3
Leaving the Road (Boundaries that Can be Crossed)

In addition to the impassable limits that physically prevent any economic system from growing unstoppably, there are invisible, unclear ‘boundaries’ that are difficult to predict. These are thresholds beyond which the systems on which we depend get out of hand, such as the climate, ecosystems and the major biogeochemical cycles of the planet. It is possible to cross these thresholds, but the consequences are just as catastrophic. Here, then, the metaphor of the wall is not very useful. Boundaries would be more adequately represented by the edges of the road beyond which the car leaves an area of stability and faces unpredictable obstacles.

As yet, we are not fully aware of the consequences of crossing these ‘boundaries’. Thus, unlike limits, which stop the car in its tracks, boundaries do not prevent us from causing disasters; they leave us free and responsible for our choices, obliged solely by our ethics and our ability to predict disasters. We cannot create energy from nothing, but we can choose to live in a climate with a temperature of +4°C above the historical average (which is what we are doing in any case). However, to make responsible choices, you need to know the consequences of your actions. But most often, these are known only after exceeding these thresholds, when it’s already too late.

Global heating and cold sweats

The climate is the best known of these invisible boundaries and over the years it has acquired a special status. Indeed, according to some experts, the consequences of global heating have the power on their own to cause global, massive and brutal disasters that could lead to the end of civilization or even of the human species. At the beginning of 2014, we were provided with an extraordinary scientific overview, the fifth IPCC report, which was now categorical in its conclusions: the climate is heating up because of the emission of greenhouse gases produced by human activity.1 The average global temperature has increased by 0.85°C since 1880, and the trend accelerated over a period of sixty years. This latest report confirms the ‘rule’ that the most alarming predictions of previous reports become realities.2 So we are emerging from the conditions required to limit heating to an average of +2°C in 2050, and we could reach +4.8°C by 2100 compared to the period 1986–2005. Note in passing that the initial projections of the IPCC on global temperature have been remarkably accurate until now.3

Disasters are not just about future generations; they concern present generations. Rising temperatures are already causing longer and more intense heatwaves and extreme events (storms, hurricanes, floods, droughts, etc.) that have caused significant damage in the last decade,4 such as that suffered by Europe in 2003 (which caused the death of 70,000 people5 and cost the European agricultural industry 13 billion euros) and, more recently, by Russia, Australia and the United States.6 In 2010, the episodes of drought in Russia, for example, lopped 25 per cent off production in the agricultural sector and 15 billion dollars off the economy (1 per cent of GDP), forcing the government to abandon any export plans for that year.7

There are already water shortages in densely populated areas,8 economic losses, social unrest and political instability,9 the spread of contagious diseases,10 the spread of bugs and pests,11 the extinction of many living species (see the next section), irreversible and serious damage to unique ecosystems,12 melting polar ice and glaciers,13 as well as decreases in agricultural yields. So much for the present.

In Climate Wars, military specialist Gwynne Dyer describes the geopolitical consequences that could be provoked by global heating of a few degrees. Drawing on the conclusions of reports written by former senior military officials in the US government, as well as many interviews with experts, Dyer covers a number of scenarios ranging from a world temperature +2°C above average, already catastrophic, to ‘annihilation’ at +9°C.

In a world with an average of +2°C, there will be a considerable risk of war. India, for example, has already decided to build a barrier two and a half metres high along the three thousand kilometres of its border with Bangladesh, one of the countries from which a very large number of refugees could arrive due to the sea flooding its low coastal regions.14 In the rest of the world, massive droughts, recurring hurricanes and population displacements would put a huge strain on the boundaries between rich and poor. Rich countries would be destabilized by severe agricultural problems, and some islands in the Indian Ocean would need to be evacuated. That is a quick overview of the scenario at +2°C, which we will not dwell on, as it is not even on the agenda anymore! Indeed, Dyer’s book is based on reports prior to 2008, and in particular on the IPCC 2007 report, which itself synthesizes scientific work published before 2002.

In November 2012, the World Bank published a report15 that it had commissioned from a team of climatologists at the University of Potsdam on the consequences of an increase of +4°C on our societies and on life on Earth. An average of +4°C means increases of up to +10°C on the continents (we need to imagine, for example, a summer at an average of +8°C in the south of France!). The sea level would rise by about one metre in 2100 (confirmed by the new IPCC report), threatening the main cities of Mozambique, Madagascar, Mexico, Venezuela, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and rendering the main deltas useless for agriculture (Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam and West Africa). The report makes for grim reading, and the consequences it describes are particularly catastrophic; they clearly threaten the very possibility of maintaining our civilization in its present shape.

