by Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee
Introduction
Since the ’90s, we’ve been in pursuit of change in climate change (Δc).
It took us about 10 years to recognize that the rate of change was doubling on roughly a 100-year timescale.
By 2020, the acceleration in acceleration had changed substantially: the doubling interval had compressed to roughly 10–20 years.
That represents a 5–10× increase in the rate of doubling—or, expressed on a centurial basis, a shift from 2¹ to roughly 2⁵–2¹⁰.
Beginning most notably around 2022, we began seeing something different happening in the climate system. Several major climate variables started changing together, in ways that were physically connected. It was no longer just a matter of the climate getting warmer—it was the parts of the climate system increasingly interacting with and reinforcing one another in real time.
At the same time, an extraordinary number of extreme climate events were being documented and rapidly shared through social-media platforms, providing additional real-world observations of climate-system behavior. Among the most striking examples was the Nepal–Tibet glacial collapse.
The models consistently produced similar results.
The period from 2022–2026 exhibits what mathematicians describe as third-derivative, or “jerk,” behavior: the rate of acceleration is itself changing at an accelerating rate, producing a nonlinear trajectory.
A simple analogy is sitting in the passenger seat while someone learns to drive a stick shift. Instead of a smooth increase in speed, you feel the repeated surges and lurches as the driver learns to coordinate the clutch, throttle, and gears. The acceleration is changing—and the rate at which that acceleration changes is changing as well.
That is the essential idea behind climate jerk: not simply that the climate system is changing faster, but that the acceleration of change is itself accelerating.
