Heat Dome

Context: The Guardian view on the heat dome – burning through the models

These events are truly worrying. What we often do not see, and perhaps by the very nature of cognition and the language(s) through which we reason and communicate, is that there is a unified, globally-integrated system of autocatalytic feedback at work here. The individual events as instances are salient, retrospectively obvious, but the underlying networks of complex causal influence and interdependence are far less likely to be perceived; it is a visible “tip of the iceberg” kind of problem.

These events are questions for which contemporary socio-economic, cultural, technological and (indeed) collective psychological maturity as they currently stand represent absolutely hollow and generally ineffective answers. We find ourselves playing the grammatical games of self and science or normative sociotechnical procedure with which we are familiar, that we know and understand but that quite catastrophically fail to introspect that these grammars and conventions are not merely anachronisms – they require complete reinvention. That is our challenge and cultivating and leveraging a hope that we can successfully negeotiate it is probably the first step in actually doing so.

Related: A hotter future is already here — and Canada is not ready