The Hydra of Lerna was a fearsome, dragon-like monster with many heads. If one is cut, two more will grow in its place. Hercules, one of the most popular heroes of Greek mythology, managed to kill the monster with the help of his grandson.

Over the past few years and dozens of articles/studies, I have tried to present various rapidly multiplying “heads” of terrifying complexity, capable, according to many scientists and the liberal media, of destroying humanity, causing the sixth extinction of life on the planet, causing Armageddon, etc. The modern hydra is climate change, and the hero who intends to defeat it once and for all is called the IPPC (International Panel on Climate Change). The mythological hero Heracles worked for ten years at the behest of King Eurystheus, performing 12 legendary labors. Although the hero of our day, the IPCC, has been struggling for several decades to fulfill its mission entrusted to it by the “king” of the UN, the new hydra is not easily defeated. Because its fundamental versatility – duplicating cut ends – has turned it into a monster of complexity, a constant challenge and touchstone painfully felt by even the bravest IPCC-clad combatants, rendering them so impotent. […]

Thus, in the grace year of 2023, we have reached the point where it is argued that we are facing a future crisis, but the main solution – a rapid reduction in global CO2 emissions to reach the net zero goal – is considered virtually impossible.

How did it get here? The source of this conundrum is that we have mischaracterized climate change as an easy problem with a simple solution. I mean, some little monster that even the more timid Hercules could easily break.

The UN, IPCC and other anti-climate campaigners have imagined that the hydra has only one head – excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – that cutting it off can solve simple due to the elimination of CO2 emissions generated during the burning of fossil fuels (left part of Fig. 2). This perspective has dominated UN climate change negotiations for nearly three decades. Goal: Climate control (what I have described as a modern version of the Babylonian myth). Decision: Planetary.

The right part of fig. 2 views climate change as a complex and difficult problem. On the one hand, the causes of climate change are presented, and on the other, solutions that can contribute to reducing vulnerability caused by climate change (energy, water, food – surplus, cheap, sustainable). The list of natural causes of climate change (sun, volcanoes, slow circulation of ocean currents, tidal effects) is tentative, recognizing that our understanding is incomplete and that there may be unknown processes that influence climate change or others that need to be better conceptualized. and connected – the great solar maximum of the end of the 20th century, the low volcanic activity of the middle of the 19th century, the great Pacific climate change of 1976 or the transition to the warm phase of the AMO (Atlantic multidecadal oscillation) in 1995. Goal: Understanding the climate. decision: Region.

There are significant differences between the two approaches to solving the climate problem (Fig. 2). The left side refers to climate controlwhile the right side refers to understanding climate and, moreover, he admits uselessness/impossibility of climate control. The right solutions focus on managing basic human needs: energy, water and food. Economic development supports these needs while reducing our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.

Why has climate change become a monster of complexity?

The horror of climate change issues is related to the duality of science and politics in complex phenomena. There are three common ways to mix science and politics, all of which are unacceptable (Judith Curry, 2023, personal communication).

First political science, which refers to the intractable political conflict generated by the transformation of political problems into scientific problems. The insurmountable difficulties of this endeavor are the result of an epistemological conflict: science is not designed to answer questions about how the world should be, which is the domain of politics.

There is a second one politicization of science, by which scientific research is influenced or manipulated to support a political agenda. To (re)read: When politicians impose a temperature limit of 1.5 °C on science.

There is a third way, which eloquently illustrates the monster of climate complexity. It is known as evil problem, which can be translated as a vicious, unbridled, evil problem, its opposite no problem, manual, simple problem without complexity. In fig. 2, on the left is depicted a no problemand the right side is an example of o wicked problem.

Recently, more and more climate-related problems do not have simple solutions. This usually happens for four reasons: incomplete or conflicting knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interrelated nature of these problems with similar ones. Bad questions are often a hot potato thrown around by politicians.

Horst Rittel, one of the first to formalize the theory of wicked problems, lists several of their characteristics:

— Vicious problems do not have a final formulation. For example, the drought in Texas is very similar to the drought in Ethiopia, but slightly different from it, so there are no practical characteristics to describe “drought”.

– It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to measure or claim the success of wicked problems because they merge into one another, unlike simple, traditional problems whose boundaries can be formulated or defined.

– Solutions to vicious problems can only be good or bad, not true or false. There is no idealized end state that can be achieved, and therefore approaches to wicked problems must be easy-to-implement ways of improving the situation, not solving it.

– There is no pattern to follow when solving a wicked problem, although history can provide a guide. Teams that solve terrible problems have to fix things along the way.

– There are always several explanations for a vicious problem, and the adequacy of the explanation largely depends on the individual point of view of the person offering it.

– Every complex (vicious) problem is a symptom of another problem. The interconnected quality of socio-economic policy systems illustrates how, for example, a change in education will stimulate new eating behaviours.

– No strategy for mitigating a wicked problem has definitive scientific verification because humans invented the wicked problem, while science exists to understand natural phenomena.

– There are no known alternative solutions to vicious problems.

The daunting complexity of climate change problems, reflected in their vicious nature, forces policymakers to recognize that control is limited and the future uncertain.

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