When we look away, the AIDS case

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How many people need to die before we understand that facts are not enough? One? Ten? A thousand? This is a blunt question to draw attention to the failure in facts alone, even when lives are at stake. Understanding something is, at best, a step in the right direction, but then we must see how to use that vantage point to solve the issue. For example, when there is an accident in aviation, there’s a committee that investigates to understand how it happened. They spend a great deal of time using many scientific, technological, mathematical, and engineering tools to precisely understand the failure. Once the process ends, they have the facts. Once those are clear, there is another process that ensures it will not happen again. Protocols are changed, new safety harnesses are implemented, policies are changed… as a result, it is rare to see the same type of failure happen again. Air travel gets safer, and we move on with better systems and machines.

The witness paradox of climate change

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Climate change is another of these long-called failures, or as Michele Wucker called it, “Grey Rhinos[i]” cases. Everyone knows what a grey rhino looks like. This one is even charging at you with known consequences of inaction, but we see it coming and do nothing, as we keep seeing it coming. It is a case where the scientific emphasis is mostly siloed on understanding the processes, without having it turned into meaningful change in practice. At this point, there is no reasonable doubt that human activity is pumping out greenhouse gases, like CO2, that are disrupting the climate systems at a global scale. This disruption has negative effects on the landscape, the oceans, life in general, and our society and support systems like agriculture. The frequency and intensity, and costs, of extreme events like floods and droughts, have increased and will continue to do so. The average temperatures in the surface will keep rising, putting more stress on our health, food production, livelihoods, and lives. Eventually this stressed system might pass a threshold of no return, deemed at around two degrees Celsius of warming above the Industrial Revolution time. At this stage, instead of adjusting by being warmer, the whole climate system changes and the impacts are not anymore incremental but radical. We can measure this, we can understand how and where these changes will happen. We know where these gases come from. We can even model the effects of having more gases. As the scientific community has put forward, if we want to minimize the consequences we must, right now, massively reduce our CO2 emission (it’s too late to avoid repercussions completely, we can only reduce the impact).

Missing the point on Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño

When we look away, the AIDS case

The witness paradox of climate change