The Atmospheric Singularity  

I liked Alex Steffen's post at WorldChanging about the recently released "Climate Code Red Report" and the appropriateness of the singularity metaphor to global warming - "The Atmospheric Singularity".

The argument of the new Climate Code Red report is much the same [as Jim Hansen's slideshow], though made at greater length and with a more direct advocacy appeal:

Climate policy is characterized by the habituation of low expectations and a culture of failure. There is an urgent need to understand global warming and the tipping points for dangerous impacts that we have already crossed as a sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. We are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points.

There are moments that I believe that it might be better to shelve discussion of tipping points for the moment, and pick up that hoary old late-90s metaphor of singularities.

(A singularity, in this usage, is a turning point in human affairs that is so radical it is almost impossible for those who live before it to imagine life after it. Most commonly, the term is used by old-school science fiction writers to describe a future in which evolving artificial intelligences hurtle humanity into a technological maelstrom of innovation. But increasingly, people describe historical moments -- the dawn of agriculture, the "discovery" of the New World, the Industrial Revolution -- as social singularities.)

I increasingly suspect that we are at a shearing point on either side of which a singularity looms.

If we fail to tackle our sustainability crisis, an, most pressingly, our climate crisis, we will with increasing rapidity find ourselves in a world which is not only unthinkable to most people in the developed world, but literally beyond the ability of scientists to confidently predict. If we get things under control, our odds of things staying somewhat the same increase dramatically. But if we can't, we enter a world where nothing we've taken for granted for 10,000 years can be relied upon. Think of it as the Atmospheric Singularity.

On the other hand, if we do come to grips with our challenges, I'm more and more convinced that it will be because we recognize that "small steps" and "swap out" technologies (think Hummer-to-Prius) are not even vaguely sufficient, and we proceed to embrace really radical rethinking of the best ways to deliver prosperity in a sustainable manner. And I'm pretty sure that the end result of that process will be a world which is pretty difficult to even imagine for most people at the moment. Think of this as the Sustainability Singularity

The point is, either way we go, the future will work by its own rules, not the rules we are used to living within today.