So much for effective interventions

In 2007, in one of my earliest articles on climate change, I wrote about the relocation of an Alaskan village that was falling into the sea. I wondered whether we required such catastrophes to happen. Or could we intervene, reduce emissions, and prevent them?

Being a rational incrementalist with confidence in institutions, I believed we could carry out effective interventions.

Life has, however, taught me otherwise. Catastrophes are required.

Embracing catastrophe

Disruptive events and abrupt changes are part of life. Sometimes, we even construct them. In my most recent column, I wrote that ongoing crises —  to our security, economy, health, or energy — make it difficult for us to prioritize the crisis of climate change.

Not all abrupt changes are disasters. The transformation of liquid water to ice is an abrupt change that occurs at a particular temperature. In weather, we experience abrupt changes at fronts that separate hot and cold air. These changes are natural and predictable.

Another abrupt change we might recognize is the bat hitting a baseball. This is described as an impulse.

Abrupt changes are common enough that we have a way to describe and model them in physics and mathematics: Catastrophe theory is the study of discontinuous transitions.

Catastrophe theory is well developed in social science, where abrupt transitions in politics and societies rule the day.

The innovator’s dilemma

One of my coveted management books is The Innovator’s Dilemma. It was written about businesses that have a successful product — until a new disruptive technology or product comes along. Examples would include how we listen to music or watch movies. We go from live events, to acetate or vinyl recordings, to tapes, to CDs, to streaming. The computer industry includes hundreds of examples.

If you have a strong and profitable customer base with one technology, how do you manage the onset of a new technology? Many large businesses fail, with a remnant of the old technology holding on in a much smaller market. There is a fascinating piece of land not far from me plotted out in open fields with street names like Tape Drive, Memory Lane,  and Disk Drive. It comes from a company named StorageTek, when robotic tape storage was at its peak a couple of decades ago.

We all face this challenge — doing what we’ve always done, which might be very successful, versus changing to something new. We perceive the new way as far too risky. We don’t see that the actual risk is our own catastrophic failure in the wake of this innovation.

Those who succeed at such transition points push forth new solutions, rethink what they have been doing. Many old thinkers are replaced with new thinkers who embark on paths leading to their own eventual innovator’s dilemma.

Climate disasters

Los Angeles, January 2025. (iStock.)

I started this column with a reference to a 2007 climate disaster. It was a climate disaster because the sea ice that protected the coast had melted and the coastline was opened to erosion. Since then, we can count many weather-related disasters amplified by a warming climate.

It is natural that we would take a wait-and-see approach to observe how disruptive a warming climate might be. Therefore, it does not surprise me that we require a series of disasters to act, perhaps, a series of more severe disasters. Unfortunately, we think we can bandage things up and carry on — it is the natural thing for most of us to do.

I call this “protect and persist” and view it as one of the many behavioral barriers we must overcome to cope with a warming climate. I got to talk about this at the 2021 Biennale di Venezia, a meeting of architects.

Protect and persist is not only natural, but also what our behavior, policies, and practices encourage. We will rebuild on the lot that we own, which is likely home, right where the devastating hurricane or fire just took our house.

Though I would like to think we do not require repeated disasters to break this cycle, I see little evidence of that happening in our risk-averse population. More of us are vested in the status quo, or even the past, than we are in innovative solutions.

Climate change is the easy part

The prospects that we would address climate change as a nation, as the world, plummeted with the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.

This had been coming, as we have spent more than 30 years with larger and larger swings between addressing and not addressing climate change.

But in the year 2024 — and now 2025 — we have arrived at a critical moment. From a climate policy perspective, it is a catastrophe.

And catastrophes are handled by innovative thinking and new ideas.

For many years, I have felt that our community’s primary approach to addressing climate change was a prescription for disaster. That approach states that we have until 2030 or 2040 to reduce emissions by some large percentage to avoid the worst effects of climate change. To that we add, “and we still have time.”

I got to talk about this at the National Science Foundation in 2022, and I extracted a short video that interpreted our messaging, crudely perhaps, as catastrophe theory.

The basic idea was that extreme, rapid reduction of carbon dioxide emissions requires disruption of our energy acquisition. Such a transition directly assaults the power and wealth structure of corporations and nations. There is no reason to expect the scientific evidence of climate change to motivate an orderly transition.

Indeed, a rapid transition to renewables would be catastrophic to these corporations and nations. As they hold wealth and power, they will not let that happen, and it is unrealistic to expect them to let that happen.

The unsatisfying present

The already weak words of trying to manage greenhouse gas emissions and limit warming will disappear as we exit the Paris Agreement. We are promised deconstruction of basic scientific capacity held by or funded by the U.S. government. Energy policy will swing to set up barriers to the market forces that have been increasingly driving the renewable energy transition. The hubris that we can manage our climate through global environmental engineering will grow.

And the climate will continue to become warmer.

Though we have experienced meaningful progress in addressing climate change, it is evident that our collective efforts have not been especially effective. Therefore, we need a better approach than “protect and persist.”

Those who grow and thrive after a catastrophe are innovative in their adaptation. In a world so rapidly changing, whether it be our climate, our technology, or our government, the complacency of the innovator’s dilemma must be avoided.

The idea that we will achieve smooth societal transitions based on scientific evidence is foolishness.

Catastrophes will occur. They are required. And we must strive to cross them successfully.

(Lead image: Wind Speed Weather Map of the strong Santa Ana Winds at Los Angeles County on Jan. 08, 2025. Made with data from Global Forecast System GFS. All source data is in the public domain. Wind Speed data: NCEP GFS 0.25 Degree Global Forecast Grids Historical Archive. Countries and Boundaries: Made with Natural Earth. Credit: iStock.)