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The Math of Catastrophe
Tipping points in our climate predictions are both wildly dramatic and wildly uncertain. Can mathematicians make them useful?
The Amazon rainforest could wither into a savanna; coral reefs could bleach ghost-white; a major current in the Atlantic Ocean might go slack and fail to deliver warmth to Europe, turning Scotland into Siberia. In 1978, the mathematician Christopher Zeeman was invited to give the Royal Institution’s annual Christmas Lecture, a major televised event in London previously hosted by Carl Sagan and David Attenborough. “The whole idea of bifurcations is something that can bring discomfort to the world.” In search of scientific ways to make sense of a world in constant flux, people called on catastrophe theory to describe everything from bridge collapses to prison riots to regime changes.
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