Sergio Abranches

Looking at the sequence of extreme weather events from 2005 to the beginning of 2011 it seems clear that any trend analysis or future scenario has to look at climate change as a central driver.A few years ago a friend of mine, an economist who runs a successful consultancy business, asked for a meeting to discuss my view on climate change. He was intrigued by the fact that, knowing my work as a political risk analyst, I have started to write extensively about climate change. Especially my journalistic commentaries have centered, for several years now, on climate change and related issues.

I argued that looking at long range scenarios to assess forthcoming risks I realized that climate change had become a unremovable driver. In the 1980’s, one could still find 30-50 year scenarios that looked at climate change as a variable. At least one scenario would not feature climate change, and this absence would be one of the factors that would distinguish it from the other scenarios. From the 1990’s onwards one could not find any credible long-run scenario that did not take climate change into account. In other words no story about the next three or four decades would be credible if it did not include climate change. Scenarios can vary widely when other factors are examined. Climate change has to be in all, and can only credibly vary regarding its intensity, and the different solutions envisaged.

He told me that he was beginning to see it, when analyzing long-term agricultural trends.

Yesterday he coined a catch-phrase for one of his analysis looking at supply, demand and price trends: “extreme weather used to be a random factor, and has now become a permanent one because of climate change”. Maybe it has never been a totally random factor. But it is clear that it has been a permanent feature over the last few years.

I’ve looked at extreme weather events from 2005 to the beginning of this year, and was able to make an extensive list covering these seven years. For all of them I could list heavy storms; floods and landslides; anomalously cold or hot winters; heat and cold waves; severe droughts. Anomalies could be found in all years, and all around the world. A good aggregation from 2005 to 2009 here. For 2010, an year of extremes, two good sources are here and here. Another good source, from the insurance industry here. This year began with some deadly weather events in Sri Lanka, Australia, and Brazil.

This sequence of extreme events over seven straight years has had a disruptive effect on agricultural supplies. Demand continued to grow, but crop failures due to the weather has reduced global supplies. Prices have increased feeding a weather-related food price inflation. It seems sensible to admit that weather extremes have become a driver no mid to long-term agricultural scenario can disregard. it also means that agribusiness will have to invest in adaptation. Some migration of agricultural production from risky to safer areas is becoming likely. Obviously the reach of the climate driver goes far beyond agriculture. Loss of lives, infrastructure and property was widespread. Extreme weather raises the risk of disasters everywhere, and adaptation has become a general need. The insurance industry has introduced the climate driver in its calculus long ago. Cities are already preparing themselves for present and future events resulting of changing climate patterns.

No risk or trend analysis will make sense if it doesn’t take climate change as a permanent and ubiquitous driver.

It is in our power to eradicate poverty by 2050; it is in our power to eradicate disease by 2050; but it is also in our power to destroy ourselves by 2050.” (Ian Goldin)

The Royal Geographic Society has hosted , last September, a panel discussion on “The World in 2050”, with scientific experts from the 21st Century School.

The event was a joint endeavor of the James Martin 21^st Century School and Intelligence². Panelists were Ian Goldin, director of the the 21st Century School at the University of Oxford; Malcolm MacCulloch, director of the School’s Institute for Carbon and Energy Reduction in Transport; Sara Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of Ageing; and Julian Savulescu, director of the School’s Programme on Ethics of the New Biosciences.

In many places, academic institutions, corporations, NGOs, think tanks, numerous people study, research, and discuss future trends. In daily social life, however, in the media in general, and in the governments of almost all countries, the long-term, envisioning the future, is a lateral, peripheral section of the agenda. Is is not a priority. We’re tied to the short-term, to the joys and tribulations of our daily life; to the immediate  policy agenda. However, disregarding the future, failing to look ahead and to focus the uncertainties and possibilities beyond the horizon of our daily obligations is riskier than one can imagine. To be the able to take our destiny in our hands, we’ve got to have a vision for the future, a long view.

Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the Long Now Foundation, reminds us in his book “The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility”, that

“time is asymmetrical to us. We can see the past but not influence it. We can influence the future, but we cannot see it. Both the invisibility and potential malleability of the future draw us to lean into it, alert to threat or opportunity, empowered by the blankness of its page (if the future is not determined, we might do anything).”

He also teaches us that “rigorous long-view thinking makes responsibility taking inevitable because it responds to the slower, deeper feedback loops of the whole society and the natural world.” Ultimately, it is clear that “in the long run, saving yourself means saving the whole world.”

Perhaps the best introduction to this panel is the concluding remark by Ian Goldin, on his presentation:

“It is in our power to eradicate poverty by 2050; it is in our power to eradicate disease by 2050; but it is also in our power to destroy ourselves by 2050.”

I hope this is justification enough to persuade those who visit this page to watch the video.

The answer is simple: we don’t want a future of decay. We want a major breakthrough for humankind. As significant as the Enlightenment was. The path to a society where all the potential present in today’s scientific, technological and societal change can fully flourish and lead to a new stage of human evolution.

Sergio Abranches

The Kyoto Protocol has failed on almost all counts. It was remarkably durable. Yet, it’s single noticeable virtue was to act as a catalyst for the development and experimentation of regional and global carbon markets, as Mike Hulme argues. But these markets weren’t even capable of stopping the growth of carbon emissions. Its flaws far outweighed its very few benefits. It has become a shield for large emerging emitters to elide their responsibilities. It conveys a mediocre vision of the future, it is a treaty for muddling-through, not for progress.

Sergio Abranches

Kyoto took too long to come into force, and when it did, it was ineffective. The Protocol was mostly a political contraption, having no firm scientific or economic basis. As Oliver Tickell writes it has “emerged from a maelstrom of negotiation and horse trading dominated by national, political and commercial vested interests”.

At the time of the negotiations, the scientific consensus about global warming and climate change was not as overwhelming as it is today. Dissenting voices were still taken seriously. Not now. Hard evidence of accelerating global warming and climate change has increased manyfold since then. Kyoto does not represent the present state of the World regarding climate change risks and opportunities.

I am not going to discuss in detail Kyoto’s failures. I recommend Mike Hulme’s “Why We Disagree About Climate Change”; Oliver Tickell’s “Kyoto 2”; Nicholas Stern’s “The Global Deal”; Anthony Giddens’ “The Politics of Climate Change”; Scott Barrett’s “Climate change negotiations reconsidered”.

Suffice it to say that the Kyoto Protocol has no targets for large emerging countries, and mediocre ones for developed countries. China, India and Brazil have interpreted its clause of “common but differentiated responsibilities”, as no obligation at all. A new deal would have to set more clearly that all large emitters, developed and emerging, have shared responsibilities, that lead to binding, though differentiated, quantitative commitments. Developed countries do have a carbon debt, but it cannot be paid with waivers for emerging countries to follow their high carbon path. It has to be paid with the creation of financial and technical mechanisms to help them thread a new low carbon path.

Kyoto failed to provide a sound financial mechanism for adaptation. The new deal has to set adaptation as a high priority and devise the institutional financial means to effectively help poorer countries to adapt to climate change, while establishing new, low-carbon economic activities to generate employment and income, and fight extreme poverty.

The Protocol has been inefficient and ineffective regarding all its main goals. It is too flexible. It’s compliance mechanism too weak. It has failed to change the behavior of its parties, admitted non-compliance, induced generalized complacency. No wonder, it will not  even meet its mediocre target of around 5% decrease in GHG emissions by 2012. Next to the required 90% fall by 2030, it has been a dismal one. As Nicholas Stern points out, “from 1930 to 1950, the concentration of Kyoto gases increased by about 0.5 ppm per annum, from 1950 to 1970 by around 1 ppm per annum, and from then until 1990 the rate of increase doubled again. In the past decade [the one Kyoto was supposed to address] it has been around 2.5 ppm a year.”

