Double Tipping Points: Agency Decay in the Climate

Hybrid environmental empathy is the mindset that will carry us through an era of uncertainty while preserving our most precious assets. Source: Walther. Gemini. 2025

Last year, natural disasters cost the world $320 billion. This year, four American tech companies will spend roughly the same amount building AI systems. This symmetry reveals something unsettling about how we process risk amid complex uncertainty. As we enter an era of irreversible climate change and pervasive artificial intelligence , it turns out that our cognitive responses are not apt to deal with them, and may be accelerating the risk that both dynamics will harm us and the planet we depend on.

The Double Threshold Problem

We stand at the intersection of two irreversible tipping points. Climate systems are appro