This is a comment by Dr. Robert Brown on the What we don’t know about Earth’s energy flow post. I thought it was so insightful on the topic of climate stability being “pushed” by CO2 forcing that I’ve elevated it to a separate post. – Anthony
Is it fair to say that the two systems would oscillate within the same parameters but the probability of them being synchronized is nil?
Sadly, no, not over long times. The systems could be as different as a ferromagnet magnetized up and an “identical” ferromagnet magnetized down. Or in the case of the Earth, as different as Glacial Earth and Interglacial Earth. The point is that both of these latter possibilities can be “stable” states for exactly the same insolation, etc, because feedbacks in the global system can themselves reconfigure to make them stable.
If you look at the link to chaos theory I provided, and look at the figure that shows two loopy braids of lines, that provides an heuristic picture of the kind of possibilities available to coupled nonlinear differential systems.
At the heart of each loop is something called a “strange attractor”, which is typically a limit point. The x and y axes are coordinates in a generalized (phase) space that represent the state of the system at any given time, x(t),y(t). The lines themselves are the trajectory of the system over time moving under the influence of the underlying dynamics. The point of the figure is that instead of their being a single “orbit” the way the earth orbits a regular attractor like the sun, the system oscillates around one attractor for a time, then the other, then both. Instead of nice closed orbits the orbits themselves are almost never the same.
Two trajectories that are started close to one another will usually start out, for a while, orbiting the attractors the same general way. But over time — often a remarkably short time — the two trajectories will diverge. One will flip over to the other attractor and the other won’t. After a remarkably short time, the two trajectories are almost completely decorrelated in that the knowledge of where one lies (in the general accessible phase space) provides one with no help at all in guessing the location of the other.
It’s only in this final sense that you are correct. Either system has to be found in the space of physically consistent states, states that are accessible via the differential process from the starting points. There is no guarantee that the trajectories will “fill phase space”. So in this sense they are both going to be found within the phase space accessible from the starting points. If those two starting points are close enough, they will probably sample very similar phase spaces, but there is no guarantee that they will be identical — especially if there are (many) more than two attractors, and if some simple parameter. In stat mech, with different assumptions, there is a theorem to that regard, but in the general case of open system dynamics in a chaotic system, IFAIK no.
If you are interested in this sort of thing (which can be fun to play with, actually) you can look up things like the “predator-prey differential equations”, e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equation
IIRC this is one of the simplest systems exhibiting an attractor and limit cycle, and illustrates many of the features of more complicated dynamical systems. The attractor/fixed point in this case is the population of e.g. foxes and rabbits that remains in perfect equilibrium from year to year. Note well that this equation is deterministic, but of course a real population — even being modelled — always has random (or at least, “unpredictable”) variations — a certain amount of noise — and is actually discretized and not continuous as one cannot have half a cheetah eating \pi baboons.
A better continuous “kind” of differential equation for describing systems like this with noise is something called a Langevin equation in physics — a system with “fast” microscopic degrees of freedom that one accounts for on average with a stochastic term, and slower degrees of freedom one integrates out like the predator prey equation. In physics it is a special limiting case of something called a generalized Master equation, which is the full integrodifferential description of a many body open quantum system and is really, really difficult. The general approach, however, is not inapplicable here — and is a presumed part of most of the simplified climate models. When you “smooth” the temperature by e.g. doing a running average, you are giving up information (the short time variation) and trying to reduce the complexity of the system by focussing on the slower time scale dynamics.
If the system really is simple — has a single attractor and is in a very regular oscillation around it where the “noise” one is smoothing out really is irrelevant and just adds small variation to a single trajectory — this is probably OK. If the system is multistable and has many locally stable points, or worse if some of the degrees of freedom are things like the Sun whose time evolution is completely outside of “the system” and whose future you cannot predict and whose effect you do not precisely know, so that the attractors themselves can be moving around as the system evolves locally — it is probably not OK.
The symptom of the latter kind of multistable system where it is probably not OK is a series of punctuated equilibria, visible in the smoothed data. The 30 year satellite data and SST data fairly clearly shows this kind of behavior.
