" Studies such as these help us gaze into the uncertain future and ask if that is what we want for our children. Most of us don’t. A few of us actually try to do something to change it. For the rest, the lag time is comforting. The complexity of non-linear feedback systems gives us an excuse to procrastinate."
Why are zombies so ubiquitous
in contemporary popular culture? The HBO mini-series, Game of Thrones, supplies one theory. Unlike in the AMC series, Walking Dead, or in the film, World War Z, the undead are not coming
on like a Blitzkrieg hoard. Rather, the White Walkers are building slowly, as a
rumor, sometimes killing the messenger and leaving the message undelivered.
“Winter is coming” is an expression that hangs in the air, deepening the sense
of foreboding.

Game of
Thrones resonates because outside the window is the drama of NATO expansion
bumping up against retired Red Army vets in the Ukraine, the unmasking of shadow
banks in the U.K. by the Financial Times
and shadowing governments by Edward Snowden, or the sniper battle on the U.S. Republican
right that is so entertaining to MSNBC and CNN. It is all much ado about
nothing. Just North of our popular culture Wall is a climate juggernaut, building
momentum.
Last month John P. Holdren, Director of the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy, released the Third National Climate Assessment
(NCA3). If you missed the news, it
was because the report was all about the White Walkers no one wants to talk
about.



After release of the study, John Holdren told Yale 360:
“There are a number of findings in this report that sound an alarm bell signaling the need for action to combat the threats from climate change. For instance, the amount of rain coming down in heavy downpours and deluges across the U.S. is increasing; there’s an increase that’s already occurring in heat waves across the middle of the U.S.;and there are serious observed impacts of sea-level rise occurring in low-lying cities such as Miami, where, during high tides, certain parts of the city flood and seawater seeps up through storm drains. These are phenomena that are already having direct adverse impacts on human well-being in different parts of this country.”
Studies such as these help us gaze into the uncertain future
and ask if it is really what we want for our children. Most of us don’t. A few
of us actually try to do something to change it. For the rest, the lag time is
comforting. The complexity of non-linear feedback systems gives us an excuse to
procrastinate.

On a very large scale, most climate scientists say that much of the excess heat energy that the Earth is currently absorbing is going into the world’s oceans. They refer to oceans as “heat sinks.” The major concern with this situation is that the ‘sinks’ will become ‘sources’ in the future. In other words, the chickens (massive amounts of heat energy) will come home to roost (wreak havoc on us with extreme weather events).
While this energy is being stored in the oceans everything appears to us to be OK. It is a lot like running up a large debt. … This is the same strategy that U.S. President Bush (the second) used with the Iraq War. He did not tax Americans to pay for the war, but put it on the national credit card. There were few complaints at the time, but now after a trillion dollars we hear complaints about the “unsustainable levels of federal debt” in America.
Similarly, climate scientists continue to warn of “unsustainable levels of carbon debt,” but I suspect more and more people will echo them in the future, especially because another and perhaps more ominous delay is also built into the climate system.
Once fossil fuels are burned the carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for decades causing more and more warming. Many scientists say that even if we stopped burning all coal, oil and gas today that we would continue to experience the effects for the better part of most Wanganui Chronicle readers’ lifetimes.

In my opinion, markets reflect a dynamic somewhat akin to the Heisenburg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which holds that precision is fundamentally limited by Nature: the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. In an analogous fashion, the more precisely we can determine the likelihood of a trend change, the less precisely we can determine the timing of the trend change–and vice versa.

And the White Walkers are just
beyond the wall.