The serious economic and demographic crises that European societies underwent before the industrial era are all related to climate disruptions. A study published in 2011 goes even further, analysing the waves of causal chains that, between 1500 and 1800, linked climate change to major agricultural, socio-economic and demographic disasters (see Figure 3.1).16 In fact, while economic downturns were the direct causes of the serious social crises that triggered demographic collapse, the climate has always been the root cause. And at the heart of the process, we always find food shortages.

We now know that global heating causes and will cause serious water-supply problems and declines in agricultural yield (the two are not always linked). At +2°C, the number of people faced with severe water shortages could increase by 15 per cent.17 Since 1980, global maize and wheat production have fallen by 3.8 per cent and 5.5 per cent respectively, compared to a simulation where there is no climate change.18 Globally, wheat yields have tended to stagnate over the last twenty years, despite considerable technical progress.19 In the north of Europe, Russia and Canada, precipitation will be more intense and winters warmer,20 which points to better yields and new arable land. But the flood risk will also be higher.21 Conversely, in other regions, researchers expect more frequent water shortages and extreme weather events (heat, drought and storms),22 which will lower overall agricultural production.

Figure 3.1 Causal links between climate change and major human crises in pre-industrial Europe. The thickness of the arrow indicates the strength of the correlation

Source: after D. D. Zhang et al., ‘The causality analysis of climate change and large-scale human crisis’, PNAS 108(42), 2011: 17296–301.

With +2°C, Indian agricultural production would decrease by 25 per cent, causing an unprecedented famine: ‘but [this] does not begin to compare with the plight of Bangladesh, where the southern third of the country – home to 60 million people – would be literally disappearing beneath the waves due to sea-level rise.’23 If Bangladeshis realize that and decide to look for those responsible for this ‘climatic genocide’ (in the words of the Bangladeshi climatologist Atiq Rahman), ‘their bitterness will be very great’.24 With a chilling realism, Dyer describes the nuclear war that could break out in 2036 between India and Pakistan following this kind of conflict.

Geopolitical tensions would be exacerbated by the increasing number of climate refugees.25 In Central America, for example, where drought would become the norm, millions of refugees would be halted in their tracks by the frontier with the United States – a frontier that is becoming ever more impermeable. The same social and humanitarian disaster could take place in southern Europe, given the influx of refugees from Africa, the Near East and the Middle East.

Episodes of increased drought can also lead to a fall in the electricity production of thermal and nuclear power plants,26 which further weakens the ability of people to adapt and survive the consequences of global heating, especially in cities.

One of the biggest risks of climate change is that of growing inequalities (see chapter 8). As Leon Fuerth, a former US national security advisor during Al Gore’s time as vice president and one of the authors of the report ‘The Age of Consequences’ puts it, even the richest countries ‘will be forced to engage in long, nightmarish episodes of triage: deciding what and who can be salvaged from engulfment by a disordered environment’.27 As for the fate of the most deprived, ‘We have already previewed the images, in the course of the organizational and spiritual unravelling that was Hurricane Katrina.’28

Today, we find ourselves in ideal conditions for reaching a global agreement on the climate since none of the world’s great powers has felt under attack since the end of the Cold War. But ‘the deeper we get into the food shortages attendant on global heating, the more difficult it will be to make international deals of any kind’.29

The latest IPCC report indicates the possibility of a ‘breakdown in food systems’ which will aggravate pre-existing situations of poverty and famine (particularly in cities) and increase ‘the risks of violent conflict in the form of civil wars and violence between groups’. But the problem with this monumental report is that it does not take into account the amplifying effects of many climate feedback loops, such as the release of large quantities of methane due to the thawing of the permafrost (hence the recurring optimism of the different versions of these reports). Now, these loops are likely to be triggered once we reach +3°C or +4°C. Thus, beyond a temperature increase of this kind, it is very difficult to describe precisely what could happen. However, the scenarios depicted by the experts are generally unanimous and point to looming disasters.

