Poor failure modes
the too close for comfort climate policy
I teach people in project (code) management to fail gracefully. When things fail you should have an easy recovery, and a backup plan. Without change, climate change policy will not fail gracefully. The recent shoulder shrugs on reporting of a slowing Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), an ocean current redistributing heat across the Atlantic with local and global climate importance, only confirm this historical stance.
This means that students have to document what they do, but also trap errors in their reasoning and/or use cases of whomever comes after them. Similarly, I tell students that when managing a project the need to walk through scenarios which might mess up all remaining work, i.e. single points of failure. For anything important, you need to mitigate issues upfront and have possible adaptation options. Generally, you can’t afford single points of failure.
A single point of failure
Climate tipping points are single points of failure. Tipping points impose rapid and irreversible change and excludes graceful failure as the speed at which it occurs excludes adaptation.
A recent article in Science Advances zooms in on the issue of the slowing down or collapse of the AMOC. It solidifies previous statistical work around the weakening of the AMOC, and finds early warning signals in line with previous studies.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189
This latest study has a number of climate scientists shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. The hope was, given uncertainties in previous studies, that it might all not go too fast. Sadly, this research confirms this previous work, with physical modelling supporting the previous statistical analysis. Currently, there are numbers floating around the scientific community for this shift to start happening potentially as early as mid-century (2050).
The consequences of this tipping point, as outlined in the paper, are profound and would unfold over short decades. It would mean a rapid decline in temperature and precipitation in Europe, and the reversal of the seasonal rains across the Amazon (jeopardizing another potential tipping point). These changes would unfold too quickly for adaptation of say agricultural policy.
Yet, from a policy perspective we collectively seem to look at this and shrug while rapidly progressing towards this tipping point, from a position which already is too close for comfort. Given the stakes of this particular tipping point one would expect more profound actions, and a sense of urgency.
To quote Jeffrey Kargel, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, to CNN:
… a potentially imminent shutdown of the AMOC “will remain somewhat controversial until, one year, we know that it is happening.”
– Jeffrey Kargel
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/09/climate/atlantic-circulation-collapse-weather-climate/index.html
One can only conclude that climate policy, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, seems to have a very poor failure mode.
Reuse
Citation
@online{hufkens2024,
author = {Hufkens, Koen},
title = {Poor Failure Modes},
date = {2024-02-10},
url = {https://khufkens.com/posts/poor-failure-modes-climate-change/},
langid = {en}
}