The Planetary Glitch: Climate Change as Accumulated Displacement Debt

We apply the displacement framework to Earth's climate system, identifying a pre-industrial atmospheric configuration as the ground state and two centuries of industrial emissions as displacement from it. The accumulated displacement cost represents the physical debt of industrialization --- energy absorbed by oceans, ice melted, feedback processes initiated. The glitch is the surplus extracted by industrial civilization without paying the corresponding atmospheric displacement cost.

We apply DC5 (irreversibility) to show that return path costs exceed departure costs, and that delay compounds this asymmetry. The framework identifies tipping points as separatrices between atmospheric basins of attraction. Crossing them produces a new stable ground state from which return costs are effectively unbounded. The paper provides thermodynamic framing for the urgency of near-term emissions reduction.