We can get an idea of the magnitude of the imaginable changes by noting that, when the atmosphere of the last 100 million years contained levels of CO2 that we could reach at the end of the century, the average temperature of the planet was 16°C higher than it is today.30 Conversely, 10,000 years ago, and with temperatures 5°C lower, the Earth was plunged into an ice age, the ocean level was 120 metres lower than today and a layer of ice hundreds of metres thick covered northern Europe.

According to James Lovelock, if the CO2 level reaches 500 ppm or more (we reached 400 ppm on 9 May 2013), most of the Earth’s surface will turn into desert and bush, leaving a remnant of civilization – just a few million people in the Arctic Basin and Greenland.

The Earth has recovered from fevers like this [in the past] […] but if we continue business as usual, our species may never again enjoy the lush and verdant world we had only a hundred years ago. What is most in danger is civilization; humans are tough enough for breeding pairs to survive, and […] in spite of the heat there will still be places on Earth that are pleasant enough by our standards; the survival of plants through the Eocene confirm it. […] But if these huge changes do occur it seems likely that few of the teeming billions now alive will survive.31

Dyer, worried about such a scenario, asked climatologists if they found that possible, and almost all among them did not find it excessive.

That is what might happen if we do not reach an international agreement on climate change and if we continue to burn fossil fuels for a few more years. For we must not forget that even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases completely and immediately, the climate would continue to heat up for several decades. It would take several centuries or even millennia to return to anything like the conditions of pre-industrial climate stability found in the Holocene.

If, by magic, we could extract and burn all the remaining fossil fuels – and the proven reserves are huge – the problems would be much more serious than those we have described above. In the fifth IPCC report, the worst-case scenario indicates an increase of between +8°C and +12°C for 2300. But in 2013, the famous climate scientist James Hansen and his team calculated the trajectory of a scenario in which we would manage to burn one-third of the proven reserves at the current rate, i.e., in less than a century. It would lead us to an average global temperature of +16°C, in other words +30°C at the poles and +20°C on the continents.32 At this temperature, the world would become uninhabitable for most living beings, and even human perspiration would not be enough to maintain our bodies at 37°C. But don’t worry: as we have seen in the previous chapter, we won’t manage to burn all that oil …

In fact, this scenario is unrealistic: well before it happens, the circulation of ocean currents could change, as it has done in the past, creating a risk of anoxia (lack of oxygen) in the depths of the ocean. If the anoxic layer reaches the surface of the oceans, where the light enters, we would then witness the proliferation of bacteria producing hydrogen sulphide, a gas known to destroy the ozone layer and make the atmosphere unbreathable. These ‘Canfield Oceans’, which have occurred on Earth in the past, would annihilate most marine and terrestrial life. Although this is only a hypothesis for the moment, it is still taken very seriously by some scientists. According to Dennis Bushnell, director of research at NASA, it is even conceivable that this might happen before 2100.

All these facts, these figures, these hypotheses, these projections and what our imagination can do with them point to what Chris Rapley, former director of the British Antarctic Survey, calls climate ‘monsters’.

Who will kill the last animal on the planet?

Let’s not exaggerate things – but still, it must be recognized that, over the past few years, humans have been quite effective in eradicating other living things. And the ‘loss of biodiversity’ is not a trivial phenomenon. It involves the destruction of many territories, in which billions of plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms live and interact, and quite simply the disappearance of these living beings. But we human beings depend for our survival on these beings, on our interactions with them and on the interactions that take place between them.

Of course, species extinctions are natural phenomena, just like the appearance of new species. But the problem is that the rate of disappearance has shot up. A recent estimate shows that it is today at least a thousand times higher than the geological average as exemplified by fossils33 and that it is increasing constantly and dramatically. According to the latest surveys, the state of biodiversity continues to worsen,34 despite the increasing efforts we are deploying to protect and conserve it.35 All the tremendous efforts that human beings are making to protect other living beings from their destructive power are still not enough.36

Very recently, a series of disturbing studies has darkened the picture even more, highlighting the extinction of ecological interactions. When a species dies, it never dies alone: it usually takes some of its neighbours with it without anyone noticing. Extinctions are like shocks that spread across the food web, affecting predators and prey of the ‘endangered’ species (vertically) and impacting indirectly on other species indirectly related to the latter (horizontally).37 For example, the extermination of sea otters causes a proliferation of sea urchins (their prey), which transforms the seabed into deserts, which in turn impacts on other food chains and other predators.

