[geeks] I really don't get it ...

[David Cantrell]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 at 04:00:24PM -0500, Mike Hebel wrote:
> Dave McGuire wrote:
> > I'm not an atmospheric scientist either, but look at what we DO know 
> > about the atmospheric H2O system: it's self-balancing.  When the 
> > moisture density gets above a certain point, it condenses and forms rain 
> > (or snow, hail, whatever)...Increasing the amount of atmospheric 
> > moisture will simply increase the amount of precipitation, in those 
> > areas where the "new" moisture moves to and settles.
> The self-balancing thing is what makes me skeptical about the global 
> warming thing. From the standpoint of the planet the Earth is a 
> closed-system with feedback control.  If we start heating it up too much 
> I'm betting we'll see it cool down too much to compensate.

Not necessarily.  Complex systems can have several steady states.

Here, have an analogy: take a curved surface shaped approximately like a
parabola but with a hump in the middle.  Place a ball somewhere on that
surface.  We know that it will end up in one of the two dips, but without
doing some sums (which have two variables - the shape of the surface and
the co-efficient of friction) we don't know where.  Now extrapolate to
the global climate, which is a problem in an unknown number of variables
interacting in ways which are at best poorly understood.  It seems that we
are currently at the bottom of one of the dips, in a steady state.  But
we don't know the exact shape of the surface we're on, and we don't know what
will happen to the ball when we put some energy into the system.  We might
give it enough energy to kick it over the hump.  Or, ghod forbid, the
surface might be an S shape with some wiggles in the middle - so will have
one or more steady states, plus one that shoots off to infinity.

-- 
David Cantrell    |    Degenerate    |    http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  There is no sigmonster