One final very important point — systems that oscillate almost always have negative feedback. In fact, that is the fundamental thing that defines an oscillatory system — it has attractors in it. Attractors are themselves stable (equilibrium) points such that if the system is perturbed from them it is pulled back towards equilibrium, not pushed away from it. In the general case of attractors in high dimensional spaces, this leads to the (Poincare) cycles around the attractors visible in the predator-prey equations or the Chaos figure with two strange attractors, except that they can get very, very complicated (and difficult to visualize) in 3+ dimensional spaces (where I’m not talking about physical spaces, note well, but parametric “phase” spaces, state spaces). Within some neighborhood of an attractor there is generally a fair bit of local stability — trajectories in that neighborhood will oscillate tightly around the one attractor and will be relatively unlikely to switch over to other attractors. Hence glacial and interglacial periods tend to last a fairly long time (compared to all of the many shorter timescales available to the system.
Moving a single underlying external parameter — e.g. anthropogenic CO_2 concentration, Solar state, geomagnetic state — can be thought of as moving the fixed points of the multistable system. If we linearize, we can often guess at least the direction of the first order direction of the movement. For example, more CO_2, given the greenhouse effect, should increase heat trapping, hence increase average global temperature. The stable fixed point should thus move a bit up in the warming direction.
Nearly all of the argument “revolves” (in more ways than one:-) around two simple problems, and note that I’m presenting them in a very different way than usual:
a) Is this linear response assumption valid? This is not a trivial question. Increased CO_2 in a multistable system doesn’t just move the local attractor, it moves all the attractors, and not necessarily in simple linear ways in a really complicated system with many negative feedbacks (there by hypothesis all over the place because the system is dominated by attractors). In many systems, there are conservation principles at work (not necessarily known ones) that act as constraints so that moving one attractor up moves another one down or increases the “barrier height” between two attractors and hence deforms all of the limit cycles.
b) Is the response the order of the mean difference between attractors being predominantly sampled within the system already? If it is greater, then it is likely not just to move the current attractor but to kick the system over to a new attractor. And it may not be the attractor you expect, one on the warmer side of the previous one. More warming, as warmists state in more heuristic terms, can make the system oscillate more wildly and hence be both warmer at the warmest part of the oscillation and colder at the coldest part of the oscillation. If the new excursion of the oscillation is great enough, it can kick the system into oscillation around a new attractor altogether on either side of things.
Note that this latter statement is still oversimplified as it makes it sound like there are only two directions, warmer and cooler. But that is not true. There is warmer with morewater vapor in the atmosphere, warmer with less water vapor in the atmosphere, warmer with the sun active, warmer with the sun not active, warmer with sea ice increasing, warmer with sea ice decreasing, warmer with more clouds, warmer with less clouds, and the clouds in question can be day side or night side clouds, arctic or antarctic clouds, in the summer, fall, winter or spring, really month by month if not day by day, with feedbacks everywhere — tweaking any single aspect of this cycle affects all of the rest, and I haven’t even begun to list all of the important dimensions or note that there are really important time scales with nearly periodic oscillation of many of these drivers, or noted that the underlying dynamics takes place on a spinning globe that generates airflow vortices as standard operating procedure that have lifetimes ranging from days to decades.
I have argued in posts above that the punctuated quasi-equilibrium evident in the climate record makes it very likely that the answer to b) is yes. The anthropogenic CO_2 shifts the system by order of or more than the distance between attractors, simply because the system jumped around between attractors even during time periods when there was no anthropogenic CO_2. Furthermore, the excursion of the system as it wandered among the attractors was as great as it is today, and not qualitatively different.
This strongly suggests that while the the linear response assumption made in a) may be valid (per attractor) — or may not, but it will be a huge problem to prove it — the effect is less than the natural excursion, not greater than the natural excursion, and the negative feedback factors that make the multistable attractors (locally) attractive also act as negative feedback on the CO_2 induced shift!
The latter is the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, as I already noted in one thread or another (two tired of writing to go see if it was this one). In an open system in a locally stable phase, the oscillations (fluctuations) couple to the dissipation so that more fluctuation makes more dissipation — negative feedback. If this is not true, the locally stable phase is not stable.
This is a strong argument against catastrophe! The point is that given that CO_2 is making only small, slow, local shifts of the attractors compared to the large shifts of the system between the attractors, if there was a point where the system was likely to fall over to a much warmer stable point — the “catastrophe” threatened by the warmists — it almost certainly would have already done it, as the phase oscillations over the last ten thousand years have on numerous occasions made it as warm as it is right now.
