Earth is a complex dynamic system. Earth system dynamics can be understood in terms of trajectories between alternate states separated by thresholds that are controlled by nonlinear processes, interactions, and feedbacks. For example, over the past 1.2 million years Earth has remained in a state of glacial and interglacial cycles. The current temperature change at 1,2°C above a preindustrial baseline has already pushed Earth out of the next glaciation cycle.

Furthermore, Earth is a water planet and incredibly inert. The time lag between cause and effect, between the heating and the final change in temperature, is large. The full warming effect of a large emission pulse may not be felt for several decades or centuries. As a result, the currently observed change in temperature represents only a part of the eventual expected increase in temperature resulting from already released greenhouse gas emissions.

Exactly where a potential planetary threshold, between a livable state and a hothouse state, might be is uncertain. Steffen et al. (2018) suggests 2°C as the critical limit, stating that passing two degrees could trigger tipping elements in the Earth System that could cascade, triggering further tipping elements, causing rapid warming beyond human control. 

Thus, actions taken over the next decade could significantly influence the trajectory of the Earth System for tens to hundreds of thousands of years and potentially lead to conditions that would be inhospitable to humans and to many other species.

How the climate system will respond to increasing CO2 levels depends on time-scale and which feedbacks we consider. Taking into account fast feedbacks such as clouds, water vapour, snow cover change, and aerosols we get a climate sensitivity of about 2-4.5°C to a doubling of CO2. But this does not include slow longer-term feedbacks such as ice sheet disintegration, changes in carbon cycle (e.g. permafrost thaw), vegetation cover changes, or changes in oceans ability to store carbon. If we include all feedbacks, both fast and slow, we get a Earth System Sensitivity of 3-6°C.  

Estimated temperature changes from fast and slow feedbacks. Source: Schmidt, 2016

Studies of past climates in Earth's history show that long-term feedbacks play an important role in Earth's overall climate. For example, during the mid-Pliocene some 3-4 million years ago, when global mean temperatures were about 3-4°C warmer than preindustrial and sea levels 10-25 meter higher than today, CO2 levels peaked at 450 ppm. Our current concentration levels stand at 410 ppm CO2, but temperatures have only risen about + 1,2°C, so Earth is likely to warm up at least to similar levels eventually. And we would over millenia have sea-level rise of up to at least 10 m.

The reason why most people don't talk about ESS is due to the fact that its presumed to take centuries or millennia for these slow feedbacks to kick in. But the issue now is that the rate of change is many times faster than any natural rate in Earth's history. Only comparable with catastrophic rare events such as the meteorite strike that took out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. This means that longer-term “slow” feedbacks such as melting of ice sheets and changes in permafrost carbon stores are starting to occur now, much quicker than expected, and will likely impact humanity during this century.

Which means that on top of some more warming from rapid feedbacks that has yet to be realised due to thermal inertia we also face the consequences of slow feedbacks already coming into play. These biogeophysical forces are incredibly strong and could become dominant in driving the system. Thus limiting the range of potential future trajectories.

Main point: Earth's climate is more sensitive to forcings than standard scenarios of future warming assumes

Biogeophysical Feedbacks

Wishful thinking is today so prevalent that it even has infected the brain of people who are trained not to be biased, scientists. I mean sure, economists have always been blissfully ignorant and wrong in their predictions but what I’m talking about is more widespread. It's a deep denial among the people researching our most critical issues: climate change and energy limitations. 

You see it in the media when scientists discuss oxymorons like “green growth”, or proclaim that we can “decarbonize our entire economy within 20 years”, or that “agriculture will save biodiversity”, or that “lab grown meat will solve our food problems” and so on. It's nothings but grasping at straws in a world that is on fire. Such delusional statements are more about belief systems and identities reflecting values than science. It's also because climate scientists have been told by behavioural psychologists not to scare people as it may hamper action. But isn't it odd that the profession that claims to be devoted to curiosity and truth seeking wants to restrict exploration of future possibilities and censor people due to how it might come across to others?

