Recent articles about the climate have been disturbing not only for their predictions but because they demonstrate the problem that dealing with pieces of the system can create. For example: West coast 'blob' may be to blame for drought and cold.
This is but one of many "explanations" for last winter's weather that may or may not be accurate and may or may not be tied to climate change as the author says very clearly.
Then there is this one talking about the "Tipping Point". It lists a lot of things to be concerned about but makes the notion of tipping point a bit confusing because it is used in so many different ways.
Then there is a bit of waffling here: Permafrost may not be the ticking “carbon bomb” scientists once thought There are plenty more but we need no more to ask some serious questions about the effect of all this on the public. Read on below and I will once again make my case for using systems science rather than a piecemeal approach.
Let's start by wondering about last winter. Lots was strange about it and most of that was confusing at best. We know a lot about what happened and we don't know a lot more. The easy part is the measurements. We have those and there is little dispute about them.
The problems arise when we try to "explain" what happened. We usually do this by trying to identify "causes".
Causality in science is a tricky concept. Do cigarettes cause cancer? Does fracking cause earthquakes? Does a "blob" of hot water off the West Coast cause a winter's strange pattern?
Reductionist science likes to break down complex systems into parts because it has been based on a mechanistic view of nature. Machines are neat. We can take them apart and put them back together and go a long long way toward understanding what they are. We do less well when they break but we often can fix them by replacing parts.
It should be obvious (but clearly is not to all too many scientists) that when you break down a complex interacting system to parts you lose vital information about the system. Machines are misleading in this respect. The connects and interactions are pretty obvious in most cases. Living systems, the Earth system, political systems, economic systems are all among the class of complex systems that are more clearly understood by the lost interactions that result from a reductionist breakdown.
The most simple minded notion of causality is direct cause. An agent acts to produce an effect. The players are easily identified and the explanation that results is usually easy to understand. The only problem is that such explanations are almost never correct when it comes to real world complex interacting systems.
The illusion of understanding is very dangerous but we like it. Real world complex systems have closed loops of causality and these exist in a multidimensional space. Almost all good explanations have to be context dependent and will not work in a changed context. What causal loops do is to change the context as time progresses so the causal explanation is ever changing. In turn what is being changed also changes the context for other processes. This gets very messy very quickly and makes reductionism very attractive even if it has no way of handling this stuff.
Today's climate scientists are working in a situation that concerns matters they were trained to deal with. Most, if not all, were trained in reductionist science and yet are faced with one of the most complex systems one could ever try to study.
Each report gives some more insight as to the Nature of the "elephant" (Remember the ten blind men describing an elephant story?). Like any multidimensional interacting complex system the climate is changing in not very predictable ways and that is changing the weather in not so very predictable ways. In spite of this we have gained a lot of information.
None of what I am talking about here does us much good in explaining what we know and don't know to the public. Worse than that it gives the deniers lots of fuel for their nonsense.
The complexity science I use began about 60 years ago. If we were to take a survey we would be hard pressed to find even one respondent who has heard of it. In its early days it received funding from the NSF. As soon as its message became understood that stopped.
I have often likened those of us who follow this area to a kind of "cult". It should not be that way but paradigm shifts are peculiar. They do not proceed linearly. Unfortunately, the consequences of this are going to compound our problems in dealing with climate Change for it is indeed a systems problem and not a machine.