The Cascade (part 1)
Now It is Our Turn
When I try to describe the situation we’re in — whether we call it the “climate crisis,” the “metacrisis,” or the “polycrisis” — I return to the opening of David Goodstein’s States of Matter:
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
I wish to speak on this subject soberly and honestly, and that doesn’t make for particularly light reading. My intention with this series is to summarize some complicated ideas in fairly straightforward terms, but more importantly, to comment on what I see happening in the world — the actions behind the narratives that frame them. As the saying goes, “watch the hands, not the mouth”.
Climate change is difficult to think about because it isn’t one event. Timothy Morton calls it a hyperobject: distributed, partially indifferent to the observer’s scale. The word “climate” in common use gestures at weather; however, outside meteorology, it names something closer to a biosphere-wide life-support apparatus. Air, water, land, and the organisms that depend on them all participate in it, which is why a few degrees’ rise across a few decades is not a minor administrative problem. The systems that evolved within a given climate — including the one that produced agriculture, coastal cities, and us — are not infinitely portable between regimes.
The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended… It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust — namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.
— Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
Considering how total our enmeshment is, it’s remarkable how thoroughly most of us have walled ourselves off from any felt sense of it. “The delivery shows up at the door, paychecks clear, it’s all rather sad about the polar bears — but what does that have to do with me?”
The systems we live inside are tightly coupled. Supply chains, financial markets, electrical grids, watersheds, insurance pools, and governance institutions interlock closely enough to transmit shocks between them. A drought shows up in commodity prices; a banking crisis in one capital seeps into others; a pandemic freezes supply lines across continents. Our technological civilization is, in the useful distinction, more complicated than it is complex — which is to say, less resilient to disturbance than it looks. Complication piles up linear dependencies. Complexity adapts.
Climate change functions here as a shift in the background forcing under which every one of these coupled systems operates. It changes probability distributions. It increases covariance across domains that used to fail independently of each other. It erodes slack. Failures that once arrived one at a time synchronize. A local shock that would previously have stayed local propagates into cascade. The literature on this is explicit — for example Brovkin et al. (2021) and Lawrence et al. (2020) — but the grammar is what matters. Climate drives. It loads the dice. It does not cause in the billiard-ball sense we prefer for storytelling.
Scale cuts the other way. None of us, as atomized individuals, acts directly on global output. A hundred of us composting, giving up our cars, and convincing our relations to do likewise registers somewhere between statistical noise and a rounding error. The behavior isn’t wrong — the problem simply isn’t organized at the scale of the agent. Part 2 of this series will take up what follows.
As of late 2024, global mean atmospheric CO₂ had climbed well above 420 ppm per the WMO’s most recent greenhouse-gas bulletin. (The Keeling Curve at Mauna Loa is the right real-time anchor for anyone who wants to watch the number move). When I was born, it was in the 330s. On any geological timescale, this is not a gradual ramp. It is a nearly vertical line. Incidentally, 350 ppm is commonly recognized as the maximum level if we want to avoid catastrophic long-term changes. Oh well.
“Climate change is normal,” goes the refrain: past epochs were hotter, past CO₂ higher. True, and utterly beside the point. The rate is the true anomaly. Human civilization — its crop calendars, its water compacts, its coastal infrastructure, its whole economic assumption of stationarity — was built inside the Holocene’s unusually placid envelope and has nowhere near the geological time that past transitions took. Heat is a lagging indicator. The warming now visible was committed decades ago, and the commitments being made this decade will manifest on horizons long past any living author’s capacity to apologize for them. Solomon et al. (2009) established a basic asymmetry: CO₂-driven warming, on any policy-relevant horizon, does not reverse when we stop.
The Copernicus team reported that 2024 was the first calendar year to exceed 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. A single-year crossing is not the same as breaching the Paris threshold as defined — Paris is indexed to a long-running average — but it is the first time the dial has shown the number at all. A Guardian poll of several hundred IPCC authors found working expectations drifting toward 2.5–3°C by 2100. Hansen and colleagues (2023) argue committed warming is larger still once the short-term masking of industrial aerosols clears. Three different kinds of evidence — expert priors, pathway models, frontier argument — pointing the same way. Up.
