In the past few years I have gone from not knowing much about climate change to believing that it will bring about the end of the world to being skeptical about what exactly all this is about. This does not remove the need for “sustainability” which is far more than carbon emissions but I am starting to question the amount of effort to be focused on this single issue.

As a non-scientist I have nowhere near the knowledge and skill level needed to understand the science. What I can do is understand basic logic and have a feel for how things work in the world. However, it is important to have a philosophy. A basic understanding of how various things will impact the world and what is important. History has taught us that we cannot really predict the future into 100 years. That is exactly what the climate change models do. Using current scenario, they take a linear model of growth into the future.

I am not saying this. James Lovelock, the celebrated author of the GAIA theory is saying this.

Andrew Watson writes this,

In The Vanishing Face Of Gaia, Lovelock argues that model projections of the climate a century ahead are of little use. The models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) extrapolate from a smooth trend of warming, yet the real climate system, complex and fully coupled to the biology of land and ocean, is unlikely to change in this simple way. It is more likely to flip from one state to another, with non-linear tipping points that the IPCC models are too simplistic to capture. Lovelock fears that the climate will shift to a new and considerably hotter regime, and that once underway, this shift will be irreversible.

Non-linearity and complexity are the hallmark of the world we live in. In this scenario, the predictions of IPCC, especially in terms of their timeframes are not relevant.

Lovelock paints a scenario where things go horribly wrong in terms of the social aspect of climate change due to this non-linearity. However, is this true?

To understand this I think a good example would be the work of Stephen J. Gould, the evolutionary biologist. His explanation of evolution is more complex than “natural selection”.

In his article, “The Evolution of Life on Earth”, Gould traces back to the history of the earth and explains the finer points of how we have come about.

Quoting Charles Darwin, “I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification.”, he sees more to the evolution of life.

Theory, of course, is relevant to explaining the pathway (nothing about the pathway can be inconsistent with good theory, and theory can predict certain general aspects of life’s geologic pattern). But the actual pathway is strongly underdetermined by our general theory of life’s evolution. This point needs some belaboring as a central yet widely misunderstood aspect of the world’s complexity. Webs and chains of historical events are so intricate, so imbued with random and chaotic elements, so unrepeatable in encompassing such a multitude of unique (and uniquely interacting) objects, that standard models of simple prediction and replication do not apply. History can be explained, with satisfying rigor if evidence be adequate, after a sequence of events unfolds, but it cannot be predicted with any precision beforehand. Pierre-Simon Laplace, echoing the growing and confident determinism of the late 18th century, once said that he could specify all future states if he could know the position and motion of all particles in the cosmos at any moment, but the nature of universal complexity shatters this chimerical dream. History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points.

He comments that “Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.”

In fact, according to him “Bacteria represent the great success story of life’s pathway” and “We cannot even imagine how anthropogenic intervention might threaten their extinction, although we worry about our impact on nearly every other form of life.”

We should be rest assured that life in its many forms, foremost being Bacteria will survive the climate change doomsday scenarios. The earth does not need saving at all, if anybody it is us humans need it. Life and Earth will be fine.

Being a young father I am amazed at the fact that humans have been actually successful as a species. My daughter needs amazing amount of caring, love, attention and resources to stay alive and grow. She needs a myriad of things to be taken care of till she is about 18 years old and is “free” to live on her own. In evolution terms, that is a big negative for success. However, we have developed complex relationships of marriage, family and community to help in this process. We have developed agriculture to solve the problem of food. We have invented tools like fire and wheel to become productive. We have developed complex institutions like hospitals, schools, democracy and banks to sustain this long march of development of 18 years.

As Gould says, “History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points”; it is even amazing we are alive as a species leaving aside the bit about thriving in this world.

Combining these two aspects, the non-linearity of the world, the way humans have adapted and are successful I believe that we will develop the solutions to solve the problems that we will face in the coming 100 years. As the problems are non-linear, so will be the solutions.

All the doomsday predictions believe that we will not make a evolutionary jump in the development of clean and cheap energy from the sun or that we will not develop low resource intensive and recyclable products or that we will have another jump in agricultural productivity which will solve all our food problems.

History however, shows us that this is possible. We can make this jump. When and how is not that clear.

All this brings us to the question, what should we be doing.

The first thing is what can be do now. If climate change is non-linear and unpredictable, what is the basic thing that we can do to be well adapted to its consequences.

Thomas Schelling, the nobel prize winning economist, suggests that economic development is the biggest solution to climate change. He says, “The sooner Malaysia can become like Singapore, the sooner it can worry less about the impact of climate change on health, comfort, and productivity.” Read more about his views here.

The second thing is about the basic economic question of allocation of scarce resources.

Bjorn Lomborg, another economist, is the director of the Copenhagen Consensus. He argues that “the Third World suffers more from malnutrition and H.I.V./AIDS than it is likely to suffer from global warming.”

He argues to relook and understand our priorities. Check out this video from TED.

Global Warming is not at the top of the list in terms of benefits from solving it. An updated version is the 2008 list – here or PDF version.

Concluding the post, the climate change problem is non-linear, so are the solutions. Humans are highly adaptable and will change and manage.

The focus should be on economic development and there are other priorities above climate change that can bring in better benefits now.

Sustainability is a better focus overall than simply climate change.