset, without being a strictly singular cause. Drivers are loosely akin to Attractors, that is, their presence compounds or make other probabilities more probable, thereby changing the overall system. (“A set of states of a dynamic physical system toward which that system tends to evolve, regardless of the starting conditions of the system.”)
Compound factors may also counteract or slow one another, such as the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon, however these processes may also often have destabilizing knock-on effects, especially if they are pushed past the limit.
Tipping points are critical to understanding complex systems, as is the basic idea of state change (e.g. the difference between water at 0 C vs 3 C), as is synergy, the effect of various factors in a complex system contributing as a multiplying or even exponentializing rather than additive factor. In system dynamics, 1+2+3+4 might equal 27 in the right circumstances. (This is also the direction solutions lie in, as it may also equal 2, but the largest hurdles are sociological, not in engineering. See below).
What would cascade look like from the inside? How would we know? Gradually accelerating disasters, until the tempo of seemingly disparate disasters hits a critical point and suddenly the feedback starts to compound and/or exponentialize. This is what happened in many of the great die-offs in earth’s deep history. Some were more rapid than others, although even the quicker ones are estimated in retrospect to cascade over the course of thousands of years.
The fact that in the span of a single human lifetime these changes are quite noticeable is, in common terms, Not Good.
Business-as-usual has us hitting numerous key tipping points (each then more likely to set off the others) within the next 30–50 years. As previously mentioned, even the most optimistic CO2 reduction models still see us hitting at least +2 C, which it is now thought may be enough to radically destabilize the climate, “tipping” it towards chaos and runaway effects. Rate of change is also a critical factor, as a +2C change over a million years is a categorically different process than +2C change over a single century.
A system once tipped past a threshold can be dramatically more difficult to return to its previous state.
We know that so long as we put more carbon and methane in the atmosphere in a timespan of a couple decades, these things will happen, and there will be more of all of it. We don’t know exactly when, or in what order it will occur. We also can’t know the unknown unknowns– systemic effects that are produced by an increasingly chaotic system, or current drivers that haven’t been factored in.
Thusfar, nearly every improvement in models has shown prior models to be extremely conservative. (Linked Red Line Podcast, geopolitical impacts of climate change from the military pov, worth a listen).
This leads us to the more complicated piece of this puzzle, as if interconnected ecological and climate shifts weren’t enough: society.
It’s quite possible to not know exactly how the cookie will crumble, what will occur first, second, third, etc. and yet still know it is destined to cascade — at least without a radical, global, systemic restructuring of society — which is the main ? for the survival of our civilization and possibly species. The evidence in history, psych and sociology here are not promising. In a capitalist frame, even when we have the tools/engineering solutions, we are unlikely to use them if they aren’t profitable in the short term. Stress is not helpful for seeing “outside the box” solutions.
Societal and cultural systems — particularly viewed through the medium of our narratives/myths — are central to the issue of climate change, rather than peripheral, as the framing of most current articles would have it.
(What do I mean by that? My book Narrative Machines which was published in 2017, while not intended as being of specific relevance to climate change, contains a number of concepts that have bearing here, particularly when it comes to the stabilizing and destabilizing roles that narratives play within social networks).
Other Examples of Mitigation Complexities:
- Aviation and military.
- The melting of ice shelves and Glaciers is likely to play out over centuries, and even the most extensive recovery and mitigation programs will need to factor in continued melting and collapse for some time after net zero is (hypothetically) reached.
- Net zero is only truly possible by significantly reducing CO2 output. “Offsets” remain mostly a mirage. For all the ills of industrial farming, the world population could not be sustained by an overnight transition back to the 19th century. One way or the other, the only way out is forward.
- The engineering fallacy — The primary barrier to rapid adaptation and mitigation is sociological/political, so while engineering solutions/new technologies are needed, they aren’t the true linchpin. That will be global consensus and action against climate change, particularly from the most wealthy in every country.
Case in point: global response to Covid-19. Instead of restructuring, rethinking healthcare and community resilience as a matter of collective necessity, globally we’ve seen a variety of examples of doubling down on old and unhealthy patterns — increase of rigid and brittle political systems such as authoritarianism, lack of concern for community health, erosion of the remaining social fabric under neoliberalism, ramping up of disinfo and propaganda, etc. Accelerating collapse rather than rebuilding a more functional society.
The combination of our response to Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have set us back significantly on necessary mitigation, and as they are also examples of events we can expect to see driven by climate change, it is quite obvious how doom spirals can play out. How will this play when more disasters continue to pile on as this accelerates?
If we continue to react to climate change the way we’ve reacted to Covid, there is no way forward that isn’t catastrophic on an almost unimaginable level.
It should be mentioned that there are feedback systems that work against climate change, within the earth’s environment and even our interaction with it. There also may be unknown unknowns that work for rather than against us, though counting on that is foolhardy, and at best on its own only likely to kick the can down the road slightly.
Solutions could theoretically work through a similar application of synergy and systemic resilience, however, this would demand a global collective effort the likes of which do not exist thus far in recorded human history. It demands that nations, corporations, and individuals all start working collectively towards a common cause. And it needs to happen immediately.
