Mobilis in Mobili.

There’s a great line in an incredibly dusty book called Novum Organum we like…

‘...human understanding is, by its own nature, prone to abstraction, and supposes that which is fluctuating to be fixed’.

A great place to start as it sets the tone of the ideas we want to explore in this blog. Bacon is trying to tell us that the human mind, as great as it is, naturally tends toward a misinterpretation of the world through bias, and this tendency if not recognised and addressed through suitable mechanisms, can lead us astray. The ideas he then goes on to unravel throughout this book give us a looking glass into a different world, one that became the foundation of a more empirical way of seeing.

If we were to define the closest philosophy that Deo ascribes to, or at least aspires toward, we’d probably borrow from the Japanese a little. There are a set of ideas combined within the term Wabi Sabi which we value greatly, a philosophy which finds beauty in the simple, and the imperfect. This is a philosophy that recognises that the natural world is subject to change, and carries with it its own aesthetic; a pattern of no pattern which sets it apart to the objects humanity ordinarily puts into the world. It requires a subtle shift in perspective, valuing tolerance, asking us instead to find beauty in entropy, in the passage of time, in a change of state. Is this a purely Japanese idea? We’d argue no, we can go back in time to Heraclitus and his famous maxim ‘everything flows’, to find a roughly similar concept, that everything is always in this state of becoming something else and it is ever our role to find a way to navigate those waters.

If you were to take these two ideas and sort of rub them together provocatively, perhaps to some suitably chosen mood music, the estranged lovechild you’d end up with by result is probably very close to where Deo tries to sit… and if you want to talk about a hard sell, its kinda right up there being very difficult to describe. It’s like trying to fuse two different types of mechanical mathematics, one classical vs. one statistical, one deterministic vs. one probabilistic, one solid vs. one a bit fluffy, and both within a wider language that is geometrically bound and contextual, like the shadow of something we cannot directly see but impacts us all the same. Frowning, you might say this is something of a strange position to be taking right? It clearly makes things a lot harder than they need to be, so why do this at all? To this we’d say, you’re absolutely right, but there is some method to the madness, something we’re trying to do.

It is in the nature of being an Architect that we spend our days navigating often contradictory forces, our built environment is complex, people equally so, we live in a maze of expectation and regulation which rarely is simple to reconcile, and that complexity often tempts us to choose safer more well trodden paths. We understand this, we even empathise, most of us want a quiet life, but the question we’d ask is what if these ‘safer paths’ aren't, in reality, all that safe? It’s an interesting question, if you’ve established a series of reproducible forms which serve their purpose well in one context, what happens when the context changes? Do we change too, or can we instead say it doesn’t matter… what impact would that have? This is the really big question which keeps us up at night, the one we ask ourselves often. If architecture forms the background world to our lives, the playground of reaction you might call it, and we define that context mostly as we see fit, then could we also say it has the power to be selective, to frame our perception of things? What happens when a great machine self-selects to only show us the things we want to see, avoiding the things we don’t?… or perhaps worse, shows us solutions which actually aren’t solutions at all or that miss the point entirely? Well… then we’d argue, that would be a problem, and there’s a very real danger things over time could get very desperate indeed.

In 2008 NASA decided to sit down and use their knowledge of planetary dynamics to work out where we needed to be to keep Earth’s complex dynamic planetary system stable. The process itself is unimportant here, if you’re interested the Met Office do some great guides, what’s important is that they defined the CO₂ levels for the whole planet as needing to hit a target ‘no greater than 350PPM’ (parts per million), and ‘ideally a good amount less’, to stabilise our climate.

At the time of writing, the current measured CO₂ level is sitting somewhere around 431PPM’ish, which when multiplied into the 5.14 quadrillion tonnes of atmosphere this planet has, gives us a number roughly around the 70 billion tonnes of CO₂ mark over where we need to be (and which represents a great deal of CO₂ we need to do something with. For context, a large proportion of the world’s population is fed on rice as a staple everyday, we don’t even produce a billion tonnes of that per year, so the CO₂ needing to be removed from our atmosphere is the equivalent of around seventy seven years of rice growth to feed everyone).

Sadly, this figure probably falls a little short. The oceans have been kindly absorbing about 90% of the CO₂ we’ve been creating for a very long time, converting it to carbonic acid, changing the ocean PH level in the process. If the oceans start outgassing CO₂ as we reduce the wider CO₂ levels in the atmosphere (as some far smarter people than us are concerned that they will), then we’ll likely find ourselves needing to take significantly more than this from the atmosphere before we stabilise our climate system. We feel it prudent to be genuinely concerned by this.

When did we pass this threshold?... the answer is circa 1986; we’ve been measuring CO₂ levels for quite some time, this is what the empirical data shows. At the time when Carl Sagen was sitting in the American Congress describing very clearly and simply the mechanisms and impacts of global warming, plus adding his measured concerns we’d be leaving an impossible problem for future generations to solve if we chose not to act, was also roughly about the same time when the situation started becoming a problem. For each year that has passed beyond this 1986 threshold, the overall cost of fixing the problem has progressively increased. Not only must we build exactly the same infrastructure and make the same social changes that would have been necessary back in 1986 to fix the problem (i.e. upgrading our energy generation systems) but we must now also do so for a larger population, with greater demands, and with the additional need to remove the CO₂ we’ve already introduced on top.

This is the hard science, the story of a single generation.

In 2018, the AR6 IPCC report identified that the last date by which significant social changes needed to start being implemented -at pace- to prevent severe climate disruption was 2020. We are writing this in 2025, five years beyond this cut off date and by current data at time of writing, there has been no measurable slowdown in CO₂ production… nor any other greenhouse gas for that matter. The good news is that renewables are being installed at the fastest pace they ever have been… the less good news is that mostly this increase is avoiding only the need to burn even more CO₂ than we otherwise would be, so is replacing expansion rather than base generation. This, again, isn’t where we need to be. Whilst it’s true the UK has indeed managed to reach about 50% mix of low carbon renewables and nuclear, we’d point out this is only to the current grid size. We have yet to start making any truly significant strides toward a low carbon completely electricity based society en-masse, and when we do it will multiply the grid demand somewhere between two and four times where it currently stands (depending on how well we upgrade our infrastructure and buildings to make them more efficient, and what processes we adopt for manufacture and agriculture).

It is also worth adding that in this analysis we’re only talking about CO₂, we’ve not even started talking about the wider impacts of this change, i.e. ecosystem collapse, AMOC changes, weather and cloud patterns, acidification and deoxygenation of the oceans, or any of the other indicators we could bring to the table… the situation is serious, and when trying to talk about it it’s hard not to end up sounding a little hyperbolic, the challenge of fixing this dwarfs in scale anything else humanity has ever tried to do, we’re ultimately trying to terraform a planet, as sci-fi as that may sound. Can we do it?... maybe… we choose to believe that we can, we got ourselves into this mess, and we believe we can dig ourselves back out, but we don’t see a clear path to achieving those answers if we keep following the path we have chosen to date. Our professional obligations demand that we find answers, and sooner or later, we’re going to need to change course, and if we don’t then changes will happen irrespective of what we may or may not want, as Feynman warned, ‘you don’t argue with nature’.

Hopefully by this point you’ll be starting to see the game we are trying to play. Trying to understand ‘the why’ of what we’re doing is all about understanding context, that is our primary focus… and it gets a fair bit more complicated still. Navigating this new physical reality requires a shared understanding of truth, that was the essence of Bacon’s life work, but now that very foundation is under attack, and it could not have come at a worse time.

…to be continued.