The more I learn about complex systems, the less likely it seems that the current, incremental approach to climate mitigation could work. It's as if, during the financial emergency in 2008, governments had said "we'll supply the bailout money at 2% a year between now and 2050".
The financial sector would have collapsed many years before the rescue package was complete. To push the system back into a stable equilibrium state before it reached its tipping point, governments had to act immediately and decisively.
We don't know how close Earth systems are to their tipping points, but some of them could be very close. If these systems are approaching their critical thresholds, the only relevant action is sudden and drastic.
We might well have reached the Lehman Brothers moment: the point at which the whole thing could go over the brink if we don't move with great speed and effect to push it back into a safe space. Yet governments are responding as if they had all the time in the world.
Either our governments don't understand how complex systems work, or they are pretending not to. But they are treating this emergency as if they are dealing with a simple system, like wash basin: water in, water out, turn down the tap a little and the level falls.
Complex systems are fundamentally different from simple ones. They behave in completely different ways. The methods required to prevent disaster in a complex system are entirely different from the methods required to prevent disaster in a simple one.
They understood this when Lehman Brothers failed. Why don't they understand it now? Why were they prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to rescue the financial system, but completely fail to grasp what needs to be done to rescue our life support systems?
Is it because the climate, unlike the banks, doesn't fund their campaigns for re-election? Is it because oceans and rainforests can't lobby them? Are we to face the prospect of systemic environmental collapse because averting it doesn't appeal to their immediate self-interest?
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