In this edition: The impacts of climate change are non-linear, weaponizing food, Russia is getting a little help from it's friends and work from home trends.
This past week was another scorcher. The impacts of climate change won’t just increase incrementally, but reach a tipping point that causes irreparable harm. And the thing is, we don’t really know what those tipping points will be, or even when they will occur.
This was explained succinctly this week by climate scientist Andrew Dessler when he discussed the non-linearity of climate change impacts.
If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage….
But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event, for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.
As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.
this is a non-linear damage function
Thus, the correct mental model is not one of impacts slowly getting worse over decades. Rather, the correct way to understand climate change is that things are fine until they’re not, at which point they’re really terrible. And the system can go from “fine” to “terrible” in the blink of an eye.
This sentiment is echoed by an article published in The Atlantic this week about breaching tipping points.
A growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change—leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. “The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1°C global warming,” Armstrong McKay and his co-authors concluded in Science last fall. If these thresholds are passed, some of global warming’s effects—like the thaw of permafrost or the loss of the world’s coral reefs—are likely to happen more quickly than expected. On the whole, however, the implications of blowing past these tipping points remain among climate change’s most consequential unknowns: We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.
