Climate Change Is the Largest Black Swan Never Treated as One (Meanwhile, the first tipping point just arrived half a century ahead of schedule)

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Cultural-Answer-321@reddit

"No he's not!"

"Yes he is!"

"Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords."

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Is not a black swan if you are warned about it by like 99+% of the scientists. It's like the pandemic, it was long predicted by the time it happened. It is something possible, but you must consider it highly improbable.

Unless you choose to be blind and deaf about it, but then we are not talking about it, but about you.

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AtrociousMeandering@reddit

I'll be honest, I saw a few correct uses of 'Black Swan Event' back when it was first coined but almost every use I've seen since is not even close to being one.

For it to mean anything, it has to refer to events which are not prevented by any laws of nature, but are not logical extensions of existing knowledge. If it's foreseeable as a consequence of what you already know, you don't need a term for it, and that's what climate change is.

Sudden reductions in CO2 from the atmosphere from a source we didn't think could do that, but doesn't violate any physical laws? That would be a black swan.

OP's swan is a standard European swan with the lights turned off to make it harder to see.

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jwrose@reddit

events which are not prevented by any laws of nature, but are not logical extensions of existing knowledge.

Good breakdown. I’d take it a step further; it’s something that, if it had been described before it happened, people would say “that’s absurd/impossible”. And then when it does happen, it completely upends our understanding of some facet of the world.

The author says stock market crashes are black swan events. They aren’t. Except maybe, like, the one that kicked off the Great Depression. Chernobyl, 9/11, the invention of the atom bomb.

That said, the term seems to be most misused in the world of finance. Seems like anything that’d cause a big change to markets is referred to as a “black swan event”.

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mem2100@reddit

Nothing atrocious in that particular meander. Quite the opposite. About 12,000 years ago there was a very large methane pulse (link below) in the Arctic. Is there a size of methane pulse that you would consider a Black Swan event?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2133397-huge-ice-age-methane-blowout-is-ill-omen-for-glacier-retreat/

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AtrociousMeandering@reddit

If your first response to hearing something is not some variation of 'What? Are you absolutely sure? I'd never even considered that' then it probably doesn't qualify as a Black Swan.

I'm aware of several potentially unstable stocks of methane that would be disastrous in terms of their warming effects, but there's PRECEDENT. Like the article says, we're considering them precisely because we have reason to believe they've happened before and we have an indication of how bad it got. We don't need a special term, this is just how science works.

Black Swans will not make sense, will not seem plausible, until they've happened, anyone predicting them is not a prophet but somehow got lucky on a guess, which is unlikely to repeat itself. It's a fool's game.

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mem2100@reddit

Thanks. That makes complete sense. I didn't understand the meaning of it until now. I thought it meant a "highly highly unlikely event".

What is about to happen seems the opposite of that. Especially now that we have confirmed that rising temperatures generally worsen drought.

Increasing Heat -> worsening drought -> accelerated depletion of aquifers and reduced snowpack -> diminished spring melts -> less water for agri

Increasing Heat -> Greater thermal stress on many crops (including cold snaps from Polar Vortex wobbles)

Heat Stress + Water Shortages -> Combine to overwhelm the steady increase in agri productivity from tech

Crop production flattens, then falls - slowly at first and then sharply

Meanwhile, people are going from uneasy to anxious to frightened as climate driven inflation clobbers their standards of living - first through housing (insurance), than all this trade war stuff and ultimately food costs.

Fear -> Authoritarianism -> Corruption and inefficient deployment of capital

Remember when GE sold all those sonogram machines to India and China - which is partly/largely the reason for the sex ratio imbalances today. Well China has a rapidly growing biz selling solar powered well pumps to farmers in Pakistan, etc. and the farmers run those babies flat out, to max their ROI. Good for individual farmers, bad for our hydrological trust funds.

I The oddest thing is that most folks do not seem to grasp non-linearity. They think the delta from 1.5 to 2C will be similar to the delta from 1 to 1.5C.

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ShyElf@reddit

This is a "Grey Elephant", as in "the elephant in the room". It's there. It's obvious. It's important. Everyone ignores it, because they've seen a grey elephant before, and it didn't do anything the past few times they saw it, and they'd rather not deal with it.