The fact that this has not happened is actually enormously strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe. Yes, anthropogenic CO_2 may have shifted all the attractor temperatures a bit higher, it may have made small rearrangements of the attractors, but there is no evidence that suggests that it is probably going to suddenly create at new attractor far outside of the normal range of variation already visible in the climate record. Is it impossible? Of course not. But it is not probable.
I’ll close with an analogy. When physicists were getting ready to test the first nuclear bomb, there was some concern expressed by the less gifted physicists present that in doing so they might “ignite the Earth’s atmosphere” or somehow turn the Earth into a Sun (note that this was before there was any understanding of fusion — the sun’s energy cycle was still not understood). I’ve read (far more recently) some concern that collisions at the LHC could have the same effect — create a mini-black hole or the like that swallows the Earth.
Both of these are silly fears (although offered up, note well, by real scientists, because they could see that these outcomes were possible, at least in principle) and here’s why.
The temperature and pressure created by the nuclear bomb is not unique! Although it is rare, asteroids fall to the earth, and when they do they create pressures and temperatures much higher than those produced by nuclear bombs. A very modest sized asteroid can release more energy in a few milliseconds than tens of thousands of times the total explosive energy of all of the man-made explosives, including nuclear bombs, on Earth! In a nutshell, if it could happen (with any reasonable probability), it already would have happened.
Ditto the fears associated with the LHC, or other “super” colliders. Sure, it generates collisions on the order of electron-teravolts, but this sort of energy in nuclear collisions is not unique! The Earth is constantly being bombarded by high energy particles given off by extremely energetic events like supernovae that happened long ago and far away. The energies of these cosmic rays are vastly greater than anything we will ever be able to produce in the laboratory until the laboratory in question contains a supernova. The most energetic cosmic ray ever observed (so far) was a (presumably) proton with the kinetic energy of a fastball-pitched baseball, a baseball travelling at some 150 kilometers per hour. Since we’ve seen one of these in a few decades of looking, we have to assume that they happen all the time — literally every second a cosmic ray of this sort of energy is hitting the Earth (BIG target) somewhere. If such a collision could create a black hole that destroyed planets with any significant probability, we would have been toast long, long ago.
Hence it is silly to fear the LHC or nuclear ignition. If either were probable, we wouldn’t be here to build an LHC or nuclear bomb.
It is not quite that silly to fear CAGW. The truth is that we haven’t been around long enough to know enough about the climate system to be able to tell what sorts of feedbacks and factors structure the multistable climate attractors, so one can create a number of doomsday scenarios — warming to a critical point that releases massive amounts of methane that heats things suddenly so that the ocean degasses all of its CO_2 and the ice caps melt and the oceans boil and suddenly there we are, Venus Earth with a mean temperature outside of 200 C. If we can imagine it and write it down, it must be possible, right? Science fiction novels galore explore just that sort of thing. Or movies proposing the opposite — the appearance of attractors that somehow instantly freeze the entire planet and bring about an ice age. Hey! It could happen!
But is it probable?
Here is where the argument above provides us with a great deal of comfort. There is little in the climate record to suggest the existence of another major stable state, another major attractor, well above the current warm phase attractor. Quite the opposite — the record over the last few tens of millions of years suggest that we are in the middle of a prolonged cooling phase of the planet, of the sort that has happened repeatedly over geological time, such that we are in the warm phase major attractor, and that there is literally nothing out there above it to go to. If there were, we would have gone there, instead, as local variations and oscillation around the many> minor warm phase attractors has repeatedly sampled conditions that would have been likely to cause a transition to occur if one was at all likely. At the very least, there would be a trace of it in the thermal record of the last million years or thereabouts, and there isn’t. We’re in one of the longest, warmest interglacials of the last five, although not at the warmest point of the current interglacial (the Holocene). If there were a still warmer attractor out there, the warmest point of the Holocene would have been likely to find it.
Since it manifestly did not, that suggests that the overall feedbacks are safely negative and all of the “catastrophe” hypotheses but one are relatively unlikely.
