2 Matching Annotations
- Sep 2023
-
www.paulgilding.com www.paulgilding.com
-
- for: system change, polycrisis, extreme weather, planetary tipping points, climate disruption, climate chaos, tipping point, hothouse earth, new meme, deep transformation
- title: The Great Disruption has Begun
- author: Paul Gilding
- date: Sept 3, 2023
- source: https://www.paulgilding.com/cockatoo-chronicles/the-great-disruption-has-begun
-
summary
- good q uick opening paragraphs that summarize the plethora of extreme events in 2023 up to Sept 2023 (but misses the Canadian Wildfires) and also the list of potential planetary tipping points that are giving indication of being at the threshold.
- He makes a good point about the conservative nature of science that underestimates impacts due to the inertia of scientific study.
- Coins a good meme
- Everything, everywhere, all at once
- He ties all the various crisis together to show the many components of the wicked problem we face
- finally what it comes down to is that we cannot stop the coming unprecedented changes but we can and must slow it down as much as possible and we should be prepared for a wild ride
-
comment
- It would be a good educational tool for deep and transformative climate education to map all these elements of the polycrisis and show their feedbacks and interactions, especially how it relates to socio-economic impacts to motivate transformative change and mobilize the urgency now required.
-
- Jul 2022
-
-
In the deep past these setbacks were local. The overall experiment of civilization kept going, often by moving from an exhausted ecology to one with untapped potential. Human numbers were still quite small. At the height of the Roman Empire there are thought to have been only 200 million people on Earth. Compare that with the height of the British Empire a century ago, when there were two billion. And with today, when there are nearly eight. Clearly, things have moved very quickly since the Industrial Revolution took hold around the world. In A Short History of Progress, I suggested that worldwide civilization was our greatest experiment; and I asked whether this might also prove to be the greatest progress trap. That was 15 years ago.
Indeed, Wright is right to ask: Is our modern human civilization the greatest progress trap of all?
Exponential technological progress has shortened the time for dangerous levels of resource extraction and pollution loads to the extent that we face the potential of cascading global tipping points and enter a "hothouse earth" state: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810141115
Were this to happen, there is no place on earth that would be immune.
In hindsight, the unfortunate but predictable trend is one of every increasing size of progress traps, and ever shorter time windows when serious impacts occur. Today, it appears we have reached the largest size progress trap possible on a finite planet.
-