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a_dance_with_fire@reddit

I think the term is “Grey Rhino”, and instead “pink elephant”.
Climate change could be that, but it could also be considered a Dragon King

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Cultural-Answer-321@reddit

Exactly. There's no damn black swan here. We were warned for over a century.

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Chucking100s@reddit

Hi everyone

Something happened last night that really shook me.

A Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer at one of the Tiger Cub Funds, someone managing billions, who has access to the best data, models, and research money can buy, told me, point blank:

Climate change isn’t real
If it is, it wasn’t caused by humans
And if it was, it’s not because of greenhouse gases

I just sat there, stunned.

Because this isn’t a random person on the internet. This is someone who literally prices risk for a living. Someone whose job depends on understanding how climate, energy, and capital interact, denying the very thing that defines their models.

It made me realize something painful: even at the highest levels of finance, where information is most abundant, belief can still override evidence.

And if disbelief like that can exist there, in the rooms where global capital gets steered, then maybe that’s the real black swan.

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WestsideBuppie@reddit

Simpler Explanation:

The Managing Directors that Climate Change is real, here today and that the risk is unbounded.

The Managing Director, knowing all this, is deliberately choosing to lie to you.

Don’t look up.

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Brizoot@reddit

The simplest explanation is that our current ruling class are the most sheltered and least capable people in history and yes, they really are that stupid.

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s0cks_nz@reddit

The first statement contradicts the other two. If it's happening, even if not caused by humans, he still has to evaluate the risk. If he's not evaluating the risk from climate change but admits the possibility that it could be happening (even if not caused by humans) then he's doing his clients a disservice. Either way it's not a consistent take from him, a telltale sign that his world view doesn't add up.

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GloriousDawn@reddit

denying the very thing that defines their models

I know Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"... However I can't take out of my head the idea that many people in power know perfectly well only chaos lies ahead, but pretend loudly it's not real so us peasants keep grinding instead of revolting and stopping the cogs of the money machine.

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s0cks_nz@reddit

I think part of it is that they just don't want to believe it. It's much easier to act like everyone else and assume that it'll be BAU for our lifetimes. Those who outright deny it have just decided it's easier for them to cope if they build a foundation of lies for which to put their denial on.

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hereticvert@reddit

No, a lot of them really are that stupid.

It's hard to believe, but they are, and they're the most dangerous kind of stupid - those in power who won't realize they're stupid.

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Cultural-Answer-321@reddit

The counter to Hanlon's razor is this:

"Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results." -Margaret Atwood

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Indigo_Sunset@reddit

For them, which is the bigger disaster?

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ttystikk@reddit

Please share the company so none of us make the mistake of letting them manage our money.

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Chucking100s@reddit

This person is part of a group I run that operates under Chatham House Rule.

That means I can share what they said, describe their work, and mention the type of firm they’re with, but not provide identifying details.

The group is meant to be a secure space where intellectuals can speak freely without fear of exposure. Violating that trust would destroy the integrity of the forum.

For context, their hedge fund’s minimum investment threshold is $1 million.

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ttystikk@reddit

So purple can apparently "price risk" while denying the underlying forces driving it.

Either that or they can keep their job while being demonstrably incompetent.

Maybe those are the lessons?

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hereticvert@reddit

It's like all the people in finance willfully ignoring that AI can never deliver what it promises, continuing with the conceit that this time the tech bubble will be different.

Insert quote about being able to see something that your job depends on you not seeing or whatever it is.

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ttystikk@reddit

That's an old John Steinbeck quote and it didn't work out any better 90 years ago that it will today.

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hereticvert@reddit

A Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer at one of the Tiger Cub Funds, someone managing billions, who has access to the best data, models, and research money can buy, told me, point blank:
Climate change isn’t real

If it is, it wasn’t caused by humans

And if it was, it’s not because of greenhouse gases

It wasn't my fault

And it it was my fault, you deserved it.

They're all fucking narcissists, and we're all going to fry because our economic system favored their rise and success.

Doesn't surprise me at all. Money != intelligence, no matter how much capitalism tries to tell you otherwise.

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RicardoHonesto@reddit

Is that just the image they want us to think.

Like they must know we are cooked.

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jwrose@reddit

Not what a black swan is —as gmuslera’s comment explains well. But, the author does describe a couple of singularities (points at which the change is so extreme, predictions become impossible or meaningless) at the end of the article.