The one that should be worrisome? Catastrophic Global Cooling. We know that there is a cold phase major attractor some 5-10C cooler than current temperatures. Human civilization arose in the Holocene, and we have not yet advanced to where it can survive a cold phase transition back to glacial conditions, not without the death of 5 billion people and probable near-collapse of civilization. We know that this transition not only can occur, but will occur. We do not know when, why, or how to estimate its general probability. We do know that the LIA — a mere 400-500 years ago — was the coolest period in the entire Holocene post the Younger Dryas excursion; in general the Holocene appears to be cooling from its warmest period, and the twentieth century was a Grand Solar Maximum, the most active sun in 11,000 years, a maximum that is now clearly past.
IMO we are far more likely to be hanging out over an instability in which a complete transition to cold phase becomes uncomfortably likely than we are to be near a transition to a superwarm phase that there is no evidence of in the climate record. The probability is higher for two reasons. One is that unlike the superwarm phase, we know that the cold phase actually exists, and is a lot more stable than the warm phase. The “size” of the quasistable Poincare cycle oscillations around the cold phase major attractor is much larger than that around the warm phase attractors, and brief periods of warming often get squashed before turning into actual interglacials — that’s how stable they are.
The other is that we spend 90% of the time in glacial phase, only 10% in interglacial, and the Holocene is already one of the longer interglacials! There is dynamics on long timescales that we do not understand at work here. We have only the foggiest idea of what causes the (essentially chaotic) transition from warm phase to cold phase or vice versa — very crude ideas involving combinations of Milankovich cycles, the tipping of the ecliptic, the precession of the poles, orbital resonances, and stuff like that, but there is clearly a strong feedback within the climate cycle that enables cold phase “tipping”, probably related to albedo.
It could be something as simple as a quiet sun; the LIA-Maunder minimum suggests that we should actively fear a quiet sun, because something in the nonlinear differential system seems to favor colder attractors (still in the warm phase major attractor) during Maunder-type minima. One has to imagine that conversion to glaciation phase is more likely at the bottom of e.g. the LIA than at any other time, and the Holocene is probably living on borrowed time at this point, where a prolonged LIA-like interval could tip it over.
To be honest, even a LIA would be a disaster far greater than most of the warmist catastrophic imaginings. The population of the world is enormous compared to what it was in the last ice age, and a huge fraction of it lives and grows food on temperate zone land. Early frost and late spring could both reduce the available land and halve the number of crops grown on the land that survives, even before full blown glaciation. Cold (warm) phases are often associated with temperature/tropic droughts, as well, at least in parts of the world. IMO, the “rapid” onset of a LIA could kill a billion people as crops in Siberia and China and Canada and the northern US fail, and could easily destabilize the world’s tenuous political situation to where global war again becomes likely to add to our woes.
We may ultimately discover that AGW was our salvation — the CO_2 released by our jump to civilization may ameliorate or postpone the next LIA, it may block cold-phase excursion that could begin the next REAL ice age for decades or even a century. In the meantime, perhaps we can get our act together and figure out how to live together in a civilized world, not a few civilized countries where people are well off and all the rest where they are poor and more or less enslaved by a handful of tyrants or religious oligarchs.
Note well, this latter bit is itself “speculative fiction” — I don’t fully understand climate cycles either (it’s a hard problem). But at least there I can provide evidence for a lurking catastrophe in the actual climate record, so it is a lot less “fiction” than CAGW.
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Robert of Ottawa says:
January 9, 2012 at 6:37 pm
“Thing to remember is: Chaos theory applies to quantized phase space; not real space.”
No, I disagree.
“The whole concept of chaos theory developed when people started to study the effects of quantization and initial conditions upon computer models that depended upon numerical integration (Runge-Cutter et al.). ”
Ecologists have throughout the 70ies and 80ies tried to simulate Runge-Kutta systems, describing ecosystems, with classical cybernetics, using analog computing networks; these are not quantized in any way. They wanted to find equilibrium conditions but their models kept oscillating unpredictably. (one such researcher was George van Dyne)
Try to find a copy of
All watched over by machines of loving grace
by Adam Curtis
Strictly speaking, a chaotic system requires infinite resolution of the state variables; as any limited resolution would lead to the system at some point in the future getting into a state where it already has been, leading to an endless loop. If your state variable has 32 bit, you run into an endless loop after at most 2^32 time steps. Only infinte resolution can prevent this in principle.