Our climate reality is harsh. Most scientists tend to underestimate our predicament because they are too conservative, not the other way around. But now it's becoming clear, predictions made by oversimplified climate models have underestimated the changes we're already witnessing due to climate change. Earth, the biosphere, ecosystems and human systems such as the economy are dynamic complex systems and their behaviour is nonlinear. A model that does not include critical feedbacks in the system will not be able to accurately predict results in the real world. This has now become obvious as real world observations about the sad state of our climate is pouring in. Climate change is accelerating.

Sea ice in the Arctic is melting at an alarming rate and looks to be completely gone summertime some time in the coming years (2022?), accelerating global warming further. Ice and snow reflect about 80 percent of the Sun’s energy back into space while the darker ocean and land will absorb 90 percent of that heat. The albedo effect due to vanishing sea ice is already responsible for about 25 percent of global warming (Pistone et al. 2014). Greenland shed about 280 gigatons of ice per year between 2002-2016 and the island’s lower-elevation and coastal areas experienced up to 4 meters of ice mass loss (expressed in equivalent-water-height) over a 14-year period (NASA, 2018). Accelerating rates of ice loss also implies accelerated rates of sea level rise. Certain cities will have to be abandoned. In ten years prior to 2016 the Atlantic Ocean soaked up 50 percent more carbon dioxide than it did the previous decade, speeding up the acidification of the ocean (Woosley et al. 2016). And the list goes on and on with increasingly worrisome observations.

With an increase of carbon emissions of 2% in 2017 (Carbon Brief, 2017), the so called “decoupling” of economic activity from emissions is not yet making a net dent in global emissions. Even if we start reducing emissions now it's not going to be enough to prevent dangerous climate change since there is about a decade lag between emissions and resulting warming (Ricke & Caldeira, 2014). We have already (95% probability) gone past the 2°C warming point/UN target (Raftery et al. 2017), and are  likely headed towards 4-5°C (Steffen et al. 2018). That's because the Earth system is dynamic and is more likely to continue warming until it stabilises at another point, which in the Earth's past occurred at about 4-5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels. By the way, it is generally accepted that a 5 degree rise in temperature is not compatible with human civilisation as we know it. At the same time, perhaps a complete collapse of civilisation could prevent the worst climate change outcomes (Garrett, 2012). But no one is going to promote or talk about that in public. Even if diminishing returns on resources, especially oil, likely will shrink our civilisation in the near future, whether we like it or not (Turner, 2014). 

No one likes either outcomes of this predicament and that's why most experts are basically just arguing over different options of removing carbon from the atmosphere through geoengineering. Using machines to suck out carbon, however, is not feasible both in terms of cost and scale and could cause more harm than good. Current technology would have to be scaled by a factor of 2 million times within 2 years. That's just not going to happen. Biological approaches to carbon capture such as planting trees, restoring soils, holistic grazing, and growing seagrass and kelp appear far more promising. 

Anyway, the real issue for ordinary people is how to adapt to a world that is increasingly hostile while using less energy? Not wasting time listening to myths about "green tech" or believing in fantasies like "colonising Mars" or "geoengineering the entire planet"

Another great systems theory based book on why nations fail is out. This time its academic, journalist and writer Nafeez Ahmed, who long wrote for the Guardian but now has his own crowdsourced news site (Insurge-intelligence), who has delivered the goods. 

In his book, "Failing states, Collapsing systems: Biophysical Triggers of Political Violence", Nafeez presents the essential data on resource depletion, net energy decline, economic stagnation (debt bubble) and ties it nicely together with the acceleration of civil unrest around the globe. It's a big picture analysis of how the triple crises of energy, climate and food production impact societies around the world. A current example, according to Ahmed, of how these multiple stressors interact and can lead to systemic failure is war torn Syria. 

