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CCSS Meeting #34 (online): Tipping positive change to avoid climate tipping points – Current affairs – Universiteit Utrecht

CCSS Meeting #34 (online): Tipping positive change to avoid climate tipping points

We cordially invite you to join us at our virtual Centre for Complex Systems Studies  external linkon Microsoft Teams to meet other complexity researchers where you won’t miss out any online activities from us as well.

This lecture is an online discussion organised within the Transitions with Complex Systems series.

Due to the current situation which many of our community have found ourselves in, we have decided to adapt our schedule to bring you an updated series of online lectures and discussions.

This Series: Complexity & Transitions

This academic year at the CCSS we are holding two series of lectures. Under our ‘Complexity & Transitions’ series, we host guest lectures from researchers from a variety of discplines whose research focuses on transitions within complex systems. Please see our upcoming Events for details on our other reading series.

Speaker Overview

Tim Lenton  external linkis Professor of Climate Change and Earth Systems Science at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on the Earth as a system, placing a focus on how life reshaped the planet in the past, and what lessons we can draw from this. A main area of his work examines tipping points and early warning signals in the Earth system, particularly focusing on the implications of crossing tipping points and the actual thresholds in the Earth’s climate system. Tim’s passion for studying the Earth’s systems was ignited after reading Jum Lovelock’s books on Gaia, which was mentioned in his recent publication in Science, Gaia 2.0 – Could humans add some level of self-awareness to Earth’s self-regulation?

Abstract

I will summarise recent evidence regarding climate tipping points, which supports declarations that we are in a ‘climate emergency’.

I’ll also show our latest results identifying a human climate niche and projecting how it will move in the future.

Then I will turn to identifying positive social tipping points that will need to be triggered to have any hope of limiting global warming to well below 2°C.

Meeting Details

There will be 60-min lecture from our speaker, followed by a 30-min Question & Answer session.

To attend the lecture, please click this link  external linkat 15:00 on Friday 19th June 2020.

You are free to join the event without a Microsoft Teams account, the link above will direct you to open Teams on the web or download the program, and you can easily join the event as a guest in Teams.

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CCSS Meeting #34 (online): Tipping positive change to avoid climate tipping points – Current affairs – Universiteit Utrecht

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About | Generation C

Generation C

#generationc 

Put on by the Center for Complexity at RISD

Funded by Infosys

A Hybrid Symposium Publication

June 15-19

Daily Posts and Proceedings

About

RISD’s Center for Complexity (CfC) is hosting a five-day virtual symposium, open to all, during the week of June 15th-19th. New content will be posted each day.

The core of the week-long event is a series of essays organized around seven themes we are calling ‘Compasses’.

Crisis & Capacity 

Culture & Constructs 

Collapse & (re)Construct 

Chaos & Control

Contact & Constraints 

Commons & Capital

Compasses & Calibrations

The title—Generation C—is meant to evoke the generational changes needed to address capitalism, climate, community, and complexity among many other challenges. We’ve adapted the term from Ed Yong’s incisive reporting. He used it to name the children now being born who will live in a society profoundly altered by COVID-19 and the choices made in response.

The CfC has assembled a group of thinkers and makers to offer their insight on a series of current and critical topics. We hope that you will find their work thought-provoking and that you will be inspired to add your wisdom to the combined insight of an engaged community thinking together.

We began our planning during a moment of disruption in public health. We make this invitation during a moment when American society has erupted in protest, confronting the racist legacies and present that shape the systems we study. The protests began as a result of police violence but are undeniably connected to the inequitable response to COVID-19 and the wider injustices that persist in our society.

This is a time for many kinds of action. This symposium is a platform to share ideas about the critical work of charting pathways forward. If you wish to think deeply with us, we welcome you to the Center for Complexity 2020 Symposium.