Thank you Dr Brown for a very lucid discussion of why things are improbable because they haven’t happened yet! That might seem a bit trite to some, but I work in a field of risk analysis where I have to address this issue a lot of the time. We can calculate probabilistic risks only when the hazard has actually occurred; we can examine hypothetical risks based on known mechanisms to create some hazard and address the individual parts of the mechanism for their probabilities (hoping to provide some level of probability); but speculative risks with no known mechanism to cause any hazard are completely beyond the bounds of analysis.
What Dr Brown has done here (in my simplistic understanding) is to use chaos theory to address hypothetical and – perhaps – speculative risks – i.e. those which have not occurred. By addressing the mechanisms for how CO_2 may affect climate and using the historical data to determine if these mechanisms might actually happen we can look at whether catastrophic warming has any likelihood at all. Obviously, it is the mechanisms which are critical here (and I am sure that warmists and skeptics will disagree on them), but the case made by the finding of it hasn’t happened yet is hard to go past.
Sparks says:
January 9, 2012 at 6:27 pm
Dr. Brown didn’t say “The butterfly effect, the flapping wings of a butterfly in Australia can effect the weather in…”
Yes that is often told, but is not what Deterministic chaos is about and not what Lorenz meant. Lorenz referred to the strange attractor like the picture that Anthony added, these are deterministic paths in phase space.
But some (journalists ?) translated this into an actual butterfly making distortions. Such distortions are randomly created and non-deterministic, and not a part of the intrinsic attractor of the system. Chaos is a characteristic that lies within the non-linear system itself.
I enjoyed reading The Arrow Of Time by Peter Coveney recently. A big part of it deals with the connection between thermodynamics (Second Law), non-linear flow and chaos.
” Graeme says:January 9, 2012 at 6:13 pm
Note that the human population bottlenecked in the last glacial period to approx 3000 individuals in Africa approx 60,000 years ago based on mitchondrial DNA studies. I.e. we almost died out.”
I believe it was mount Toba at 72,000 BC that almost did humanity in. Less than 10,000 world wide is the estimate I’ve seen from the DNA studies. Then we went as low as 170 PPM of CO2 and almost went extinct again. Just another 10-15% drop and we’d have been gone. Rollercoster ride this Earth is.
Great article Dr Brown. Thanks. I’m going to have to reread it because most was over my head but I love to read these things because it makes me think and learn.
Hans says:
January 9, 2012 at 7:41 pm
“Sparks says:
January 9, 2012 at 6:27 pm
Dr. Brown didn’t say “The butterfly effect, the flapping wings of a butterfly in Australia can effect the weather in…”
Yes that is often told, but is not what Deterministic chaos is about and not what Lorenz meant. Lorenz referred to the strange attractor like the picture that Anthony added, these are deterministic paths in phase space.
But some (journalists ?) translated this into an actual butterfly making distortions. ”
The butterfly analogy is not that bad – it shows a small perturbation having ever larger consequences. In the context of state variables, this corresponds to a left-bitshift of information; so with each round of the simulation, or with each timestep of the system, information creeps up from smaller decimals to larger. When you consider the butterfly to be a part of the system, not as an outside disturbance, the picture is consistent again.
Lew Skannen says:
January 9, 2012 at 4:31 pm
“Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as the weather”
[5]Sneyers Raymond (1997). “Climate Chaotic Instability: Statistical Determination
Edit wikipedia to fix the problem. The reference is “cliamte” so it is inaccurate for someone to use “weather” in the sentence. It should read:
Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as climate.[5]
Great discussion, though I think it important to note that the basic point–if a modest amount of warming could induce runaway warming feedback effects then it would have happened long ago–does not require all of this insight into the workings of chaotic systems with multiple attractors.
Of course that fuller picture has its own virtues. The image of a big fat cold-attractor lurking below, with no previously observed warm attractor above us, is a nice way of pointing out where the more likely danger lies.
Warming theorists would have us be complacent about this peril: “New paper: AGW may save us from the next ice age.” Even Dr. Brown suggests that:
But that is only if CO2 actually has a significant warming effect. If 20th century warming was actually caused by the 80 year grand maximum of solar activity that began in the early 1920’s, that would leave little warming to attribute to CO2, and little chance that this slight warming effect will make the difference on whether our climate falls into the cold attractor.
Hans says:
January 9, 2012 at 7:41 pm
Deterministic chaos, that’s interesting!