One of the pillars of the Kyoto Protocol was the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). It was a good idea that helped to provide the catalyst for the development of the global carbon markets, as Hume ponders. However, as Stern says, in its current form it is not able to generate or absorb the financial and technical flows needed under a “global deal”. The mechanism is too complex and too bureaucratic. It is based on the unfettered discretion of regulatory and bureaucratic agents. In Brazil, for instance, one bureaucrat alone has been able to totally stall the licensing process. It is prone to idiosyncratic behavior, leading to different outcomes, at different countries, largely impossible to be systematically compared for evaluation purposes. What is required is a new conceptual and methodological non-discretionary framework, to reduce transaction costs, gain scale and expedite decision-making.

It should not be the pivotal mechanism for the whole deal, but part of a system of mechanisms with the ultimate goal of promoting a technological revolution, as Scott Barrett   contends. The global deal should not be designed to have as its final goal meeting the emissions targets. This is a critical goal, but its sustainability depends on a new political economy, a new industrial revolution. This new political economy requires a full-blown technological revolution. To create momentum for such a technological breakthrough we’ll need wise market inducements and regulatory constraints.

To meet this ultimate goal, that will guide us into a low-carbon society, we do need market mechanisms, and the institutional discipline of a global new green deal, but we should concentrate most of our attention on the state, and the new governance needs. The “state will have a major role in all countries in setting a framework for these endeavors,” as Giddens argues.

The basics for a new global deal are already well known: GHG emissions of developed countries should peak by around 2015 to subsequently decrease continually and fast. GHG emissions of emerging powers (especially China, India and Brazil) should peak by 2020, to then converge towards developed countries’ trajectories. Global emissions should drop to 50% of 1990 levels by 2050, at least, and global per capita emissions should reach at least 1 ton by 2050. The goal is to eventually stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases. Scott Barrett correctly stresses that “there is disagreement about what this stabilization level should be.” It is now clear that before even thinking about stabilizing we must ensure they reach 350 ppm.

Stabilization, says Barrett, “requires that the atmosphere and the oceans be in chemical balance. Over time, take up by the oceans will decline as emissions fall. In equilibrium, if concentrations are to be stabilized, emissions will have to fall to zero.”

Kyoto has left the world forest out of its mechanisms. The new deal must find a way to include them and create the means to encourage zero-deforestation and the maximum possible afforestation targets.

We’ve got to create the conditions to write these goals into a binding agreement. Governments should adhere and provide the domestic governance required to meet these goals. The governments among indisputable large emitters, that are today in denial, are betraying the concrete interests of their people, not forsaking any moral obligation to humankind.

The deal must be ambitious. We must aim high and look far. Those proposing negotiations to aim at what’s possible, are looking for something impossible to have: an incremental, muddling-through solution to a cataclysmic threat.

Looking into the limits of the possible is to wish for accommodation. It is a self-defeating formula. We’ve been accommodating, compromising, tolerating, and failing to mitigate and adapt. We are building a dystopia, envisioning doomsday, almost unconsciously, through complacency and lack of vision.

What we need is ambition, boldness, climate radicalism, rather than political maneuvering, or diplomatic wavering. We’ve got to have a dream, a global dream. The low-carbon society is possible, it is within our reach. We’re not talking about de-growth. De-growth is the threat ahead if we keep with our dystopian outlook. We are talking about a new development pattern. A turning point like the passage from the Middle Ages to Enlightenment, like the transition from feudalism to capitalism via the Industrial Revolution. We’ve done it before. We can mitigate global warming, improve our well-being and fight global poverty. Why should we accept our future history to be poorer than our past history?

Dystopia leads to paralysis, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Utopias breed revolutions. We can be technical, practical, and effective, and yet have a dream, pursuit an Utopia for ourselves and the generations ahead.

