On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:18:48 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 09:49:28 -0700, Mark Fergerson
wrote:

We simply cannot wield energies on natural scales.

Mr. Larkin thinks that washing his car will cause an ice age.

I think he's being just the least bit sarcastic.

No, I think that, if climate is a chaotic system, the tiniest
disturbance will propagate to complete changes of state.

Seriously? You don't recognize the basic inertia (homeostasis) of the
system?


I do know that we had ice ages and jungle ages, and graphs of
temperature/ice coverage/CO2/species extinction vs time are all over
the place. There's no short-term inertia (weather is wild, from hours
to months) and no long-term inertia (ice ages come and go), but I
suppose there might be a mid-scale inertia. A Fourier analysis of
earth temp versus time *might* be bimodal or something, but I'm
guessing that weather/climate are noisy at all time scales, and are
chaotic except for occasionally being whacked by cosmic events and
vulcanism.

Whether climate has any significant chaotic components (nonlinear gain
mechanisms, wherein past states have a significant but complex
influence on current state), or whether it's largely dependent on
external inputs, I can't say of course.

John



It's interesting that the "climate change" crowd (formerly known as
the "global warming" crowd) now warn us of a "tipping point" where
added CO2 will trip a positive feedback mechanism and cause either
intense warming, or an ice age, I'm not sure which.

Both, actually, depending on when you cite a given author. Most of
the current "global warming" crowd were warning of "global winter" a
couple decades ago, and AFAICT changed their stripe only when climate
data showed them wrong.


Mark L. Fergerson