Last week I presented in an INFORMS 2008 panel, Role Reversal: The Impact of Climate Change on Aviation. My slides are here (you’ll miss a model demo using a carbon cycle/climate model, but that wasn’t central). I got challenged on one assertion – that participation in regional initiatives is meaningful – on the grounds that federal preemption definitively assigns aviation regulation to the national level. That may be so, but I suspect that mental models formed through regional experimentation will still shape what happens nationally. Without early involvement, aviation could find itself getting pounded into the nearest available policy pigeonhole, regardless of fit. Avaitors joke that, “gravity never loses; the best you can hope for is a draw.” The same could perhaps be said of aviation’s chance of withstanding the inexorable consequences of GHG accumulation.
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Don't just do something, stand there! Reflections on the counterintuitive behavior of complex systems, seen through the eyes of System Dynamics, Systems Thinking and simulation.