Fun with chaos
Climate change is a fun topic if you're not desperate for predictability. The power of science is amazing in BOTH predictability and knowledge of the limitations of predictability.
Predicting weather in a given location is at best done not more than 1 week in the future. And as they say, statitically the flutter of a spring butterfly in Asia can effect the creation of a hurricane in the Alantic the following Fall.
Even in Kepler and Newton's wonderful predictions of planetary motion under gravity is lost under chaos if you want to predict motions more than 10 million years in the future.
As much as "little things" can create a big different in a dynamic system, repetitive events have even more power. Using harmonic resonance in the solar system, like a child on a swing, if you're patient enough you can amplify small power into large effects - like "pulling" a comet into a new orbit to collide with the moon. Gods could play a serious game of planetary pool, like the silly animations of the comedy show "Third Rock from the Sun".
Back to climate, we're apply "random" (unintentional changes) to the climate. All of life does this over thousands and millions of years. Th Gaia Hypthoesis even suggests a proper representation of the earth as a living organism, regulating the environment to support its own continuity, whether consciously or merely diversity applied to moderate, like "Daisy world" model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_Hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld
The fun thing is the earth has been in an "ice age" for most of the last 5 million years, 100,000 year cycles of cold and warm, and modern culture evolved large since the decline of the last glacial period 10,000 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_glaciation
Without humanity, predictions imply the world would likely move back into a glacial period in the next 10,000 years, a slow decline in world average temperatures.
In geology I objected to the term "Holocene" in the local era, because it LOOKS like we're still in the Pleistocene era of the last 2 million years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene
However given human's influences it is probably true - we've changed the direction of the earth's climate. Still the question is WHAT direction?!
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, helping trap more solar radiation as heat on the earth. Now glaciers and ice in the polar regions are melting fast in geological time, and less ice means a darker surface causing more energy to be absorbed. And the melting perafrost in northern Canada and Russia is causing the break down of ancient vegetation long frozen, releasing methane and again more global warming.
But perhaps a negative feedback loop will reverse things. If the greenland glacier melt fast enough to change the salinity of the northern atlantic, it can change the flow of the ocean currents and end the warm waters flowing to Europe warming their climate. Slower ocean currents will slow the redistribution of heat in the climate, perhaps recooling the polar regions, changing system back into a glaciation direction. Who can say?
Well, fun stuff, if you don't care about what happens. Our brains are perhaps not very good at looking at threats that take years and decades, but climate change is real, and we are changing it much more dramatically than a butterfly's light touch.
Life will adapt, I'm sure. Even after a nuclear war, it'll deal with it. Civilization on the other hand, is more fragile I think, and it seems clear sooner that later we'll be forced to scale back our ambitions, and reintegrate ourselves back into limitations of our immediate surroundings.
Probably best to not know too much what will happen, since we'd be too depressed to face the cruel demands of the near future.
It is sort of like a baseball game, and I wonder how it'll turn out. The gods have a lot of fun watching I'm sure.
Predicting weather in a given location is at best done not more than 1 week in the future. And as they say, statitically the flutter of a spring butterfly in Asia can effect the creation of a hurricane in the Alantic the following Fall.
Even in Kepler and Newton's wonderful predictions of planetary motion under gravity is lost under chaos if you want to predict motions more than 10 million years in the future.
As much as "little things" can create a big different in a dynamic system, repetitive events have even more power. Using harmonic resonance in the solar system, like a child on a swing, if you're patient enough you can amplify small power into large effects - like "pulling" a comet into a new orbit to collide with the moon. Gods could play a serious game of planetary pool, like the silly animations of the comedy show "Third Rock from the Sun".
Back to climate, we're apply "random" (unintentional changes) to the climate. All of life does this over thousands and millions of years. Th Gaia Hypthoesis even suggests a proper representation of the earth as a living organism, regulating the environment to support its own continuity, whether consciously or merely diversity applied to moderate, like "Daisy world" model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_Hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld
The fun thing is the earth has been in an "ice age" for most of the last 5 million years, 100,000 year cycles of cold and warm, and modern culture evolved large since the decline of the last glacial period 10,000 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_glaciation
Without humanity, predictions imply the world would likely move back into a glacial period in the next 10,000 years, a slow decline in world average temperatures.
In geology I objected to the term "Holocene" in the local era, because it LOOKS like we're still in the Pleistocene era of the last 2 million years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene
However given human's influences it is probably true - we've changed the direction of the earth's climate. Still the question is WHAT direction?!
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, helping trap more solar radiation as heat on the earth. Now glaciers and ice in the polar regions are melting fast in geological time, and less ice means a darker surface causing more energy to be absorbed. And the melting perafrost in northern Canada and Russia is causing the break down of ancient vegetation long frozen, releasing methane and again more global warming.
But perhaps a negative feedback loop will reverse things. If the greenland glacier melt fast enough to change the salinity of the northern atlantic, it can change the flow of the ocean currents and end the warm waters flowing to Europe warming their climate. Slower ocean currents will slow the redistribution of heat in the climate, perhaps recooling the polar regions, changing system back into a glaciation direction. Who can say?
Well, fun stuff, if you don't care about what happens. Our brains are perhaps not very good at looking at threats that take years and decades, but climate change is real, and we are changing it much more dramatically than a butterfly's light touch.
Life will adapt, I'm sure. Even after a nuclear war, it'll deal with it. Civilization on the other hand, is more fragile I think, and it seems clear sooner that later we'll be forced to scale back our ambitions, and reintegrate ourselves back into limitations of our immediate surroundings.
Probably best to not know too much what will happen, since we'd be too depressed to face the cruel demands of the near future.
It is sort of like a baseball game, and I wonder how it'll turn out. The gods have a lot of fun watching I'm sure.
posted by Ares Olympus at 8:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home