Soon, water will be scarce, forests will burn, cities will be overcrowded, and climate refugees will flood most developing countries, making countries fall apart into civil wars because of the blatant injustice toward the primary victims of the ongoing climate crisis, ultimately leading to doomsday where the human race will say its big good-bye to the Universe.
Wait a second
That might be true, and we might destroy ourselves spectacularly and ultimately blow up. This post is not climate skeptic: serious climate issues must be addressed, and potentially catastrophic cascade effects might lead to armageddon.
It’s probably not obvious reading the other posts. Still, I am a fierce optimist believing the human way of creating knowledge is unique, powerful, and our best hope against global crises such as the ongoing climate one.
It’s probably not obvious reading the other posts. Still, I am a fierce optimist believing the human way of creating knowledge is unique, powerful, and our best hope against global crises. Knowledge is the source of many things, and one of them is innovation and actual problem-solving.
Would you disagree if I told you that our 1900s fellows would not have believed if they had been told Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969 or that you could FaceTime your loved ones anywhere, anytime, at zero cost? I bet that if you ever fall into a time rift and end up in 1914 talking about NASA to your new buddies, they would call you a sucker and the local administration would make sure you are the first drafted for WWI. You would have died in Verdun for telling your buddies about Neil Armstrong. What a destiny.
Innovation and problem-solving, especially when happening at scale, are not linear processes. What does that mean exactly? If you describe something as linear, it does progress or develops smoothly from one stage to the next in a logical way. It does not make a sudden change. Here is a typical example: your monthly wage if you bill hourly. The more you work, the more money you make, and it’s very easily predictable we call it deterministic: you have a tractable, intelligible, and closed equation to calculate your salary based on the hours you worked. Most processes in life do not work like that.
All right, but what’s the matter with climate change here? We will not see progressive, incremental, linear changes in the fight against climate change. Instead, we will use an English word that exists for a reason: breakthrough. Innovation and great inventions never came progressively. They show up out of the blue as sudden changes, extreme and unexpected events, implying cascading effects that propagate into every node of the great network the human race is.
Let’s take the Internet, with a big I. The Internet did not silently walk through the room. It was a giant, unexpected, and perfectly mind-blowing revolution. There is a world before and a world after the Internet, and we often point out the year 2000 as the breakthrough date. The Internet did not become mainstream one day at a time, instead, it suddenly stepped from marginal to mandatory in less than a decade, and you can ask for WiFi in the most remote places on earth.
Climate change mitigation will not come incrementally, and I guess that we will witness, if we are fortunate and innovative enough, a formidable breakthrough in how we engineer our habitat, the dear planet earth. We will not decrease our carbon footprint by 1kg of CO2 at a time. We will keep losing and keep desperately but will see the dawn when we expect it the least. Europe's most extended peace period came right after World War II. Things will get worse, bleak, and suddenly get better.
Keep the faith.