The Exponential Complexity of Anthropogenic Global Warming & Climate Change

The problem:

There are externalities (1) to the use of fossil fuels. The extraction, processing, and use of fossil fuels imposes a hidden cost to everyone on Earth as the CO2 produced by its use in combustion not only creates air pollution locally, but more importantly, it traps more energy from the sun than it would otherwise go out, leading to a gradual increase in temperature which will destabilize many (currently free) ecosystem services we use, as well as increase maintenance/operation costs on nearly all human activity (2). On top of that, the use of fossil fuel is subsidized due to its geopolitical importance (3).

References:

(1) Definition of Externality — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

(2) IPCC Report on Global Warming 1.5 dgC — https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

(3) IMF Report on fossil fuel subsidies — https://sun-connect-news.org/fileadmin/DATEIEN/Dateien/New/WPIEA2019089.pdf

The initial solution:

Since the cost of production of fossil fuel is not reflecting the externality, the cost to all humans from its use, it follows that this cost should be adjusted to create the necessary incentives for the reduction of fossil fuels, and the switch or research into alternative fuels or sources of energy with less externalities (4).

As the industry has no incentive to enact the change, it follows that a body that can regulate and oversee the actions of all industries, the government, would force the increased cost to ensure a more correct market operation and accelerate the transition before any damages would be too great (5).

References:

(4) Carbon Pricing Schemes — https://trevorldavis.com/share/papers/TLD_carbon_pricing_draft.pdf

(5) State and Trends of Carbon Pricing in 2019 — https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/pdf/10.1596/978-1-4648-1435-8

The problem with the solution:

Given the slow, emergent and global nature of the problem, there is an exponential increase in complexity in trying to solve it.

It is too unreliable and costly to expect individuals to collectively change behaviour without clear “carrot & stick” incentives from governing bodies, such as adjusted price signals or pollution penalties (6).

Even if a government of one nation state recognizes the issue and acts to incorporate the externalities, they risk jeopardizing their next election cycle if the economy is harmed as there are parties that deny the problem or would benefit from exploiting a public perception of higher imposed costs (7).

Additionally, said government would also increase its vulnerability in the international stage as it would be adding costs to its economy and losing competitiveness to other nation states that would delay such action or choose not to act at all (8)(9).

There is also a lack of direct benefit for international cooperation, at least within and between states with “short” election cycles (ie: western democracies), as it is harder to build consensus given the amount of stakeholders that need to be accommodated to reach an agreement, leading to slower action (10). By contrast, more centralized states like China have the ability to enact faster unidirectional change, for better and worse (11).

Lastly, the slowness and inertia of the problem and the way the current civilization has been built means that any required changes should have been enacted aggressively decades ago to account for the inertia, but this was never possible as the nature of the problem was such that it would have required such a level of scientific certainty that was unavailable at the time (12), and the perception of the problem would have had to been immune from counter-information measures by entrenched industries, which had an economic and power incentive to delay any action or deny the existence of the problem in the first place (13).

References:

(6) Sufficiency and consumer behaviour — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519301764

(7) Example of conflicting views on climate change as a problem in Brazil — https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6425/330.summary

(8) Game theory aspect of public goods — https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018WR023575

(9) Climate change negotiations in COP21 — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963662518823969

(10) EU falls to third place in electric car race — https://industryeurope.com/eu-falls-to-third-place-in-electric-car-race/

(11) China leading the world in the electric car future — https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/china-is-leading-the-world-to-an-electric-car-future

(12) The discovery of climate change — https://history.aip.org/history/climate/public2.htm

(13) Shell & Exxon secret 1980s climate change warnings — https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings

Consequences

As such, we have now reached a point where it is unlikely to expect any coordinated international aggressive action to global warming and climate change until the real human and economic costs become disproportionately huge. And by then, the runaway effect and inertia will be too great, such that the only option to curb it will be a massive downgrade of material wealth and economic activity, as well as the standard of living across all countries (13).