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a_dance_with_fire@reddit

Climate change isn’t a black swan. It’s either a grey rhino or a dragon king:

Grey rhino: highly probable high impact event that is in plain sight and charging towards us, that we choose to ignore.

Dragon King: an extreme outlier event that is larger than a typical "black swan" and has a predictable pattern. Is sometimes predictable through advanced modeling, and the event often includes things like feedback loops. Dragon King events are possible to predict

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hereticvert@reddit

Grey rhino: highly probable high impact event that is in plain sight and charging towards us, that we choose to ignore.

This!

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a_dance_with_fire@reddit

Yup, although all of the 1000+ year events (like the 2021 heat dome or the 2022 monsoon creating an inland lake in Pakistan) could be viewed as Dragon King: outlier events that could be predicted with a model. Statistically low probability but high impact

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Masterventure@reddit

What does they mean ”half a century early” 1.5C was supposed to be in 2100.

If my math and my watch are correct and we are not living in 2050, this means we a 3/4 of an century early.

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Current-Code@reddit

The tipping point in question is the irreversible dying off of coral reefs due to the acidification of the ocean, which will have dire consequences.

It has been confirmed recently.

As for temperatures, it seems almost certain now we will reach the +2°C, what we should be aiming at is not reaching +4°C.

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quequotion@reddit

All of the other tipping points will arrive ahead of schedule too.

Humanity will continue to ignore the problem until there's absolutely nothing else we can afford to be concerned about.

Then we will die because it will be too late.

Well, maybe not all of us. A few might survive in the tropical polar regions; some of us may resign ourselves to an eternity of eating jellyfish and living on the sea.

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hereticvert@reddit

Faster Than Expected!! (tm)

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naniyotaka@reddit

Let's go collapse I hope the billionaires won't survive.

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CorvidCorbeau@reddit

I'm skeptical how viable that strategy would be. Those far north areas are either permafrost, ice or bare rock.

Permafrost thaws, but it's not fertile soil, it takes a long while for that freshly thawed, metal-rich ground to be viable for crops. Rocks are well, rocks. And ice will be there for a long time. If hypothetically, the surface got so hot that only the poles are viable to live on within our lifetimes, the poles will still have ice. No sea ice, certainly, but Greenland and Antarctica will still be covered in impossibly thick ice sheets. They'll be melting rapidly, just not nearly fast enough to expose anything underneath them. And if they somehow did, you're back to the permafrost problem.

Also, growing crops at those latitudes would be even more challenging due to the unconventional daylight hours throughout the year.

The only people maybe living there will be hunters. Hope they like the taste of penguins

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TheArcticFox444@reddit

Meanwhile, the first tipping point just arrived half a century ahead of schedule)

Didn't get to this before the paywall...what tipping point?

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KlikketyKat@reddit

I think it's the evidence of widespread, irreversible coral reef death on a devastating scale.

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TheArcticFox444@reddit

I think it's the evidence of widespread, irreversible coral reef death on a devastating scale.

Really? Hadn't heard this before. First tipping point...ahead of time...shouldn't that be in the news?

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KlikketyKat@reddit

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/13/coral-reefs-ice-sheets-amazon-rainforest-tipping-point-global-heating-scientists-report

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TheArcticFox444@reddit

Thanks. Must be too busy reporting on Gaza and the government shutdown to mention it on broadcast channels. Oh, well. Another nail in civilization's coffin...it can wait.

Thanks again.

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Low_Complex_9841@reddit

I agree with title, because .. well capitalists in 1970x and on were as evil doing as today but I still doubt they intentionally let catastrophe of this magnitude slip past. Yes, studies were done in 1970x, but many of them IIRC were pointing at "1 C in 2080 or so", or at least those were picked up as most comforting. Now, everything got turbocharged with neoliberalust globalism winning in 1980x, and we just about now finding out we do not really have any time for avoiding IMPACT! I definitely did read (recently, when I started to search space solar seriosly, after reading Thomas Murphy's blog and textbook published in 2021 ) about "climate change is worrying!" in 1980 book by Gerard K. O'Neill and full blown "2.5c will be apocalyptical!" in 1995 book "Sun power" on NSS website, but I guess those warning were drown in counter-rhetoric by more mainstream media, and our peers shaped by it.

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