Climate change is caused by complications humans create in complex systems they do not understand

Scientific advances since the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, and the technologies that have followed, have given humans hubris that they can master the very Nature that has created them. The poet Robert Frost prays: “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.” The big joke God has played on humanity, Frost implies, is to make humans believe they can be like Gods, invent technologies, and use Nature and other species as economic resources for their own “rational self-interest”.?

The Nobel Prize for Physics in 2021 has been awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi, according to the citation, for “groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems", for “the?physical?modelling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming, and the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in?physical?systems from atomic to planetary scales”. The Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for improving economists’ tools for understanding complex systems, and to David Card for insights into wages and labor markets using those tools. Thus, the awards in both physics and economics are for contributions to methods of modeling complex systems.

Different types of complex systems

Complex systems fall into three broad categories. The first is “engineerable complex systems” which can be objectively understood. An engineer views a system from outside it. He improves its design, and cleverly finds levers in the system to make it more efficient in converting inputs into outputs. Systems models developed in MIT and other engineering schools are suitable for mathematical computation because they do not include fuzzy, qualitative forces such as human emotions.?

The second category of systems is “complex adaptive systems”. Engineers can design systems on clean sheets of paper. They can predict what the system they design will do because they can control its starting conditions. Moreover, their models are bounded; they are limited to the machine they are designing. On the other hand, processes of biological and ecological evolution don’t begin with clean sheets of paper. They are “path dependent”: what was there before determines what follows. Farmers must understand the potential in their land and its surroundings to improve its productivity sustainably. Moreover, natural systems are not bound tightly: what is around any subsystem affects what is in it. The plants and pests in neighboring farms affect the conditions of a farm. The weather is an even more open system with weathers in neighboring areas dynamically affecting the weather in our area. Also, what the weather will become in a few hours depends on what the weather is now. From an engineer’s mind-set, the weather and climate are dynamically adaptive (and potentially chaotic) systems.?

A common feature of both, engineerable complex systems and complex adaptive systems, is the exclusion of?human intentionality?as a primary force of change within them. Climate change has been caused by misguided human interventions. Mankind’s “little jokes” are backfiring on the survival of humans themselves. An accurate model of climate change must include human agency as a force within the model.

A hundred years ago, path breakers shook physics out of the Newtonian paradigm that had ruled physics for two centuries. In the Newtonian worldview the Universe is a machine composed of distinct parts.??Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, and Bohr took physics into realms of relativity, uncertainty, and unknowability. Whereas these pathbreakers had pointed to the need to understand the relationships amongst the various parts, including human minds, a large stream within physics continues to search for the ‘final explanation’ of the Universe within the composition of its tiniest particles (wondering whether they are infinitesimal lumps, waves, or strings.)

The search for an ultimate explanation of how humans think, in the physics of the brain and the flows of chemicals and pulses within it, has infected the science of the mind too. The paradigm changing winners of physics’ Nobel Prizes have proved, a hundred years ago, that the human mind can never fully understand reality. Because it is a very small part within a vast system that shapes it. The ways we think are formed by our histories—they are “path dependent”. They are also shaped by what is happening around us: i.e., the ‘cultures’ in which live.?

Complex?Self-adaptive systems

The third category of systems is “complex?Self-adaptive systems”, within which human agency is a principal force. Humans have self-consciousness and a capacity for deliberate action. With human agency come complications of egos and ethics. Humans want to have power over Nature and over other humans too. Even when their actions are well-intended, they are ill-informed because they do not understand the system. This is the problem with “scientific” solutions for climate change based on models of only the physical and biological world.

Macro-economists’ model economies as machines, with inputs and outputs, and with nature and human labor as resources, and with levers to increase economic growth by pulling levers, like the cost of finance. Complex, socio-economic-ecological, systems are not machines, whose all-round well-being can be improved with a universal goal for carbon reduction and by fixing a price of carbon, for example. Policies to solve systemic problems and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, must be guided by models of?Self-adaptive systems that factor in the egos and ethics of human beings as well as limitations of human minds.?

New insights in physics, as the Nobel Laureates themselves noted a hundred years ago, had already been expressed in ancient Vedic and Buddhist knowledge traditions. Humans are only parts within?complex ecological systems; human perspectives are always subjective; and it is never possible for humans to be?detached?observers. The time has come for the European Enlightenment to give way to a new modern Enlightenment founded on ancient wisdom to save the world from a scientific apocalypse.

(This article was published in The Mint on 11th November 20210