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About | Generation C

A hyperlinked and reverse-linked copy of Donnella Meadows’ classic Leverage Points piece, set up in www.roamresearch.com by Bardia Pourvakil

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System Metadata: Author: [[Donella Meadows]] Source: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System Recommended By: [[David Perell]] Tags: #Essay Notes #complex systems #Science #Systems Theory

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jywqMIbNuvY

also by the same person

Erik Pruyt (2013) Small System Dynamics Models for Big Issues: Triple Jump towards Real-World Dynamic Complexity
https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:10980974-69c3-4357-962f-d923160ab638/datastream/OBJ/link.pdf

Thanks to John Raven for the links

Causal texture, contextualism, contextural

 June 9, 2020  daviding 0 Comments

In the famous 1965 Emery and Trist article, the terms “causal texture” and “contextual environment” haven’t been entirely clear to me.  With specific meanings in the systems thinking literature, looking up definitions in the dictionary generally isn’t helpful.  Diving into the history of the uses of the words provides some insight.

• 1. Causal texture
• 2. Contextualism and contextural
• 3. Texture
• 4. Causal
• 5. Transactional environment, contextual environment
• Appendix.  Retrospective on the 1965 article from 1997

The article presumes that the reader is familiar with the 1965 Emery and Trist article,.  The background in the Appendix provides some hints, but is more oriented as context in a history of science.

Continues in source:

Causal texture, contextualism, contextural – Coevolving Innovations

Our recent explorations into the development of psychology (back to Tolman, Brunswik, Pepper from 1931) and systems thinking coincides with the appearance of a comic strip rerun in the Saturday Toronto Star.

Continues in source:
Behavioral responses in an ecology (via For Better or For Worse) – Systems Changes – Open Learning Commons

Link to original article (free pdf) at https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/04/15/the-causal-texture-of-organizational-environments-emery-and-trist-1965/

Causal Texture of the Environment June 10, 2020 dougmcdavid 0 Comments For those who haven’t read the 1965 Emery and Trist article, its seems as though my colleague Doug McDavid was foresighted enough to blog a summary in 2016!  His words have always welcomed here, as Doug was a cofounder of this web site.  At the time of writing, the target audience for this piece was primarily Enterprise Architecture practitioners.   [DI]

Causal Texture of the Environment – Coevolving Innovations

The Dialectic of Bottom-up and Top-down Emergence in Social Systems January 1970TripleC 3(2):28-50 DOI: 10.31269/vol3iss2pp28-50 LicenseCC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Christian FuchsWolfgang Hofkirchner

(19) (PDF) The Dialectic of Bottom-up and Top-down Emergence in Social Systems

Social relations: Building on Ludwig von Bertalanffy Wolfgang Hofkirchner First published:29 April 2019

Social relations: Building on Ludwig von Bertalanffy – Hofkirchner – 2019 – Systems Research and Behavioral Science – Wiley Online Library

• Published: 03 May 2019

Socio-Technical Perspectives on Smart Working: Creating Meaningful and Sustainable Systems

• Peter M. Bednar & 
• Christine Welch 

Information Systems Frontiers volume 22, pages281–298(2020)

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10796-019-09921-1

Podcast:

Episode 34 covers an important article by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth, “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting,” published in the journal Human Relations in 1951. Eric Trist was a British social scientist best known for his contributions to the field of organization development and one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute. Ken Bamforth was a miner and industrial fellow of the Tavistock Institute.

34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth – Talking About Organizations Podcast

Summary of the classic Trist and Bamforth piece:

soure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8sgGtgro1w

I cannot struggle with wordpress block editor any more but these pieces are also well worth reading!

