The Great Forgetting

This is one of the most important insights that paleoclimate archives provide: They show us how the real world breaks. How resilience folds into catastrophic failure. They show us the edges and asymmetries of the climate system: the thresholds of tolerance in ecological networks; the slow steady slog of diversification and the quick ax of extinctio... See more

Before a tipping point in a complex system, there are early warning signals that may be detected.14 The most widely applicable of these early warning signals is “critical slowing down”—the phenomenon we are all familiar with before our computer crashes, and rather than heed the implications of this slower processing power, we jam at the keys in fru

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