Can we really solve the million-piece climate puzzle?
To be clear, I’m not asking "Do we care about climate change?" or "Are we worried about climate change?" or "Would we like to see something done about climate change?" The answer to all of these questions is obvious; I can prove it to you with dozens of opinion polls certifying how much we care about climate change.
But we care about many wicked problems. We care about global peace, while the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Doomsday Clock gets ever closer to midnight. We care about global inequality, while it gets worse. We care about the international wildlife trade, with countries meeting year after year after year to decry it, yet the illegal trade continues. We’ve cared about climate change for several decades, and yet we remain on track for dangerous climate change.
So what I’m asking isn’t "Do we care?" It’s "Do we intend to do anything about it?" That’s a much harder question to answer. To explore the question further, I’ll use Australian cartoonist Neil Matterson’s 2008 vision of themillion-piece climate change jigsaw puzzle.
After working on many aspects of climate change for more than two decades, I became fascinated by the idea thatso few of the million pieces of the puzzle已经数以百万计的个人，组织和几十个国家的数千落入地方经过多年的工作。为什么没有我们取得较大进展？
我花了过去四年集中在认识气候变化之谜。什么可能拼图实际上看起来一样，如果它能够完成？什么是碎片，他们在哪里站立，这可以迅速组装并没有，谁正在组装拼图和谁是试图减缓下来？
为此我读过几十本书，几百个报告和期刊文章，数以千计的新闻报导，访问数以千计的网站，并观看了数百部影片。随着知识管理工具我“记住”得差不多了，所以我可以诚实地声称拥有的深入拼图为别人的理解帮助。
这几乎是不可避免的，我们最终会脱碳我们的能源系统。那么，为什么在拼图进展如此缓慢？
这几乎是不可避免的，我们最终会脱碳我们的能源系统。那么，为什么在拼图进展如此缓慢？We have most of the tools we need and, in the larger scheme of things, it wouldn’t cost very much. So why will we wait to finish the low-carbon transition until we’ve committed to levels of climate change that will range from disruptive to catastrophic for billions of people on the planet? That’s the really challenging question.
I know that climate change is a wicked problem, perhaps the ultimate快刀斩乱麻for human and societal decision-making. I can list dozens of factors that impede progress on avoiding dangerous climate change. I think that this political cartoon sums up the situation nicely:
What do I mean by that, using the climate change jigsaw puzzle as a guiding metaphor? I mean that we seem much less driven to make progress on the puzzle than we are to go through the motions of working on the puzzle.
- Are there very different views of what the completed puzzle should look like, based on our disciplinary tool sets, political world-views, and financial self-interests? Yes.
- Are we more committed to completing the puzzle "our way" than to the larger goal of getting the puzzle put together? Yes.
- Do we only "see" those parts of the puzzle we want to see or are most comfortable seeing? Yes.
- 难道我们更主动地生成有关的难题，而不是找出如何组装它的更多信息？是。
- Are we happy to "reinvent the wheel" when it comes to individual puzzle pieces if it advances our personal (need to publish) or organizational (need to raise funding) interests, no matter how much of a diversion? It seems that way, yes.
- Do we tend to convince ourselves that "our" puzzle piece is by far the most important, justifying our relative lack of interest in other puzzle pieces? Yes.
- Do we spend a lot of effort downplaying the importance of puzzle pieces other than our own (think about renewables and nuclear debate)? Yes.
我们似乎要少得多驱动就比我们要经过的难题工作的议案拼图进展。
I could go on, but is it necessary? The reality is that we have the information that ought to motivate us to complete the million-piece jigsaw puzzle. We have the tools that would allow us to complete most or all of the puzzle if we chose to use them. We have the money we would need to complete the puzzle.
But even though we focus more attention on the puzzle, it hasn’t progressed much beyond what Matterson drew in 2008.
底线是，除了许多其他原因，气候变化是这样一个邪恶的问题，即使是那些我们实际工作的上万片拼图的波戈的一部分“我们遇到了敌人，他（她）是我们“配方问题。我们强烈专注于我们的一块拼图的工作，而不是在帮助完成它。如果我们真的没打算做一些危险的气候变化，我们会重新审视我们的激励和动机，去拼图建设学校学习什么完成一百万片的拼图实际需要。
因为过去的30年suggest we haven't figured it out.
