What Needs to Change So Our Climate Doesn't

Is democracy, which relies on reasoned debate, patience, and tolerance, the wrong system for combating global climate change?

There's a fascinating exchange between two of England's better minds, George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth, over at the former's website under the rubric of "Should we seek to save industrial civilization?"

It begins with Kingsnorth's lament over the implications of all the exponential growth curves he's come across in recent times:

Sitting on the desk in front of me are a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each graph is identical: it represents time, from the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, human population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the gross domestic product of the human economy.

What grips me about these graphs (and graphs don't usually grip me) is that though they all show very different things, they have an almost identical shape. A line begins on the left of the page, rising gradually as it moves to the right. Then, in the last inch or so – around the year 1950 – it suddenly veers steeply upwards, like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared from what he thought was an empty bank of cloud.

The rest of the exchange revolves not around the reality of the trends but how to deal with the impending doom that they imply, and whether the coming collapse might actually be a good thing in the long run. It's worth reading if you've ever found yourself wondering about the value of a clean slate, but for me, nothing is as interesting as the challenge posed by exponential growth.

Humans aren't really programmed to respond well to non-linear change. And this discrepancy explains a lot of things, from our failure to appreciate how quickly a climate can shift from one regime to another, to the disdain that greets much of Ray Kurzweil's predictions about the future of technological and biological evolution.

Our relatively short lifespans and the brief evolutionary history as a species has made us moderately good at reacting to the kind of changes that dominate the left side of a typical exponential growth curve. Looking back, everything looks like it's changing gradually in a manner that's easy to manage. We extrapolate that trend into the future, regardless of the value of the variables that determine the location of the "elbow" in the real curve and just how rapidly the curve's right-hand side will be upon us.

Kurzweil's insistence that we're coming up on a "singularity" of artificial intelligence and biological engineering is frequently dismissed as loopy hyper-techno-optimism. But it's hard to find flaws in his argument that just about every trend in technological development involves an exponential curve. Things get better, faster, and cheaper faster and faster. That's a fact. The only question is where's the elbow? Kurzweil says we're 30-odd years away. Maybe he's miscalculated – elbows and slopes of exponential curves are sensitive things; change the value of the parameters just a tiny bit and you get enormous changes down the lines – but we are almost certainly headed for one. The failure of this idea to gain a foothold in society at large indicates just how stubborn our linear programming can be.

Similarly, we all know intellectually that we're using up all our natural resources at an accelerating rate. We know we're pumping more and more carbon in the air and oceans. We know it's not sustainable, but we haven't been able to internalize that fact, and admit that this time it really is different. Instead, we fall back on a long history of failed-to-be-realized predictions of doom. We deride climate change "alarmists" as naive, even as the science piles up that the right-hand side of the curve is either here and now or very, very close.

All of which leads to the conclusion that we need to find a way to overwrite our programming, to unlearn our instinctual confidence in the way things have been. This may prove to be a mission impossible. The mathematics of exponential growth curves aren't the kind of things that people quickly absorb.

Furthermore, some of the coming changes won't exhibit even the relatively mild characteristics of exponential growth, but be more akin to the instantaneous phase change of ice into water. It could be that democracy, which relies on reasoned debate, patience, and tolerance, is not a suitable environment to engage in the social, and physical, engineering this sort of change demands.

If that's the case, then things are much bleaker than either Kingsnorth or Monbiot say they are. And they're not exactly paragons of optimism.