Sergio Abranches

What if we are living now at the edge of tremendous changes and breakthroughs that will lead the humankind to evolve faster than ever along the twenty-first century? What if we are at the edge of a tipping-point in the history of humankind?

Mathematician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge wrote, back in 1993, that acceleration of technological progress has taken us to “the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.”  Vinge, one of the first writers to envisage cyberspace, wrote on an essay for NASA in 1993, later published by the Whole Earth Review, that the cause of this sweeping change would be “the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.” He called this tipping point a singularity.

A singularity, in physics, in astronomy, is where the laws of physics as we know them break down. My friend Ulisses Leitão, professor of Physics and Linux evangelist, tells me that the greatest singularity, is the Big Bang moment: “density would be so high, tending to infinity, that present Physics would not be able to describe its physical behavior. It would require a unified theory of all fundamental forces of Nature: electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravitational. A theory encompassing Quantum Physics (small dimensions), Relativistic (high energy), and Universal Gravitation (large distances). “This theory doesn’t exist, we’ve been searching for it for the last 60 years…” If the search is possible, i.e. if we have the tools to search for it, than, in the long run, the theory is possible. That’s the point to me.

Vinge thinks that technological singularity means a moment beyond which huge, but unpredictable, changes occur, as John Hind explains on an article for the Guardian, in 2002. On his original presentation of singularity, Vernor Vinge said that “when greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid.” He went even farther: “there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities, on a still-shorter time scale.” That is thinking as creatively about the future as possible.

Envisaging inevitable surprises we can anticipate without ever knowing in advance their consequences to us, as Peter Schwartz proposes in his 2003 book Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence, is also about creative thinking. They are two different and equally valid ways of thinking about a “history” for the future that is boldly visionary and technically sound.

Inevitable surprises we can anticipate, as hypothesized by Peter Schwartz, are not in contradiction with the possibility that we are plunging into a singularity, a whirlpool of vertiginous change. The former tells us about changes we can anticipate, but not know its consequences. The latter tells about a tipping point after which change will accelerate beyond imagining to arrive at a quantum leap on human evolution that goes beyond everything we’ve known so far.

The difference is that one way of thinking points to the possibility of anticipating the changes that could create the means for the emergence of singularity. The other invites us to try to anticipate the broader consequences of these events. To look at the time, Vinge invites us, “where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.” From the human point of view this change will be “a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.”

Can you imagine how much controversy this idea has created in the academic and intellectual circles more than 15 years ago? Reaction to the singularity hypothesis was widespread. Supporters have also multiplied. Social scientist Robin Hanson once collected several comments on Vinge’s singularity. One comment has direct implications for the whole idea of looking into the future: it stated that nothing is certain, we’re always dealing with hypothesis. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute said that he did not “regard the singularity as being a certainty, just one of the more likely scenarios”.

Singularity has raised controversy since the first time Vernor Vinge used the idea, fictionally and rather diffusely, on a novel, Marooned In Real Time. On the story, a character says, at a certain point of the plot: “It was the Singularity, a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligence.” It is a breaking point, a paradigm shift beyond the concepts we’re used to. Similar to the passage from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

It is easy to understand why all the controversy. We are talking about two orders of unknowns and neither is really easy to look into. The future is an entertaining idea until we start to realize it points to our ineluctable finitude. We have to make ourselves comfortable with the idea of looking beyond ourselves and our beloved ones. Singularity radicalizes this vision. It points beyond human dominance in the universe. Not comfortable at all. Ray Kurzweil and several others took this idea much further, into the real of transhumanism. But that’s far beyond my view.

Stewart Brand has a point worth recalling in his The Clock of the Long Now: time is asymmetrical to us. We can see the past but we can’t change it. Yet we still argue about the past, I’d add. We cannot see the future, he continues, but we can influence it. He is not implying we can control the way future events will unfold. It is not about trying to control the future, but trying to give it, i.e. to future generations, the tools to help itself.