Systems and democracy

https://medium.com/gentlyserious/systems-and-democracy-2fa1b515360

Decolonising time

https://medium.com/gentlyserious/decolonising-time-b1aaaa2361f5

A very corporate pandemic

https://medium.com/gentlyserious/a-very-corporate-pandemic-71f42b9ae18#_ftnref1

Axiomatic Nonsense

https://medium.com/gentlyserious/axiomatic-nonsense-1120f5b9c923

Three related systems thinking blogs

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<blockquote class=”wp-block-quote”><p>Grounding what we eat

Aidan Ward

Jun 11 ·

Food distribution, but of what?
Not just our food chain but the whole of life on earth depends on soil; soil is where it happens. Macro fauna and flora, like ourselves and the trees, are largely irrelevant in the scale of things. We don’t see it like that because we are macro and filled with our own importance. But we are discovering (again, this is how civilisations collapse) that both in the quantity and the quality of what we eat, the soil is where it is at.
Assessing our food supply chain is that simple. Does the food we eat and how it was distributed and how it was grown protect the vital asset it is based on? Or does it degrade that asset for short term gain, or indeed for any other reason? Since the vast majority of the world’s soils are not only being degraded but are being eroded away entirely, we can guess that the food supply chain is utterly broken.</p><cite><a href=”https://medium.com/gentlyserious/grounding-what-we-eat-e639d1aa9222″>Grounding what we eat – GentlySerious – Medium</a></cite></blockquote>
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Active Gut, Passive Brain

Philip Hellyer

Jan 31, 2019

What would it mean if our brains were passive? Passive to aspects of our environment that we are not even aware of? What would it mean literally but also as a metaphor of our hubris? What do we know and what are we prepared to hear? And given all that, what use can we make of these brains of ours? My increasingly ancient but still spry mother read Peter Frankopan’s Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Her favourite sport is goading the sticks-in-the-mud at her local church. This history is told as the title suggests from a non-western perspective, and my mother’s summary is “Aidan, we are just specks. All this happened and we are nothing in the bigger picture”. His New Silk Roads is her preferred entry into current affairs. Maybe I am my mother’s son, without reading either book. Let me try and rehearse a fantastic narrative from Zack Bush. I am increasingly allergic to the exuberant ‘American’ style and to medical doctors. I don’t like slick presenters, I want authenticity.[1] I came at this from my course on soil regeneration with Didi Pershouse. And I watched an interview-style presentation that lasts 94 minutes. Ugh! And yet.

Active Gut, Passive Brain – GentlySerious – Medium

Crimes against humanity

Aidan Ward

Feb 5, 2019

The original template for capitalism is sugar plantations in Brazil. The recipe is this. Occupy an area of land by force. Kill off anyone who happens to live there. Wipe out all the trees and plants to create bare soil. Import some slaves from Africa, keep them isolated so they have nowhere to run to. Plant sugar cane and harvest for as long as the soil still works for you. Export the sugar to wreck peoples’ health elsewhere. If you were a Portuguese gentleman with some spare cash, you could invest it in such an enterprise and never know the misery that allowed your investment to grow. You didn’t need to know anything other than you were not cheated in the returns. Capitalism in the raw. When we speak of crimes against humanity we generally think of naked aggression: Cortes in Mexico, Stalin and Mao, Apartheid, the Holocaust. Here, we pay more attention to misinformation about the health effects of tobacco, corruption of climate science by the oil majors, killing people with processed food. These are closer to the raw capitalist model: just make sure your investors don’t know and don’t care — killing millions of people is OK, it is just business. And very respectable, caring, liberal-minded people don’t even notice; the officially sanctioned history doesn’t get written. Yet? I want to add one to the list that I was not properly aware of until my studies this week. In two hundred years Australia was turned from a green and pleasant land into largely a desert and desertifying hell of 50 degrees centigrade. And that change is so significant that it tilts the warming and aridification of the whole world. How many people does that kill? I don’t mean to suggest that the enormity of a crime is measured by the number of dead bodies: but I do want to rescue our imagination from the immediacy of death camps to the long slow impoverishment and starvation of masses of people. We have written before about slow violence. The rehearsal of the true history is immensely important, vital even.

Crimes against humanity – GentlySerious – Medium

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Adapting to Uncertainty: Complexity Science and COVID-19 – Niskanen Center