Last night I got restless #sleep and started drifting in and out of #paralysis; #dreaming I was in my bed next to my partner but when I tried to get their attention to wake me up I was just talking to my #dream.
But then I started #lucidDreaming and my partner was there I might as well have fun; so I started messing around and doing all the kinky shit I like to do and they were totally down with it!
Niels Bohr said with deliberate irony, "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."
Indeed, in complex, chaotic systems it's extremely difficult to forecast behavior far into the future, because of high sensitivity to initial conditions. This means that tiny changes can lead to wildly different outcomes. It's why weather forecasts are very accurate about tomorrow, but get increasingly vague 14 days out. The atmosphere is a really complex system.
Then there are other, simpler systems, that operate like clockwork. For example, lunar and solar eclipses, even ones that will take place thousands of years from now can be predicted down to the second, even including the precise ground track of the eclipse. Barring the intervention of some wayward cosmic object, these events will occur exactly as forecast. It's a virtual certainty, based on Newton's laws of motion.
Then there are hybrid forecasts for systems that contain elements of chaos but overall behave as deterministically as the solar system.
For example, Earth's climate.
Some of the most complex simulations in existence involve supercomputers modeling the future impacts of climate change. These models are damn good. Even the ones run back in the 1980s have been backtested and our current conditions were predicted with shocking accuracy. So it's no surprise that in the past few days, Earth's temperature has been hotter than any point in the last 125,000 years. Climate scientists like James Hansen told Congress this would happen more than 30 years ago.
Yet during all those intervening years, propagandists from the fossil fuel industry, and the Republican party have been mocking the science. They have played on the idea of uncertainty, which has a grain of truth, because of the high sensitivity of complex systems to initial conditions.
But this doesn't mean that the model could be so wrong that the Earth could actually start a cooling trend in the next 5-10 years. There are natural oscillations, such as El Nino, when the ocean begins to release its heat. At some point that oscillation goes in the other direction. But overall the temperature trend is inexorably up.
The uncertainty in climate models means that you can't do things like predict a specific storm 10 years from now. But you CAN predict the likelihood of increased storm activity. Same thing with droughts, and floods, and sea levels. What has been predicted, WILL OCCUR. As certainly as a future solar eclipse.
There are other elements of uncertainty having to do with triggering previously unseen natural feedbacks. I'll give three examples:
Albedo flip, where sea ice melts and the ocean surface at that area turns from the reflective white of ice, to the absorptive blue of water. As that ocean absorbs more solar radiation, its temperature rises.
Melting permafrost that releases methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas.
Melting of deep-sea methane clathrates.
We know these natural feedbacks exist, we just don't know the precise magnitude, nor do we fully understand the temperature thresholds when they would become irreversible.
But they are baked into the system, and no one can change that.
There's another natural feedback that wasn't fully predicted, and that is the disruption of the jet stream. Instead of smooth consistent motion, the jet stream can break up into more localized vortices, creating unpredictable weather. This has been occurring this year, and is related to the droughts and heat domes many of you have been experiencing.
Yesterday I read an article discussing how the disruption of the jet stream could impact future food production. There's a high potential of synchronized crop failure. This is unprecedented in the history of human civilization. We've always been able to send food from one area to other distressed areas. But we have no experience living in a world where crops fail everywhere at once, putting the entire world into a net calorie deficit. Science is now telling us that famine is a real possibility.
Right about now, you might be thinking about giving up hope.
And indeed, such forecasts are dire. Perception plays a huge role. Because if people believe there's no hope, they behave exactly the same way as if climate change were a hoax. Which is to say they take no action. There's no effective difference between climate denialism and climate fatalism.
So public perception becomes another part of planetary climate feedback. If we want to stay in the sweet spot, we'll be just worried enough about our survival to take appropriate action, but not so worried that we become paralyzed.
It's difficult, because many of us know what's happening, but not many of us are in a position to do much about it. We can't change industry, or buying habits overnight. If you own a gasoline car, you still have to drive to work--in spite of the fact that you know that it's making climate change worse. In the medium term, you can resolve never to buy another gasoline vehicle. You can take shorter trips, and change your diet to reduce your carbon footprint.
But until everyone resolves to make these changes, your attempt to improve the situation can simply result in others being more reckless.
That is why responding to climate change is the most difficult problem humans have ever faced. In many ways, even the most dire prediction of scientists are not dire enough. But it's a tough balancing act, because if scientists seem too hopeless, people give up.
During the past decade, I noticed that my climate posts got much less engagement than almost any other topic. It's like people know this subject is radioactive. It makes them think of DEATH. (And ain't nobody got time for that).
If anything, I've been too optimistic. Somehow I still see a future where humanity turns this around. But if that future exists anywhere in probability space, it means taking certain actions each year. Actions that we have not been taking. Each year, the possibility of a soft landing for humanity gets more remote. Each year, climate impacts themselves reduce our capacity as a civilization to take corrective action.
Some of our political chaos is already the result of climate effects working their way down through our political systems.
Let's just take one example. Thomas Friedman was involved in producing a climate series I watched 5 or 10 years ago. He discussed how the Syrian Civil War was triggered by climate-induced drought. That in turn triggered a wave of refugees, some of whom ended up in Europe. The reaction to the influx of refugees has led to increasing wins for right wing anti-immigration parties, which in turn led to things like Brexit.
In the US, increases in immigration are also related to climate impacts in Central and South America. Which contributed to the rise of Trump. Who made concessions to fossil fuels, and pulled out of the Paris agreement.
So we can see that positive climate feedbacks are also very much political. And they have sweeping ramifications.
Everything to do with the terrible SCOTUS decisions in the past year has a climate link. In a very real sense, if you're a woman in a red state who can't get an abortion right now, and dies of preventable pregnancy complications--there's a causal chain based on carbon emissions going all the way back to the beginning of the industrial revolution.
This is not theoretical, it's as real as it gets. But I don't want you to give up hope.
If we have any chance of turning any of this around, it's going to be because we refused to give up.
At a certain point, probability will overwhelm human efforts. We don't know where that point is. And until we literally overheat or run out of food, we have to believe there's a way to thread this needle, and act accordingly.
A Dutch man who was paralysed after breaking his neck can now walk with crutches after receiving implants that let his brain send signals to his spine through a computer in a backpack.
Gert-Jan Oskam can now stand up from a seated position, go upstairs and walk around outside on uneven ground. “The stimulation will kick in as soon as I think about taking a step.”
Swiss-French team gets paraplegic walking again with thought-controlled implants (www.rfi.fr)
In a world first, electronic implants developed by Swiss and French experts have allowed a paralysed man to walk again simply by thinking about it.