Climate change is not occurring inside a stable planetary system. It is altering the persistent structure of relations among climatic states, variables and phases, changing the conditions under which subsequent states become possible and probable.
Climate change is not a problem inside a stable planetary system. This text indicates how it is reorganising the relations through which planetary stability itself is reproduced.
We require forms of language capable of representing continuity without losing the ability to act locally within it, models capable of preserving the relationship between part and whole without reducing one to the other.
Climate change becomes civilisational risk when insurance can no longer translate catastrophe into recoverable cost.
For a long time, serious problem-solving assumed the world could be broken into parts, those parts analysed separately, and the larger situation improved by fixing each component in turn. That still works for bounded problems. It fails when the object is not a part but a whole system composed of vast numbers of interdependent subsystems […]
