On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 10:32:54 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

snip

The Earth oscillates, very noisily and aperiodically, between ice ages
and jungle ages. Whether we'll be hot or cold 200,000 years now could
be changed by the tiniest extra input to the system. Certainly a major
change in solar output would change climate, but the noisy swings
about the mean, the chaos component, are large and exquisitely
sensitive to input.

In chaos theory, "probabilities" pretty much translates to "attractors".

Some attractors are "fatter" than others (have greater probability),
and some are indeed strange...

With that in mind, re-examine the curves on the Wiki page I cited and
think about the energies involved in getting those curves from one
excursion to the other. It just doesn't seem reasonable _to me_ that
anything we can do will push their pseudoperiodicity far enough off
their mutual attractors (remember, they interact) to be worth worrying
about.

The climate is _not_ stable and never has been for any significant
period on the scales of those curves; we haven't even been taking data
long enough to know the current slope of the cumulative attractor it
rides with any reasonable degree of confidence much less know when it's
going to change next, and we certainly don't have the energy at our
disposal to change it or make the climate jump to another attractor. At
least not until we have a much larger energy budget to screw around with...

I concur with George Carlin; I see "Chicken Little"'s assertion that
our comparative butterfly-wing-flapping is driving global warming as
arrogance.


Mark L. Fergerson


You suggest that there's nothing we can do, including dumping gigatons
of CO2 into the atmosphere, to push climate away from a natural
equilibrium point, pressumable either a linear point of stability or a
chaotic attractor (which are sort of the same thing, longterm).

I suggest that weather and climate are so chaotic that anything we do,
big or small, changes the state of climate in totally random and
unpredictable ways.

So we agree that there's no point in getting neurotic about
human-influenced climate change.

John