Each additional tenth of a degree disproportionately loads the dice. “Every tenth counts” is a catchphrase, but not a misleading one. The picture is not a smooth ramp. It is more like inching toward the edge of a cliff whose position cannot be read from the top. Somewhere past +1.5°C over baseline, no outcome is good in any meaningful sense, only less bad, measured against the climate we have just left — quite likely for all the life any of us will live. Part 3 explores the geological horizon a little more closely. The point here is only that we are inside the transition already.
What the warming means in practice is a set of synchronized pressures on systems that were not built to fail at the same time.
A crop failure in a major grain basket; a regional war shutting a critical supply line; a banking shock; an authoritarian movement somewhere capitalizing on the resulting anxiety. Each element makes the others worse, or more likely, or both. Climate change is none of them singly. It is the background that raises their joint probability and closes the gaps between them. The United Nations Security Council adopted “threat multiplier” for this kind of thing, and while the phrase has been worn thin enough to become diplomatic vocabulary, the mechanism it names is real: stressors stack faster when the envelope of operating conditions has shifted.
The evidence is no longer abstract. The World Bank’s Groundswell assessment projects up to 216 million people internally displaced within their own borders by 2050, a figure that does not include cross-border flows or the pressure displacement places on already strained political systems. Munich Re’s 2025 natural-disaster figures capture another face of the same dynamic: insurers retreating from high-exposure markets, protection gaps widening, capital relocating away from the coastlines it used to underwrite. The infectious-disease literature tells the same story with a different grammar: range shifts, altered seasonality, and vector-ecology changes are changing disease burdens in ways no single outbreak will announce.
Traditional storytelling wants each of these to have a single cause: this war was political, that famine meteorological, that pandemic zoonotic. At the population level, most of it reduces to changing probabilities. A disruption anywhere can now become a disaster almost anywhere, provided it hits the wrong material flow or the wrong social pressure point.
COVID-19 was a useful preview. A health emergency cascaded into economic seizure, supply collapse, political realignment, and a mental-health aftermath still not cleared — a demonstration of how a tightly coupled system of systems responds to a large shock, and a preview of what the climate future contains: many such shocks, arriving out of phase with any given society’s capacity to absorb them.
If all of this were merely a problem for research, this essay could end with an appeal to policy. The obstacle is organizational, and scalar.
Many corporations and governments understood the scale of what was coming well before the broad public did, and chose, within the games they were playing, to delay. Fossil-fuel incumbents built durable legal and political positions inside the regulatory architecture. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s reference outlook, global oil and gas demand is projected to grow or hold through 2050; coal contracts, but does not vanish. Renewable capacity rises. Total demand rises faster. New capacity rarely displaces existing throughput — it arrives on top of it.
We don’t have leaders. We have vested interests. Financial ones. That is a description of what elected and corporate authority optimizes for on the timescales that matter. An arms dealer will not broker peace. Any approach that does not rapidly reduce fossil-fuel production — paired with durable carbon sequestration — continues to load the atmosphere, which continues to load the distributions, which continues to load everything downstream.
The population boom of the last two centuries rode a glut of fossil energy and still depends on it. That is a hard fact for anyone who would like degrowth to arrive painlessly. Individual ethical retargeting matters as a prerequisite for collective coordination, but the mechanism by which composting acts on grid emissions runs through institutions that presently have little interest in translating it. What is at hand — the options inside any given social context — defines the scope of imagination along with the scope of choice.
Every year we delay compounds what will ricochet back at us — arithmetic, not elegy. Committed warming is already in the ocean; further commitments price in further coastline, further crop loss, further synchronized failure. The next fifty years are a stress test without retake. Whatever passes through will not resemble the world we recently left.
The systems we built to produce stability now produce delay.
“Just imagine David Hoyle dragging himself slowly across broken glass in the awkward silence between commercial breaks, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what the future looks like.” —Party At The World’s End