The Climate Crisis and Black Box Thinking

Whilst Matthew Syed’s book Black Box Thinking (2016) makes only passing mention of the climate crisis (p187), it is nonetheless highly illuminating concerning our current predicament.

Two particular passages stand out.

In one, Syed relates the story of United Airlines Flight 173, which took off from New York bound for Portland, Oregon on 28th December 1978. As it neared its destination the pilot pulled the lever to lower the landing gear. One of the lights that would normally come on to indicate that the gear had locked into place failed to light. The gear wasn’t visible from the fuselage, so the captain requested time to troubleshoot the problem and the plane was put into a holding pattern.

What happened next is sobering. A DC8 burns fuel at 210lbs per minute and as time went on and the crew failed to make progress with the landing gear issue the plane began to run out of fuel. The black box transcript revealed that the flight engineer repeatedly attempted to draw the attention of the pilot to the fuel situation. But the pilot was so intent on solving the landing gear problem that one by one the engines flamed out with the plane still 8 miles short of the runway. The plane came down in a wooded area of suburban Portland. 2 crew and 8 passengers died, 21 had serious injuries.

The other passage is the story of Elaine Bromiley, who attended a hospital in England for a routine sinus operation. She was 37 and, sinus problem aside, fully fit. After she was anaesthetised the anaesthetist attempted to insert a laryngeal mask into her mouth to assist her breathing. But there was a problem; Elaine’s jaw muscles had tightened. Without access to oxygen she began to turn blue.

As the minutes ticked away the anaesthetist used drugs to loosen the muscles. He tried two smaller masks. He tried an oxygen facemask and finally trachael intubation. It was the theatre nurses who understood what needed to be done and the most senior fetched an emergency tracheostomy kit. She informed the doctors (three of them were now engaged in trying to insert the trachael tube) that the kit was ready but received no response. The doctors persisted in their use of conventional methods.

By the time the doctors had restored Elaine’s oxygen levels, her brain had been starved of oxygen for 20 minutes and irreparable damage had occurred. She died after 13 days in a coma.

Application to the climate crisis

Right this minute we are all passengers on planet earth. The greenhouse gas dial is entering the red and we are encountering the first eddies of the climate crisis in world-wide extreme weather events. What is the crew doing? Well, in the UK our politicians are fixated on Brexit, the NHS, security — all of them legitimate enough but, similar to the landing gear on Flight 173, not the main event.

They don’t lack focus, they have that in spades, but the intractable character of the other significant issues they face has blindsided them to the existential threat under their noses. There are some other things in play that compound the problem…

Cognitive dissonance

Chapter 5 of Matthew Syed’s book is headed Cognitive Dissonance. This is the mental discomfort experienced by an individual when evidence encountered by them clashes with their prior beliefs, ideas or values. To reduce the associated stress, we can change a belief, reduce the importance of the beliefs or reframe the evidence.

In both of the examples above, the pilots and clinicians involved struggled to face up to what had happened: the captain told the investigator that the fuel had run out “incredibly quickly,” Elaine Bromiley’s husband was told “It is one of those things… we don’t know why.”

The psychologist Leon Festinger demonstrated that when we are confronted by evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs, reframing is our normal preference. We go in search of contrary evidence, new explanations and justifications, in support of our self-esteem. Sometimes professional reputations are at stake. Hence, from the fossil fuel lobby we hear “what we are experiencing is part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling.”

Alternatively, if we wish to reduce the importance of the latest evidence, try “life on earth will adapt and so you’re all worried about nothing.”

Marginal gains

In Black Box Thinking, when Matthew Syed considers some of the antidotes to denial, he extols the virtues of randomised control trials, but, as he concedes on page 187, there is only one world. By contrast, marginal gains — the idea that if you break down a goal into small parts and improve on each of them, the aggregate effect will be large — is more promising from a climate crisis standpoint.

And indeed, that is what is happening with the climate crisis right now: we’re switching to renewable energy, to electric vehicles, we’re insulating our homes, we are re-using and recycling etc.

But none of it is happening fast enough. That is because most of us are happily engaged in cognitive dissonance at some level. This is essential to maintaining our competing commitments to consuming stuff and long-distance travel, inter alia.

Moreover, we are grappling with an issue that a) demands an unprecedented level of collaboration and b) is inter-generational. Though collaboration is one of the hallmarks of our species it hasn’t been attempted on this scale before. We have never been particularly great at delayed gratification, and now we’re being asked to engage on it between generations.

Mindset

In the final chapter of Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed reflects on milestones in our intellectual history, for example the development of language. In ‘recent’ times the most significant has been end of dogmatic tradition and the emergence of critical thinking and the scientific method. The historian Karl Popper locates this in the time of the Ancient Greeks.

However, the flowering of knowledge that this heralded was not to last and between the time of the Ancient Greeks and the Enlightenment of the late 17th century, dogma dominated once again. Syed uses the concepts of fixed and growth mindset to explain this (see his earlier book Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice).

Right now, whilst critical thinking continues to hold sway in the scientific and engineering realms, gut instinct holds sway in our social world. Which poses a problem. Because the climate crisis requires an acceptance of the underlying science, a rejection of consumerism in its current form, and an expansion of our collaborative ability, from nation-wide to planet-wide and from this generation to future generations.

If we are successful in meeting this challenge it will mark a new milestone in our intellectual history; the emergence of planet-wide and inter-generational collaboration. If we flunk it, our species may not be around to rue the failure.