Complexity and Its Discontents

warning signAndrew C. Revkin

As the oil continues to spread in the Gulf of Mexico, I encourage you to read David Brooks’ column on “the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology,” as well as the 1996 Malcolm Gladwell article on complexity and hazard that Brooks alludes to.

They’re helpful reminders that we inhabit a world, much of it now our creation, that is interlaced with complex, connected systems that work fabulously — almost magically — until they don’t.

Some of the resulting threats hide in plain sight as Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns. Some are well understood but ignored.

In the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, there were undoubtedly failures of management and oversight, and there was potentially malfeasance (the investigations will play out for months).

But the well blowout appears to be a prime illustration of the uncomfortable reality that we have yet to figure out effective ways to overcome a persistent human failure to appreciate, and act on, certain kinds of risks. There was a captivating column in the journal Nature not long ago pondering whether humans need to go to “risk school.”

Of course one of the resonating questions now is whether there are even larger risks, with vital systems on the scale of a planet instead of a single oceanic gulf, that can also be pushed past manageable thresholds?

The climate system certainly has the necessary complexity and importance to human affairs, as well as a history punctuated by sharp natural jogs — implying that it can be nudged in ways that have outsize results.

And we’re pushing on it with growing force, through the rapid buildup of long-lived greenhouse gases flowing from human activities (including burning all that oil we’re sucking from seabeds).

There is a durable subset of society that points to the mild warming so far and says, so what?

But there are vast volumes of studies concluding that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are already influencing the climate and will continue to raise the odds of fiercer floods, drier droughts and other disruptive changes, including a quickening pace of coastal retreats (and all as human populations soar in some of the world’s most vulnerable places).

Still, the most serious impacts from human-driven warming remain largely in the realm of “low probability, high consequence” threats.

A truly disruptive rise in sea levels in this century of more than three feet remains, at best, a plausible worst-case outcome of unabated warming. But on the scale of decades to a century, the dynamics of ice sheets whose disintegration would determine that outcome remain beyond clear human understanding.

Two recent reviews of research on warming and the oceans in Nature Reports/ Climate Change have stressed just how unlikely those high-end sea projections are.

Stefan Rahmstorf, a German physicist and oceanographer who has long pressed for curbs in greenhouse gases and is a founding contributor to the Realclimate.org blog, was blunt in his piece:

Although the popular media tend to focus on the upper limits of these projections, reaching the upper limits is, by definition, extremely unlikely. And at the high temperatures that produce extreme rises in sea level, predicting the response of the climate system is difficult. More…

The other analysis, by Jason A. Lowe and Jonathan M. Gregory of the British climate office, concurred:

The climate science community needs to communicate effectively that sea level rise is likely to continue, but that the rise by the year 2100 is almost certain to be below two metres and that there is currently very little evidence to suggest that increases at the top of this range are likely. More…

Lowe and Gregory said this leaves society with the uncomfortable task of undertaking coastal development with resilience in mind, using planning strategies that can flex as new insights emerge.

That’s the adaptation side of the response to climate change.

With a confounding mix of uncertainty and urgency (because of the penalty for delay), a tougher challenge is shaping policies to blunt the human force pressing on the climate by cutting heat-trapping emissions.

In this realm, efforts to craft a stronger international climate treaty and America’s first climate legislation remain in limbo.

Nearly two years ago, a German reader with the Web name Florifulgurator summed up this pattern in four words: “blah, blah, blah, … bang.

Are we stuck with that pattern, or can humans move to the formulation articulated by some demonstrators at the Copenhagen climate talks?

climate protestAndrew C. Revkin Tens of thousands of protesters rallied during climate-treaty talks in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford University climatologist immersed in climate science and policy for decades, framed the question a different way in the title of the last chapter of his new book on the climate challenge: “Can Democracy Survive Complexity?”

That’s clearly an open question.