The living world is not simply woven from a web of predation, and the shock wave can also spread through the parallel – and very rich – networks of mutual dependencies, like seed dispersal or pollination. Allowing a species to die out deprives others of valuable and even vital resources. We are discovering, for example, that the collapse of the populations of some pollinators can cause the widespread collapse of all the pollinators of an ecosystem and thus have a serious impact on the plants that depend on it, i.e., the agricultural yields.38 It therefore affects not only human populations that feed on these ecosystems but also all the animals that depend on these plants which have nothing to do with the pollinators in question.

The consequences of the extinction of species may even modify the physical characteristics of the milieu. For example, the disappearance of bird species in New Zealand significantly decreases the pollination of the shrub Rhabdothamnus solandri; this reduces the density of its population,39 and therefore affects soil, climate and the temperature and humidity of the ecosystem.

But there are even worse consequences. The shock wave can also strike us with unexpected speed. A study published in 2013 showed that the disappearance of ecological interactions (‘functional extinctions’) precedes the extinctions of populations. In other words, a species (the otter, for example) is already losing ‘connections’ with its neighbours as soon as decline sets in, entailing the disappearance (in 80 per cent of cases) of other species around it well before it has died out itself. These indirect and silent extinctions can begin very early, even before the population of the endangered species has lost a third of its total population (whereas it is not officially declared an endangered species until its decline has reached a figure of 30 per cent). After this point – paradoxically – the most endangered species are not the ones we imagine but those that are indirectly related to those we think are most endangered. Even ecologists, long aware of these effects, have been surprised by the extent of such ‘domino effects’. What are now known as co-extinctions are potentially the most numerous,40 but they are unpredictable, and we do not observe them until it’s too late. That is one possible explanation for the catastrophic extent of the destruction of biodiversity through human activity.

What is the result? We have already entered a silent spring.41 Since the year 1500, 332 species of terrestrial vertebrates have disappeared42 and ‘vertebrate species populations across the globe are, on average, about half the size they were 40 years ago’.43 The populations of 24 of the 31 biggest carnivores on the planet (lion, leopard, puma, sea otter, dingo, lynx, bear, etc.) are in serious decline, thanks to the domino effect44; this dangerously disrupts the ecosystems they inhabit.45

At sea, the situation is particularly dramatic. There are practically no marine ecosystems left that have not been disrupted by human beings,46 and almost half of them (41 per cent) are seriously affected.47 In 2003, a study estimated that 90 per cent of the biomass of large fish had disappeared since the beginning of the industrial era.48 This number, which left many scientists incredulous at the time, has now been confirmed.49 The oceans have literally emptied. In January 2013, for example, only one specimen of bluefin tuna was sold in Tokyo – for 1.7 million dollars!50

The same fate has befallen birds. New Zealand, for example, has lost half of its bird species51 and, in Europe, 52 per cent of the wild bird populations have disappeared over the last three decades.52 This rapid decline in bird populations is accentuated by the pollution caused by neonicotinoid insecticides used in agriculture (which have decimated the insects that birds feed on).53

Among invertebrates – not often studied in sufficient detail – two-thirds of species populations that scientists are tracking are declining (by an average of 45 per cent),54 including wild pollinators and the honey bee.55 ‘For Mr. Bijleveld, the ongoing decline of the entire entomofauna is a “brutal collapse”’.56

When it comes to tropical forests, due to poaching and excessive hunting, they are ‘empty of wildlife’, observes Richard Corlett of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in Menglun (China). This is a reality that we can observe in most of the lush tropical forests of the world, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Borneo, after thirty years of measurements in the forest of Lambir, the ecologist Rhett Harrison and his team from the World Agroforestry Centre in Kunming (China) have been able to closely observe this ‘defaunation’: the animals are no longer there, there is nothing left. ‘There is deafening silence,’ notes Carlos Peres of the University of East Anglia.57

To produce an extinction comparable to that which swept away the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and for palaeontologists to talk about a ‘sixth mass extinction’, more than 75 per cent of the planet’s species need to disappear. We are not there yet, but we are rapidly getting closer to this figure.58 And yet society still does not recognize the decline of biodiversity as a major factor in global change on the same level as the other ‘crises’ that mobilize the international community, such as global heating, pollution, the hole in the ozone layer and the acidification of the oceans.59

But the evidence is there: domino-effect extinctions have dramatic and profound consequences for the productivity, stability and sustainability of the planet’s ecosystems. As a result of our having disrupted or ‘simplified’ them (especially by industrial agricultural activity), these ecosystems are becoming very vulnerable and starting to collapse.60 The idea – a simple one, after all – that diversity is essential for the stability of ecosystems (a basic lesson of scientific ecology) has apparently still not penetrated the brains of most people in the political and economic elites.