Isn’t that precisely what we are trying to do about climate change? We know, or most of us know, we cannot control natural laws. There is very little we can do with the tools we have today about the amount of GHG we’ve already sent to our atmosphere, or the global warming we’ve already bought with the carbon we’ve emitted so far. We can develop tools to adapt human society to these very likely events, though. We can develop tools and the required means of governance to reduce future emissions and avoid worst case scenarios.

None of these challenges is about certainty, about knowing beyond any doubt. Certainty will always fall within the realm of our finitude. It is about uncertainty, risk, chances we should no take. We can estimate probabilities and educatedly guess probable consequences. To do that we must look into the future, and doing it with art, creativity, imagination and boldness helps a lot. Worst than to reveal good and bad things that might be brewing in our future, would be to make these views dull and obvious.

I, for myself, as far as climate change is concerned, would rather be warned of risk greater than what is most likely to happen than to be informed of risk that might fall short of probable outcomes. The same is true for me regarding the future history of this century. I’d rather think that humankind will have overcome its frailties, brutality and insensitiveness; learn solidarity to the sufferings of those different from oneself; domesticate the propensity of the powerful to oppression and of the rich to amass far more wealth they can manage; than to imagine it will be all the same in 2100.

There is a tipping point looming on the horizon of our future. It may not have anything to do with Vinge’s singularity. We can only be sure of one thing: change will be overwhelming and our old models will have to be discarded, a new reality will rule.

An excellent brief interview with Jamais @cascio on future thinking and foresight as a sort of immune system for our civilization. It is a good metaphor, as it puts together the two major functions of scenario design: adopting a long view to look at risks mostly those yet invisible at first sight, and thinking about long term ways to manage those risks. Thinking ahead of present circumstances, helps us to envision paths for the development of new solutions to new problems or to enduring problems.

More thoughts by Jamais Cascio at Open Future.

Thinking about the future is not easy. It is very much like gaming, one has to get through a maze of obstacles and deception to reach further and higher, moving to increasing levels of complexity, towards one’s goal.

The task is to envisage plausible, different, alternate futures. The whole exercise is about increasing levels of abstraction and detachment from current experience, down to concrete hypothesis about a new state of the world.

One could do that either by using quantitative simulation tools or qualitative story writing. Quantitative methods are still too linear to my liking. If necessary I would prefer to use system analytic tools such as Studio 8 (Powersim) for PCs, and Stella or iThink, for Macintosh (my case). If I can choose, I’d rather use more qualitative scenario writing that can be as effective as simulation curves. Dealing with the future is a tricky affair, be it to interpret the results of one’s models, be it to get meaningful results from one’s storyboard.

Future thinking requires an awkward combination of audacity and discipline. Audacity to dare to be radically creative and to feel absolutely free to use all one’s intelligence, information and knowledge to consider alternate futures. Discipline not to let the past and the present to contaminate your views of the future. Both past and present have to be wisely and carefully applied in shaping the context for your future stories, but they cannot dominate them. The greater danger lies in the temptation of linearly projecting our present experiences and biases into the future, what Ray Kurzweil calls “intuitive linear view” in opposition to the “historical exponential view”.

Let me be clearer: the present writes linearly the “business as usual” future. In many cases, as for climate change, the “business as usual” future is the one we cannot afford, because it is not feasible. It is a future that will not actually be. There are emerging forces, many still latent, that will very likely change the course of future history away from the “business as usual” scenario. The contradictions of maintaining the status quo generate a turbulent environment in which these forces tend to unfold and gain strength. At the same time it is a hostile environment for the dwindling forces behind the status quo.