Syrian oil production peaked in 1996 while population, and thus consumption, kept increasing. By 2008 the government, who relied on petrol money for maintaining the state budget, had to slash fuel subsidies which tripled the price of petrol and food almost overnight. A huge deal to anyone already spending almost half of their income on food. At the same time as an ongoing drought in the eastern part of Syria devastated harvests and drove people from the countryside into the cities. Yemen experienced a similar fate of depleting resources, peak oil, and the resulting high vulnerability to shocks. Based on these two cases it takes about 15 years for a country that experiences its peak in oil production before additional pressures, such as climate change, contribute to systemic failure. 

It's not only the Middle East. Many other countries, for example Mexico,  are well on their way of having little to no extra oil to export for keeping their budget in balance or pay for subsidies that people depend on. And the counties who are still able to import some oil or have some mix of energy sources to depend on will be a target of immigrants looking to flee bankrupt and failing nations. Which in turn will fuel the nationalist sentiments and a grab for what's left, military interventions. Something we are already witnessing in Europe and the US.

For a summery version of the book, read "How global economic growth will drown in Trump's oil glut after 2018"

People in Europe are getting fed up with the elite. Rising resource costs, austerity, bank bail-outs, tax rate hikes and massive corruption of governments has led to a shattering European Union. Of course there are many different reasons for the increasing decentralisation trend in Europe, but my perspective is that the low ranked members of society has started coalitions to demand that the high ranked members of society share a larger part of their natural resources with the rest. As we all know, economic inequality is at an all time high with half of the worlds total capital in the hands of the top 1%, according to Oxfam. 

As we can see in the map above there are several so called "separatist" movements popping up all over Europe. As the global resource pie starts to shrink there will be winners and losers, the weakest suffering first. And this is what we see with the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) countries suffering, all time high youth unemployment, increasing refugee flows and homelessness. The trend towards decentralisation is the same as a break up of nations, or collapse of society, controlled by centralised corrupt or ineffective governments. Politicians have not understood or accepted that the Earth is finite and that debts have only postponed the harsh reality of resource depletion and economic down turn. Instead they have promoted perpetually borrowing year-after-year (for the last 30 years) despite that science tells us that we can never pay those loans back.

Now when the global economy is turning down, governments are going to attack ordinary people much more aggressively (increasing taxes, cutting benefits, slashing jobs, negative interest rates etc). Unfortunately most governments will think that if they can only increase taxes they will survive another election cycle. They do not understand that massive deflation, and rapidly rising unemployment, is what kills nations. Some politicians will think about starting international war to shift blame, create a diversion for their own population and to steal resources. Just think about what is happening in Syria right now, its a total mess.

So really it is no wonder that people are getting fed up with the political elite, in Europe and elsewhere, and are trying to return to smaller more local types of decision-making and trading of essential resources (food, water, housing etc). It is what one would expect realising that natural resources are scarce, expensive, and becoming more so. Only a steadily increasing supply of energy can maintain a complex society with a wealthy elite, but when the supply of energy starts falling and the elite gets richer on the backs of ordinary people we can expect social unrest and break up into smaller, simpler groups. I think this is whats happening right now.

New research reveals that some of the earliest civilisations in the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent may have been affected by abrupt climate change. Abrupt climate changes occur in the span of years to decades.

A team of international scientists led by researchers from the University of Miami have found that during the first half of the last interglacial period known as the Holocene epoch, which began about 12,000 years ago and continues today, the Middle East most likely experienced wetter conditions in comparison with the last 6,000 years, when the conditions were drier and dustier.

The Fertile Crescent, a region in west Asia that extends from Iran and the Arabian Peninsula to the eastern Mediterranean Sea and northern Egypt is one of the most climatically dynamic regions in the world and is widely considered the birthplace of early human civilisations. The research team found that transitions in several major civilisations across this region, as evidenced by the available historical and archaeological records, coincided with episodes of high atmospheric dust. Higher fluxes of dust are attributed to drier conditions across the region over the last 5,000 years.

Climate variability during the past 5000 years is shown in the diagram above. The vertical orange bands denote periods of dry and dusty conditions, which correlate to historical records of drought and famine. Transitions between ruling dynasties (grey arrows) in Iran and North Mesopotamia coincides with the episodes of dry and dusty condition in the region.