Furthermore, even if coordinated international aggressive action were to be implemented today, the web of industrial development and dependency is too great, and our behavioural patterns too entrenched, such that we would be unable to escape massive climate effects. While the carbon cost of switching to renewable energies is low (13a), the economic cost is substantial (14), and there exist no incentives to make economic actors care about future costs at the expense of present costs, even when it would be cheaper to prevent climate change than it will be to repair damages caused by it. At play is the concept of hyperbolic discounting (15), or as a separate example, the reason why people end up getting lung cancer or diabetes when it would seem simpler, more rational, and beneficial to give up smoking and sugar at present to avoid the higher future cost. Humans have evolved the hyperbolic discounting concept through natural selection, and such concept has favoured individual and tribe survival. However, it is unfit for collective global survival.

References:

(13) Too late to stop climate change — ABC News — https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/late-stop-global-warming/story?id=17557814

(13a) Carbon Cost of Switching to Renewables — https://medium.com/@BenTheMentor/carbon-cost-of-switching-to-renewables-2a2ed42673cc

(14) Economic cost of global switch to renewable energy — https://inhabitat.com/infographic-how-much-would-it-cost-for-the-entire-planet-to-switch-to-renewable-energy/

(15) Hyperbolic discounting — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting

Future outlook

As individuals, the whole situation looks tragic, as individual action on its own is a drop in the ocean, and its hard to have an emergent new behavioural change for an issue that is slow in its build-up, and its danger is perceived as distant. It is also extremely unlikely that international cooperation is achieved given the complexity of the web of power, influences, stakeholders, and sheer inertia of the existing infrastructures and traditions. However, there are still a few different range of outcomes that can occur within these conditions:

Business as usual

In this scenario, no significant reduction in emission is achieved. As such, the level of environmental destruction and human suffering will be great. There will be a strong chance of warfare within and between nation states as they try to compensate the new costs that are emerging from different climates, underperforming crop yields, immigrations, water scarcity, natural disasters, etc. The end result will likely be a general decline in the standard of living and in the amount of human population, with the overall global climate reaching a new equilibrium where less life is able to be supported. A worst case scenario within this scenario is of course human extinction, or a complete runaway greenhouse effect where all life on Earth is extinct until a new geological phenomenon overturns the greenhouse effect.

Overall reduction in emissions + capturing

In this scenario, at some point international aggressive agreements are reached and enacted, and the process begins to try and overturn the greenhouse effect. However, given the head start and overall inertia, this scenario would likely also result in a general decline in the standard of living and in the amount of human population, with the overall global climate reaching a new equilibrium where less life is able to be supported, although this would be more delayed in the future compared to the initial scenario of business as usual, thus resulting in less total suffering overall, and less total costs, though these would still be massive compared to the standard we have grown accustomed to today.

Individual preparation

As the knowledge sinks in of the complexity of the topic of climate change and global warming, and people realize the unlikelihood of their individual contribution, it is only natural that anxiety levels start to increase in regard to this topic (16).

While individual action to prevent climate change is likely to yield insignificant global impacts, there are plenty of actions that can be taken to cope with the aftermath of its effects. These include, in no particular order:

• Moving to regions where the effects of climate change are expected to be relatively mild compared to the rest of the world (Northern America, Nordic Countries, Russia);
• Developing community building skills, leadership skills, and other soft skills to effectively manage conflict using non-violent communication;
• Building wealth and savings in preparation for higher costs of living (food, water, energy, transportation, services, communication);
• Developing technical skills in self-sufficiency, such as food production, energy production, waste re-use, water harvesting, and alternative transportation;
• Developing manufacturing skills for tools and materials in order to be self-reliant in achieving self-sufficiency;
• Backing up important information, both as digital data as well as a hardcopy, about the skills and technical knowledge described above.

References

(16) Rise in climate anxiety — https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/are-you-suffering-from-climate-change-anxiety/p073zgqd