Why the World Feels so Unstable Right Now

Tim Palmer discusses the challenges of predicting events in nonlinear systems that, by nature, experience intermittent instabilities, as in the famous “butterfly effect”. Today, continued emissions are increasing the instabilities and uncertainties of climate change, while the economy and global health exhibit similar non-linearities. To deal with such uncertainties, he advocates ensemble prediction systems that run many simulations, each with slightly different initial conditions, to identify moments of heightened instability in which extreme events are more likely to occur.