Biodiversity is the guarantor of resilient and productive agriculture and, above all, of the continuing functions of ecosystem regulation (air quality, stability of local and global climate, carbon sequestration, soil fertility and recycling of waste products), the functions connected with the supply of vital resources (fresh water, wood, medicinal substances, etc.) and cultural functions (recreational, aesthetic and spiritual). It influences human health by allowing us, for example, to control the emergence of infectious diseases,61 as happened with the Ebola virus in 2014 that was able to spread in West Africa because of – inter alia – the destruction of forest ecosystems.62

And how, for example, can the function of pollination (which after all involves 75 per cent of the species cultivated in agriculture) be guaranteed in the absence of pollinating insects? By using cheap labour to pollinate fruit trees flower by flower, as is the case in the Sichuan region in China where bees have vanished?63 By using mechanical drones, maybe? Some experts are even trying to give a monetary value to the services provided by ecosystems. In 1998, it was estimated at twice the global GDP.64 But do these numbers mean anything? Nature obviously cannot be reduced to economics. The web of life is a matrix that cannot be replaced on a global scale by technical and industrial processes (as we have been trying to do for three centuries, with only mixed success).

It is accepted that the growth of international trade, and thus the expansion of invasive species, is one of the major causes of the decline in biodiversity.65 But we must avoid concluding that in the case of ‘de-globalization’, or a collapse in the global economy, biodiversity would be in any better shape – quite the opposite.66 During the twentieth century, despite a world population that quadrupled, human beings ‘only’ doubled the amount of biomass they took from ecosystems. This ‘delay effect’, which has preserved many forests, is due only to the massive consumption of fossil fuels.67 In the absence of these, therefore, the populations of the whole world will rush to the forests in urgent quest of a little game, some arable land and especially firewood, as happened in Greece after the economic crisis began. The wood will probably also serve to maintain a semblance of industrial activity, given that ‘it takes about 50 m3 of wood to melt 1 tonne of iron, i.e., one year of sustainable production of 10 hectares of forest’.68 Not to mention the possibility of future wars: we know, for example, that ‘in 1916–1918, when German U-boats blocked British trade relations, the United Kingdom had to cut down nearly half of its commercial forests to meet military needs.’69

To this, we need to add the impact of climate change, which, as most models show, will have ‘dramatic’ consequences on biodiversity, and could even, in the worst-case scenarios, trigger the prophesied sixth mass extinction.70

Biodiversity is not a luxury to which only people out for a Sunday walk – rich and cultured people, by definition – have access. The consequences of a decline in biodiversity are far more serious than we imagine. Reduce the number of species and we reduce the ‘services’ that ecosystems provide us with, and thereby reduce the capacity of the biosphere to sustain us. This will sooner or later result in a reduction of the human population,71 following the usual pattern: famines, diseases and wars.

The other boundaries of the planet

Climate, biodiversity … Unfortunately, there are many other ‘boundaries’. In a highly influential study published in the journal Nature in 200972 and updated in 2015,73 an international team of researchers tried to put a figure on nine planetary boundaries that it is absolutely vital not to cross if we are to avoid falling into a danger zone for our survival. They include, of course, climate change and the decline of biodiversity (now also known as the ‘integrity of the biosphere’) but also the acidification of the oceans, the depletion of stratospheric ozone, the disruption of the phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, the impact of aerosols on the atmosphere, the consumption of fresh water, changes in land use and finally chemical pollution. Seven of them have been quantified to date, and four have apparently already been exceeded. The first two, climate and biodiversity, as we have seen, can by themselves have a deleterious impact on human destiny. The other two are changes in land use measured by the decline of forest cover and the main bio-geochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, which have been irreversibly disrupted.74 The quantities of these nutrients released into the soil or into the water by human activity – inter alia agricultural activity – are no longer being absorbed fast enough by natural cycles and are polluting our environment by water eutrophication. There are immediate consequences: non-drinkable water, explosions in the populations of cyanobacteria that are toxic to humans and farm animals, and the death of aquatic fauna due to lack of oxygen in the areas concerned.75

