Complex Natural Systems
“Climate science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”
-The prevailing notion in today’s media and political debates
Steven Koonin is an eminent theoretical physicist, formerly Provost at the California Institute of Technology and now importantly engaged at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. Professor Koonin believes it’s far too early to draw conclusions about planetwide climate change, much less to undertake precipitous action to reverse or even to stabilize it. The reasons for his reserve have to do with the inadequacy, when taken together, of our models of recent climate history, with the uncertainties in trying to understand the consequences of future greenhouse gas emissions and with the manifest fact that the warming trend between 1900 and 2023 has been attended by unprecedented prosperity when measured by population, life expectancy, literacy, economic product, food production, extreme poverty and weather deaths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acyErLNL7kQ&t=1534s
Given our purposes here, we will want to pay attention to the conservative reserve exhibited by serious people like Steven Koonin. We are floating the feasibility of directing the evolution of consciousness, in large part by way of conversation theory. We are not yet as intellectually serious as Steven Koonin is, but we like our chances. We agree with him that predicting a system as complex as a physical planet’s climate, which in the earth’s case appears to have precipitated several mass extinction events over its geological history, means rapid, wholesale adjustments to a natural system of even greater complexity would likely be punctuated by catastrophe.
Be these as they may turn out to be, there is really no alternative to the science and the positive engineering of consciousness. Universal movement is the law; nothing is allowed to sit still. The trick will be to get a good social feeling for the pre-existing universal movement. We think we know how to prepare ourselves and our institutions to do just that.
