The most common, everyday example of one state "flipping" to another is ice freezing -- the water gets colder but it's still water, and then, all of a sudden, it's ice. If you're outside near, say, a lake or a pond, you can even hear it crystallizing, ping.
There's no in-between states between solid, liquid and gas.
Then there are processes which require critical mass, like glomming together enough plutonium to set off nuclear fission.
And then there are processes which are almost entirely mysterious, like crowds all of a sudden becoming mobs.
But weather -- well, I submit that's mysterious because we just plain don't understand it very well, even extremely familiar phenomena like local rain. I have a weather program on my computer that I watch very closely but last week was mystified that it started raining one day with nothing showing on radar to suggest why. The clouds were wet, the temperature shifted, an age old phenomenon that was too localized for NOAA to observe. Ping.
Seems like, though, the reason not to pollute isn't "tipping points," it's sort of inherent in the word "pollution." It's dirty and doesn't belong. We put up with it because we've always put up with it, throw it out in the street or out in the stream or into the air and it's "gone" (except of course it's never gone). Externalities always have to be paid for, eventually. |