With regard to water, researchers have estimated, at 4,000 km3/year, the world freshwater consumption boundary that must not be crossed if irreversible catastrophic effects are to be avoided, such as epidemics, pollution, a decline in biodiversity and the collapse of ecosystems.76 But the most direct consequences of lack of water are food shortages, as the development of irrigation was one of the main factors of the spectacular increase in human population during the green revolution. Current global consumption is estimated at 2,600 km3/year, but the authors indicate that the remaining room for manoeuvre is dangerously lessened because of global heating (the disappearance of the glaciers), population increase and the growth of agricultural activity (pollution and rapid depletion of non-renewable underground stocks of fresh water).77 The remaining safety zone for the future water needs of humankind is thus very slender. Today, about 80 per cent of the world’s population is at risk of shortages,78 especially in densely populated areas such as Europe, India and China.79

Chemical pollution, meanwhile, is also very worrying. For some years, there has been a great deal of scientific evidence about the consequences of synthetic chemicals on human health.80 We now know that exposure to certain synthetic chemicals during the embryonic stage modifies the expression of genes and therefore impacts on the health, morphology and physiology of future adults: a decline in fertility, rising obesity, altered behaviour, and so on.81 But in addition to the problems caused by exposure to high doses, there is the problem of chronic exposure at very low doses, potentially affecting almost everyone on Earth. In agriculture, when manure is spread, more than 90 per cent of the product is unabsorbed by plants and ends up in the soil where some may persist for many years, contaminating waters and migrating to untreated areas.82 Residues of insecticides (especially neonicotinoids, at present) cause collapses in insect populations, including bees,83 but also damage to vertebrates84 and finally to wildlife and agriculture.85 Air pollution is another consequence, as evidenced by episodes of ‘airpocalypse’ in the big Chinese cities and even in Europe: for example, ‘on 13 December 2013, the streets of Paris were as polluted as a 20 sq. metre room occupied by eight smokers. […] These ultrafine particles, whose diameter is less than 0.1 micrometre (μm), are extremely harmful for human health because they penetrate deeply into the lungs, enter the bloodstream and can reach the vessels of the heart.’86 These forms of pollution are problematic because they cause millions of deaths (and contribute to lowering our average lifespan), but they also impact on biodiversity and the functioning of the ecosystem, as well as on future generations who, in the event of economic collapse, might not be able to rely on a modern medical system.

There are many ‘boundaries’ and we cannot discuss all of them in detail. This is not our aim. The idea we need to take away from this overview is that we are surrounded by boundaries. Whether we are talking about climate, other species, pollution or the availability of water, crossing any of these boundaries seriously affects the health and the economy of many human populations, including the populations of industrialized countries. Worse, the disruption of any one of the systems (the climate, for example) causes upheavals in the others (biodiversity, natural cycles, the economy, etc.), which in turn impact on others in a huge domino effect that no one can control, and that no one can see. Boundaries show us one thing: the great industrial machine, though remarkably efficient, becomes paradoxically ever more vulnerable as it grows and gains in power.

What happens when we cross different Rubicons?

Imagine a switch on which you’re exerting an increasing pressure: at first, it doesn’t move, so you increase and maintain the pressure; it still doesn’t move and then, at a given moment, click! It switches to a state totally different from the initial state. Just before the click, you could feel that the switch was about to yield under the pressure, but you couldn’t predict the exact moment.

For ecosystems, it’s (almost) the same. For a long time, it was believed that nature responded to disruptions in a gradual and proportionate manner. In reality, ecosystems also function as switches. Those which undergo regular disruptions (hunting, fishing, pollution, droughts, etc.) do not immediately show any apparent signs of wear, but gradually – and imperceptibly – lose their capacity to recover (i.e., they lose their so-called ‘resilience’) until reaching a tipping point, an invisible threshold beyond which the ecosystem collapses in a brutal and unpredictable way. Click! In 2001, a new discipline was born: the science of ‘catastrophic shifts’.87

For example, a lake can quickly change from a translucent state to a completely opaque state due to the pressure of constant fishing. The gradual decrease in the number of large fish causes, at a particular moment, a domino effect throughout the food web which in the end leads to a very sudden and widespread proliferation of microalgae. This new state is very stable and difficult to reverse. The problem is that nobody had anticipated this invasion of algae, and no one could (until recently) predict it.

