Nothing below is meant to diss “normal” science, but we’re in kinda post-normal times. Our cognitive models, and our computer models are not the map of the territory that we need to think they are.
The easiest way to think of this is via the game of Jenga.
A tower of blocks. You can take a certain number out, and it stays solid. Then it starts to wobble. Then, you do one more and suddenly it’s gone like a fist when you open your palm.
Nonlinearity
Terms assume our norms. e.g. ‘non-linear’ suggests that linear is the norm; the same for ‘disequilibrium’ and ‘aperiodic.’ How often is this an order and pattern imposed by human minds, with their all-too-human needs? This point from Alan Beyerchen, cited by Ron Eglash in an account of a 1998 MIT conference on ‘Embracing Complexity.
Exponential growth
Flickering
Systems on the edge of a phase shift (Universal early warning signals of phase transitions in climate systems)
Black Swans
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Angel of History
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.[2]
manchester climate monthly 