Paging Tomas Milanovic …
DirkH says:
January 9, 2012 at 7:56 pm
The universal answer is, snow flakes are all different but snow is white, huh?> how can this be?
lol
Paul Penrose says:
January 9, 2012 at 5:19 pm
I have been making this same basic argument for years, however yours was more articulate and detailed. Good luck getting traction with it; I kept getting “But you’re not a climate scientist” rebuttals. My answer was that one did not have to be a mathematician to know that 2 + 2 = 4. A condescending look and a dismissive remark is the usual response.
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lol, yes, that’s right! But, as most of us know, there really isn’t such a thing as a climatologist. It is an invented occupation. It is akin to having a degree in ecological justice.
There is mathematics. There is physics. There is chemistry. Show me a science outside those realms and I’ll show you climatology.
Keep the faith. Truth is winning!
I’ve always thought that if we want to stabilise the climate we should get rid of all those pesky butterflies.
Thanks for this post – very good read.
I’m still unsure about what CO2 does to the climate one way or the other, but I am concerned with the relationship between the concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and the efficiency of photosynthesis. The coincidence of low CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and Ice Ages puts the wind right up me. The biosphere appears to be sampling new lows in atmospheric CO2 concentrations each Ice Age and we appear to be entering a new regime never experienced before in Earth’s history. I wonder how it will turn out?
This was an excellent post. I do want to take this little bit from the post and discuss is. It said:
“Is the response the order of the mean difference between attractors being predominantly sampled within the system already? If it is greater, then it is likely not just to move the current attractor but to kick the system over to a new attractor. And it may not be the attractor you expect, one on the warmer side of the previous one. More warming, as warmists state in more heuristic terms, can make the system oscillate more wildly and hence be both warmer at the warmest part of the oscillation and colder at the coldest part of the oscillation. If the new excursion of the oscillation is great enough, it can kick the system into oscillation around a new attractor altogether on either side of things.”
____
This is the point that leads to the validity of the study of the paleoclimate data from the mid-Pliocene. Looking at the data might give us a glimpse of a new attractor that additional CO2 might kick the system into oscillation around. This “kick” is of course the old sensitivity issue. How sensitive is the climate current system to not just the amount of CO2 that is being added (beyond anything seen in the system’s current oscillation in at least 800,000 years, and probably longer), but also the rate at which it is being added. The system, with both fast and slow feedbacks, will possibly respond quite differently to a slow kick than a fast kick, as the feedbacks will have different temporal responses. Thus, had it taken 2,000 years for the CO2 levels to go up from 280 to 390 ppm, could have a much different response or “kick” to the system then going up in a few hundred years. The speed of the “kick” could matter greatly. Studying the attractor that existed for the system in the most recent time in which CO2 levels were this high is a very valid approach, and certainly can offer insights which linear climate models do not afford.
I do not understand how DNA studies can be used to indicate human population levels 72K years ago, but I suggest that doing some DNA research on the inhabitants of a Walmart parking lot on Sunday afternoon would show that we are already in the middle of another extinction event.
but there is clearly a strong feedback within the climate cycle that enables cold phase “tipping”, probably related to albedo.
I’ve been thinking about possible mechanisms for the kind of sudden cooling we saw at the start of the Younger Dryas.
The likeliest mechanism IMO is a volcano around 45 degrees north early in the northern winter. A large ejection of troposphere and stratosphere aerosols, initially causes a large increase in clouds. Aerosol seeded clouds have a particularly high albedo, then followed by snowfall to much lower latitudes than normal again increasing albedo.
Note that any GHG warming would accentuate this effect by increasing the available water vapour in the atmosphere.
As northern winter progresses low atmospheric water vapour levels and hence clouds, and extended snow cover in mid-winter would continue the cooling by increasing outgoing LWR.
Would this cause a cooling tipping point? Probably not, but if we had multiple eruptions over several years as we did prior to ‘the year without a summer’, then maybe.
Good, article until the mention of methane which is “greens” and IPCC (through green representatives) hyped up nonsense. There is no evidence to say that methane in the atmosphere has a measureable influence. The supposed 21*CO2 for methane in the atmosphere is not true. Depending how one considers water vapour it maybe correct when burnt in a car engine or a gas turbine (for electricty generation) but then it is actually worse than oil (diesel) or coal (for electricity generation).
R. Gates says:
January 9, 2012 at 9:08 pm
In the next 70-100 years we’ll know that we wont know, we won’t be around to know.