Similarly, in semi-arid forests, once enough vegetation cover has vanished, the soil dries out a little too much and triggers the violent emergence of a desert, which prevents any vegetation from growing back.88 This is what happened to the Sahara five thousand years ago when the forest suddenly became a desert89; a similar transition is probably beginning in the Amazon basin.90

In 2008, a team of climatologists identified fourteen ‘Arctic climate tipping points’ where similar dramatic changes are likely (the Siberian permafrost, the currents in the Atlantic oceanic, the Amazon rainforest, the ice caps, etc.).91 Even if some of them are reversible, or at least have been during the course of geological history,92 each of them is able – by itself – to accelerate climate change catastrophically … and also to trigger others. As Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), points out, ‘the responses of the Earth system to climate change seem to be non-linear. If we venture beyond the threshold of +2°C, towards the bar of +4°C, the risk of exceeding the tipping points increases sharply’.

This approach applies very well to agricultural systems and human systems, which also include ecological, economic and sociocultural breaking points: the management of dry forests in Madagascar (whose destruction is wrecking the local economy), the production of Fédou cheese in the Causses region (whose pastoral system is very fragile) and the emergence of ‘buzz’ on social networks.93

The presence of these tipping points is often due to the great connectivity and homogeneity of systems (see chapter 7) associated with domino effects and feedback loops. Indeed, a complex living system (ecosystems, organizations, societies, economies, markets, etc.) consists of countless interwoven feedback loops that keep the system stable and relatively resilient. When approaching a break point, just one small disruption, such as a drop of water, is enough for certain loops to change nature and drag the entire system into an unpredictable and often irreversible chaos. Either the system dies or it reaches another state of equilibrium, admittedly more resilient and more stable, but often very uncomfortable (for us).

At a global level, the global economic system and the Earth system are two complex systems subject to the same non-linear dynamics and also containing tipping points. This is brought out in two recent studies, one analysing the risks of a global systemic financial crisis system that would cause a major economic collapse in a very short period of time,94 and the other considering the possibility that the ‘global ecosystem’ is coming dangerously close to a threshold beyond which life on Earth would become impossible for the majority of the species present.95 This is the well-known study published in 2012 in the journal Nature by an international team of 24 researchers: it caused a great stir with the media (exaggeratedly) predicting ‘the end of the world in 2100’.96 Even if such global tipping points have already been reached in the past97 (five mass extinctions, transitions to ice ages, and changes in the composition of the atmosphere preceding the explosion of life in the Cambrian), the authors indicate that they have been rare, and that nothing about the present situation can be certain given the complexity of the case as well as the difficulties in measuring all the parameters.98 However, they bring together a cluster of indices showing that we humans have the ability to devastate the entire Earth system radically and rapidly and that we are well on the way to doing so.

This nascent science of catastrophic change is remarkable because it totally changes our understanding of the gravity of the upheavals that our model of industrial development triggers. We now know that every year that passes, and thus every small step towards an intensification of ‘crises’, does not produce foreseeable proportional effects, but increases the risks of sudden, unpredictable and irreversible catastrophes more than proportionally.

Notes

  1. 1. According to the IPCC report published on 27 September 2013 (a very high certainty of 95 per cent). See also John Cook et al., ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature’, Environmental Research Letters 8(2), 2013: 024024.
  2. 2. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber et al., ‘Turn down the heat: Why a 4°C warmer world must be avoided’, Washington, DC, World Bank, 2012.
  3. 3. Stefan Rahmstorf et al., ‘Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011’, Environmental Research Letters 7(4), 2012: 044035.
  4. 4. Dim Coumou and Stefan Rahmstorf, ‘A decade of weather extremes’, Nature Climate Change 2, 2012: 491–6.
  5. 5. Jean-Marie Robine et al., ‘Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003’, Comptes rendus biologies 331(2), 2008: 171–8.
  6. 6. There is even one study showing that, in some currently populated regions, human beings would not be able to survive after 2100. See S. C. Sherwood and M. Hubert, ‘An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress’, PNAS 107(21), 2010: 9552–5.
  7. 7. David Barriopedro et al., ‘The hot summer of 2010: redrawing the temperature record map of Europe’, Science 332(6026), 2005: 220–4.
  8. 8. Kirstin Dow and Thomas. E. Downing, The Atlas of Climate Change (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).
  9. 9. J. D. Steinbruner et al. (ed.), Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2012).
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