Estate Living Magazine Invest SA - Issue 45 September 2019 | Page 11

P R O P E R T Y
&
I N V E S T M E N T
crew. This is fundamentally different from complex systems such as
the global climate. and lower threshold. Just like weather forecasters will talk about the
percentage probability of rain tomorrow.
Complex systems have multiple variables, each of which is linked
in ways that are almost impossible to predict. This is the so-called
butterfly effect, in which the flapping of a butterfly wing in a tropical
rainforest will set up minute wind patterns that affect other wind
patterns until – ultimately – it could unleash a hurricane halfway
across the world. This body of science is known as deterministic
chaos theory. While scientists are unable to predict exact outcomes, what is
known with great certainty is that all existing climate-related events
will become more extreme. We can clearly see this in our rainfall
patterns. A high-confidence study conducted by the University of
Cape Town, funded by the Water Research Commission (WRC
Project 2317/1/18), showed that 1982 was a threshold year in South
Africa. Before 1982 rainfall across the country was greater than
average (shown as shades of blue to indicate the extent of deviation
from the norm) but, after 1982, rainfall was clearly less than average
(shown as shades of brown). More importantly, we also see a distinct
shift in winter rainfall. This speaks to a core issue that residential
estate owners and managers will need to deal with in future –
extreme events: droughts that are deeper and more protracted, and
rainfall that is more intense over shorter periods, and possibly out of
the seasonal norm.
The recent tragic loss of life in two plane accidents illustrates
this perfectly. The fuel-efficient Boeing 737 Max 8 featured a
revolutionary piece of software called a Manoeuvring Characteristics
Augmentation System (MCAS), which was designed to take over
automatically if sensors detected that the plane was about to stall.
Unfortunately, once the system took over in response to a faulty
stall signal, the plane (a complicated machine) suddenly took
on the properties of a complex system, rendering the outcome
unpredictable by the pilots.
Even predicting tomorrow’s weather is not an exact science because
there are so many factors, so predicting how global warming will
pan out is even trickier but the mechanisms are understood.
The second implication is that it will test our collective capacity to
cope, eventually to the most extreme degree imaginable. The way
that Cape Town dealt with Day Zero has now become an international
case study in how decision-makers deal with complex situations in
which predictability has been lost for a variety of reasons. In reality,
Cape Town dodged the bullet, but only by imposing a draconian
demand-management policy that prevented total system collapse,
but also triggered a significant shock to the economy, eroding
business confidence. In reality, the entire country is dealing with a
Day Zero scenario, and that’s an important message because, with
the recent good rains in the Western Cape, it’s easy to forget how
close we came to disaster. But the underlying driver of the crisis has
not changed. Just as quickly as the system flipped from near-total
collapse to near-total restoration in a short period of time, so too can
it flip back again. This is the essence of complex systems – they are
impossible to predict, but they are also not steady-state. The only
An increase in greenhouse gases like carbon monoxide and
methane prevents heat from leaving the earth and radiating back
to space, resulting in increased ocean surface temperature, and
consequently faster evaporation of water into the atmosphere.
This increases the moisture content in clouds, so more energy
is needed to keep that water in the sky defying gravity, but at the
same time greater cloud cover reduces the amount of energy
coming into the earth’s atmosphere from the sun. With thousands
of variables, each related to one another at different levels of scale,
it is impossible to predict a specific outcome. This is why climate
change scientists speak of an envelope of probability with an upper
Challenges