Abstract

The Chinese use two characters to express the meaning of crisis, danger and opportunity, the idea that at the crisis one can have either depending on the direction that one chooses to move. Opportunity signifies sustained chaos while danger transient chaos. The latter dynamics mimics the sustained dynamics, but it asymptotically evolves towards a catastrophic state. I will present a ramification based on the crisis dynamics, applied to climate change, the danger-opportunity choices associated with the global warming. Like crisis it conveys the idea of a planetary critical transition. At the Opening Ceremonies of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COPS26, the UN Secretary-General, António Gutérrez, warned that the Earth has past the point of no return, a critical transition has already occurred. Danger is to progress in the highway to climate hell, evolving towards a planetary regime shift, or, opportunity, to take a ramp out of this highway to reverse the trend. How can one predict, based solely on empirical data without knowledge about the system equations, that one is in the danger side of crisis, critical transition?

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