Let’s look at it empirically and logically. Can we say that the world we live today is the outcome of 30 years of business as usual? Look around you, all the gizmo, the economics, the social networking, the cultural context, all significant elements of both your personal and professional lives. Now, think back 30 years ago. Almost nothing that is relevant for our current personal and professional lives could be found in 1979. Why should we bet our existence on the belief that 2039 will be approximately equal to 2009, linearly increased or decreased, a bit improved or a bit worsened? Isn’t it more likely that it will be as different as 2009 is from 1979, or even more so? Some of you reading this post weren’t even born back in 1979. Is there a more radical change than between being and not being? Look at all the differences it means to be 20 or 50 years old. To me business as usual, in the long run, is a logical impossibility.

Besides, a business as usual outcome in the age of global warming and climate change is much less likely than a happy scenario of a low-carbon society or a doom story of a society that has chosen to burn itself out of history.

The dangerous temptation of projecting the present into the future should not be mistaken for acknowledging the political, social and cultural strength of the status quo. We’ve built a world not to change, but to expand upon what we already have and are. Our institutions are set to prevent that we shift towards the very different. They are adjusted to help us become more efficient, building upon what we already do. Like the French say with savvy, the rule is: “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more it changes, the more it remains the same. This is true on the short and mid run. On the long run, however, the World will change no matter what forces try to prevent it from changing.

There is another danger haunting everyone trying to think about the future: “short vision” or the inability to hold a long view. In this hectic society we live, overflowing of news, information, scientific findings, gadgets, you name it, threaten to engulf us on an ever accelerating pace. To adapt and survive we have to spend so much time sorting out what is meaningful to us, that we can only look at today. Tomorrow will always be another day, very much like yesterday, and so this experience seems to hold for the future as well.

It doesn’t. The future will not be like yesterday, today or tomorrow. It will be something very different. If we look back at twenty, thirty years ago, our world was so different from today. There are countless things we do, use, have that we couldn’t even dream of a few years ago. The only thing we can be sure of is that change will happen, life will find a way very likely unprecedented and unforeseen by most.

A group of future-minded people was so worried about this short view syndrome that they decided to create a foundation dedicated to promote long-term thinking. I should have said very long-term, because they say they “hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years”. They intend to do that by providing a counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking.” Among the founding fathers of the Long Now Foundation are two well known authors and professional scenario planners, Stewart Brand and Peter Schwartz. They aren’t a group of “outliers”. They’ve been sponsoring some of the most creative and interesting seminars I’ve seen lately. One of the most recent, on July 28, was on “Organically Grown and Genetically Engineered: The Food of the Future”, with Pamela Ronald, head of plant genetics at UC Davis, and Raoul Adamchak, who teaches organic farming, there. Their main claim is that “to meet the appetites of the world’s population without drastically hurting the environment requires a visionary new approach”.

To adopt a long view – it doesn’t have to be 10,000 years long – is to open ourselves to the novelty that lies ahead of us. It may sound as a cliché, but the future is indeed full of surprises, bad and good ones, and, more often than not, inevitable surprises. Peter Schwartz wrote in his 2003 book, Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence, that “surprises are the norm”, particularly after science and technology-powered revolutions have greatly increased the complexity and turbulence of our life. He tells us that there will be more surprises, we will be able to deal with them, and we will anticipate most of them. We cannot know their consequences in advance or how they will affect us, but we know many of the surprises to come, like economic collapses, for instance. He wrote that in 2003.

Far-reaching scientific and technological changes have accelerated our biorhythm as they exponentially increased our power to tinker with both our natural and built environments. We are right now experiencing the early beginnings of yet another scientific revolution. It will lead to the convergence of several advancements that are already among us, but when put together in full interaction will likely become something very different. Something much larger than the simple sum of their parts. I am talking about the fusion of digital, nano, bio, and neuro science and technologies that will inevitably produce a new techno-age, full of wonder, potential, and risk.

The breadth of the changes to come can be so astonishing that we may not continue to be able to anticipate surprises, and to make “pretty good assumptions about how most of them will play out,” as Peter Schwartz asserts. We may be traveling to a higher dimension of our future, totally new and yet inconceivable.