**3. Why is it so difficult to recognize the reality of climate collapse?**

It is relatively straight-forward to talk about climate change given this term evokes images of incremental evolution. These images have, more or less, benign connotations. This advantage noted, more than a euphemism the term 'climate change' is counter-articulate. In contrast, the term 'climate collapse' denotes a phenomenon that confronts because something large and spectral is conjured. However threatening to consider, climate collapse is a phenomenon that is both undeniable and accelerating. This fact is, and will continue to be, confounding. Why is this so difficult to recognize? Two levels of action fuse to make recognition formidably challenging to achieve. Each is discussed individually even as they present a conjoint challenge.

## **3.1 Climate collapse as hyper-object**

Climate collapse is an example in a class of phenomena the philosopher Timothy Morton terms hyper-objects [2]. These phenomena are so massively distributed, so powerful and totalising, that their complexity defies both denial and comprehension. For example, Morton argues that human cognition cannot comprehend the fact that

radio-active isotopes have a half-life whose scale varies between the tiniest fraction of a second and millennia. For example, Uranium-238 has a *half-life* of 4.5 billion years whilst Neptunium-223 has a half-life of 2.15 on the scale of 10 to the minus sixth of a second. Both these numbers are incredible, literally beyond our ability to apprehend.

We have been intellectually socialized to assume items and events are located in time and place. Hyper-objects, in this case climate collapse, transcend localization and temporal fixedness. This state of unbounded distribution and temporal nonspecificity defies common sense.

Deepening the intellectual difficulty is the fact that climate collapse involves the loss of an embedded pattern. This pattern has historically involved a steady state [7]. That is, there was a quality of homeostasis between regular features (the pattern of seasons) and an expected distribution of irregular events (droughts; storms, etc.) that occurred, broadly speaking, at an expected and acceptable frequency and intensity. This state was normalized, was assumed to be permanent, and became naturalized as our frame of reference.

Anthropocentric inputs over the last 200 years have disturbed this state. This input has triggered a greater degree of entropy – a loss of organization in the key patterns that sustain amenable existence. In this cascading complex system the only regularity is non-regularity, that is, an accelerating rate of de-regulation. One in one hundred year events are clustering, droughts are defying seasonal averages, pyro-cumulonimbus cloud conditions are propagating fires.

Even given an extended inspection, this seems like crazy talk. To intellectually comprehend this situation requires the thinker to jettison the received practices that allocate probability. Re-purposing an idea from the renowned architect Christopher Alexander, such a disruption could even be said to sunder the grand 'pattern language' that structures experience and imagination [8]. Again, this seems like madness. What has evolved, and become embedded, over the length of human history cannot be dismissed even as the fact that climate collapse is real is indisputable. The situation is therefore confounding.

Of course, the key issue is not intellectual; the deregulation of the material conditions within which life on earth has prospered, including but not restricted to human life, is not an abstract matter. This distinction introduces the symbolic-affective dimension of the problem with recognition.
