Of course the weather is chaotic on short time scales and small dimensions. That's a fundamental characteristic of turbulent fluid flow. Do you really think the people who have studied and who work in the atmospheric sciences are unaware of this? Given this obvious fact, the reality is that the climate in the past has changed rather slowly and we have learned much about the reasons for the changes in climate seen in the historical and paleo records. And, the skills of the model builders have progressed to the extent that the models can produce a very good simulation of past and present climate. That's because the climate system is a highly dissipative system with energy flowing thru it at a nearly constant rate. The energy storage within the oceans is important, but much of the water in the oceans is relatively isolated from the surface, therefore the thermal storage changes very slowly (at present, of course).
I share your concern about abrupt climate change and from my perspective, the most likely cause of those abrupt changes seen in the record is the Thermohaline Circulation. I am on record pointing this out in a comment to the US Climate Science Program. It would appear that political influence resulted in such warnings being ignored. Also, I know of no hard evidence which links ENSO and the abrupt transitions which ended the Interglacials, leading to Ice Age conditions. If you are really worried, why not provide us with a link, you know, as in science? I think I see an indication that the THC has weakened in the Greenland Sea in recent years, but I do not have the tools, the money and the institutional associations needed to provide hard proof. Oceanography is a very expensive science. I can't even pay for a fishing boat. BTW, if the rational choice were so easy to make, we would already have made it. E. S. ---------------------------------------------- On Sep 19, 5:09 am, Robert I Ellison <[email protected]> wrote: [cut] > It seems to me that the rational decision is easy to make. Create the > market for low carbon technologies and business will respond > creatively. I think that government investment in not even neccessary > - just the right social and cultural understanding sine qua non. The > difficulty is in using irrational predictions of the certainty of dire > outcomes for political engineering by social bloody democrats. > > The problem with Hansen and the IPCC is that if they are wrong over > the next couple of decades - as I believe they most certainly are and > as suggested by peer reviewed literaure - everyone is going to end up > a sceptic and the impetus for decarbonisation is lost for at least a > generation. I am arguing, perhaps forlornly, for action despite the > confluence of ideologically inspired and millenialist thinking. If > there is immense uncertainty - why not admit to it and not take the > risk of being shown to be hopelessly wrong, muddleheaded, misguided > and a social democrat. Or is that a tuatology? > > I don't think you are understanding chaos as one of three great ideas, > along with relativity and quantum mechanics, in 20th Century physics. > Small initial changes propagating nonlinearly through a complex and > dynamic system and causing the system to jump between radicaly > different states. Science can give us a correlation between UV and > cloud for instance - but the system involves changes in the > temperature of stratospheric ozone and consequential changes in sea > surface pressure at the poles in particular. The system involves > planetary spin, surface and deep ocean currents, wind and cloud > feedbacks, wave propagation and refraction and reflection. Climate is > theorectically determinant but practically incaluable. Global warming > is certainly wrong - the more correct paradigm must be abrupt, and > perhaps dangerous, climate change. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange
