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Feeling Connection

 Read this great essay in Wired about climate change involving a waterfall deep down in the ocean:

When a system approaches a tipping point, though, the character of the fluctuations changes. With the AMOC, you might see the flow rate increasingly struggle to regain its equilibrium. The rate might wander farther and farther away from the comfy baseline. And the system might take longer to settle back into its routine state. These features— the greater meandering, the slower return to home base—are an obsession of tipping-point mathematicians. If you were to plot the data for a system that’s about to tip, you’d see the data points first follow a nice, predictable path; then the path gets jittery, and then it goes off on wide, whiplashing swings. The system is becoming less stable, taking longer to recover. You can almost feel sorry for it. You can sense a sort of sickness

As the story goes, the brother and sister team published a paper on this patient's sickness and predicted the the time around which it would no longer recover. That got them a lot of heat and scrutiny from the climate science community. The system being studied is highly complex and the data is too scarce to make confident predictions. For every outcome humans can think of nature can come up with a surprise. So to conclude, the author writes: 

Besides, there’s another possibility. A remote one, sure, but one that also can’t be ruled out: The AMOC might have already tipped. And we wouldn’t know it for years

This all reminded me of a two partners in a relationship that is being put to test by one of the two. The other side, adjusts, tolerates, and adapts almost infinitely and they are rewarded for their efforts by bigger more novel challenges. It seems as if nothing can break this person's will to make the relationship work - there is no realistic tipping point. One day, the person who was creating all this trouble comes home to find half of everything gone, the person disappears so perfectly it is as if they had never existed. It turns out that they had planned their picture perfect exit for a decade while making it look like all was well. Nature is atleast letting us know all is not well infact. 


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