I wrote a thread on the ecological impacts to our societies, explaining climate change was just one small, but very significant part of those ecological impacts. Remember, in 2024, UK farming suffered big losses in yield, because of rain.
1/🧵theguardian.com/news/ng-intera…
This was the thread I wrote, and without a huge amount of words, I can only partially explain what I was getting at. That we need to urgently develop a holistic, joined up way of thinking, who understand all these serious challenges we face as a whole.
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There are 2 very different ways of looking at the increased flooding we are experiencing in the UK, and other parts of the world. The first is to look at it as a singular problem, in terms of specifics of flood engineering. This is relevant, but only part of it.
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The second way of looking at the problem, is to see the everything in context, the causes of this increased flooding i.e. climate change, the wider way increased rainfall, impacts everything, and that it is part of a much bigger problem.
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Looking at it purely in terms of specific flooding in an area, going on past precedent, flood engineering, whilst essential, is a poor way of understanding the hazards this increased rainfall poses.
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There are many cases of unusually heavy rainfall, in areas, where historically, there has not been catastrophic flooding, where lives are lost, communities are destroyed, such as the Bocastle flood.
6/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Bosc…
You cannot hope to address every potential flooding event with engineering, because many specific floods, were not foreseeable. Then it is not just acute flooding, but chronic heavy rainfall as happened in 2024, which has much wider impacts than flooding.
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We must address this at root cause, unaddressed climate change, because this will have profound impacts on humanity, and life on Earth. That this is just part of a massive biodiversity and ecological crisis, which will be devastating.
8/gov.uk/government/pub…
The way climate change will primarily interact with humanity, is not just devastating, direct physical effects, such as flooding. In fact, it will more likely be indirect effects, such as poor agricultural yield and food shortages, and too many other ways to list.
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Ecology, ecosystems, are about a huge web of interrelationships, not just directly between species populations and the non-living environment, through long causal chains, that are not obvious, or known at first. But they are very real.
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Understanding this is counter-intuitive. We are taught in our culture, to believe that big impacts on our societies, can only be caused by big effects, such as flooding, and that small changes will only have small impacts, but in ecology it is different.
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Small changes, can actually have massive impacts, through the well know example of the butterfly effect, where a hurricane, could theoretically, have its origins in a very small chance change. Ecosystems are complex dynamical systems.
12/americanscientist.org/article/unders…
Dynamical systems theory, is used to study and understand complex systems, like weather and climate, population dynamics. But actually, the systems it is usually applied to, are far simpler than ecosystems.
13/fabiandablander.com/r/Dynamical-Sy…
Ecosystems are massively more complex than anything else understood by humanity. Please read this paper, to try and get a grasp of this. Adaptation to the impacts we have induced by our gross over-exploitation of natural systems, is essential.
14/science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
However, adaptation is very limited, when you cannot even anticipate what most of the major impacts on our societies are going to be. The single biggest contributor to adaptation, must be cooperation, and a move away from competition.
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But the biggest thing we must do, is to stop driving this ecological crisis, with the mindless burning of fossil fuels, and the continuing destruction of biodiversity and natural ecosystem. It is literal madness. Our leadership is dangerous incompetent, and reckless.
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@ZackPolanski @CarolineLucas @natalieben @GreenRupertRead @GreenJennyJones @NBPTROCKS
@ZackPolanski @CarolineLucas @natalieben @GreenRupertRead @GreenJennyJones @NBPTROCKS @threadreaderapp unroll
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