Lighting Small Fires of Hope in the Darkness that Surrounds the Climate Crisis

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<p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" class="first" dir="auto" id="d4045909e55">The UN describes current progress in closing the CO2 Emissions Reduction Gap as representing a “massive gap between rhetoric and reality”. To meet the goal of the Paris agreement “we would need global mobilization on a scale and pace never seen before. Many will say this is impossible.” I don't believe it's impossible but, to achieve the necessary turn-around, we have to unlock new and relatively unexplored digital opportunities for reaching net zero. What I'm proposing is a cybernetic approach to solving the problem. In 1959, the UK cyberneticist, Stafford Beer, prepared an analysis of comparative systems (i.e. what organizations do and how they do it) by grading them from simple to complex. He placed only three systems in his ‘exceedingly complex’ category: ‘the economy’, ‘the brain’ and ‘the Company’. Beer’s list was a starting point in defining each system's predictability and its susceptibility for control by tried and tested scientific methods. If he were to be alive today, I feel sure he would have included ‘Climate’ in his ‘exceedingly complex’ shortlist. This system, too, must be subjected to new theories of prediction together with proposed methods for testing the validity of these theories, in order to tackle the most formidable challenge of all time. I am advocating that research should be undertaken, as a matter of some urgency, into the idea that the digital attributes of the metaverse can help in lighting small fires of hope in an otherwise dire situation,