Similar to the way that you don’t know that the past 100 years won’t change the future or the events from the last Ice age [thousands of years ago] from having far more influence over the next 100 years than what it has had over the past 100 years.
Oh, CO2, I hear it’s good for something. But I hear that it’s bad when billions of people constantly produce all of it. are there any facts surrounding this logistical bull s**t?
Fascinating post.
Fred Hoyle wrote “ICE” in the early 1980s. His thesis was that ice ages and interglagials are triggered by large body impacts from space.
Part of the argument was that entry into, and exit from, ice age conditions are really quick – of the order of 100 years or less. I guess that this sort of rapidity is also what we should expect if the system is chaotic with several attractors.
For information purposes: Luboš Motl in his blog is discussing a paper that corrects the input to Milankovitch’ cycle calculations.
Quote:
This paper by a former student of Richard Lindzen finally managed to fix Milutin Milankovič’s theory which hadn’t worked and the outcome was a theory that does work. The graph below contains both theoretical predictions as well as the observed data about the Northern Hemisphere temperature and you may see that the match is beautiful:
“The one that should be worrisome? Catastrophic Global Cooling. We know that there is a cold phase major attractor some 5-10C cooler than current temperatures. Human civilization arose in the Holocene, and we have not yet advanced to where it can survive a cold phase transition back to glacial conditions, not without the death of 5 billion people and probable near-collapse of civilization.”
OH NOES! It’s worse than we thought!
New ‘research’ has claimed that extra CO2 will hold off an ice age. About as believable as AGW.
I agree with Dr Brown. I have previously expressed it as follows:
Earth has been much warmer in the past, and catastrophic runaway global warming has never happened.
So the feedbacks to warming in the climate system must be negative, not positive.
The fact that we are still here, having this conversation, is proof enough.
I have also previously stated that natural global cooling will soon recur. I wrote in 2003 that cooling would start by 2020 to 2030. This was based in part on NASA’s now-obsolete prediction that SC 24 would be strong but SC 25 would be weak. SC24 now appears to be weak, so cooling could happen sooner.
I have also stated many times that global cooling is a much greater threat to humanity and the environment than global warming. The threat to food production of even modest global cooling is significant. Do we even store significant reserves of grain anymore? Global cooling is what our foolish governments should be worried about – not small fractions of a degree of natural global warming.
anna v…it’s no go on the graph below.
R. Gates,
You sir, have done more than anyone else to prove to me that AGW is a complete and total crock of excrement. For anyone who keeps tack of your unrelenting drivel, there is a clear pattern to it. Allow me to illustrate using your last bowl of steaming excrement tossed off as a pithy an relevant observation to demonstrate what it really is; FORMULA WRITING.
The formula begins (as always) with a compliment:
R. Gates;
This was an excellent post.>>>
The formula follows with the misdirection trick. Isolating an out of context paragraph from the article in order take the discussion in a direction never intended by the author. The comment seems sincere because it is proceeded by a compliment. Had the compliment not preceeded the blatant isolation of an out of context comment for the purposes of misdirection, the misdirection would be much more obvious as intentional, and the isolation of the comment excerpt out of context chosen carefully to support that objective:
R. Gates;
I do want to take this little bit from the post and discuss is. It said:>>>>
Having started with a compliment, and having used that compliment as cover for isolating an out of context excerpt for the purposes of misdirection, the misdirection can proceed apace:
R. Gates;
This is the point that leads to the validity of the study of the paleoclimate data from the mid-Pliocene.>>>>
The circular obfuscation is now in full flight. The compliment. The out of context quote. The misdirection, and then a conclusion that somehow, this supports the notion that (in this case) a completely out of context excertp supports the validity of a totaly and completely unrelated matter, which is the validity of the paleoclimat data. Having surreptitiously tied an out of context quote to an unrelated matter (validity of the paleoclimate data), R.Gates continues on building misdirection in layers of misdirection, each one of which relies on the misdirection before it:
R. Gates;
Looking at the data might give us a glimpse of a new attractor that additional CO2 might kick the system into oscillation around. >>>>
The premise almost seems logical except that the out of context quote that the logic process began with says nothing about the validity of the data in the first place, let alone how it might be exhibited even if the data was valid. Unperturbed that he has built a house of cards that stands on thin air, R. Gates continues:
R. Gates;
This “kick” is of course the old sensitivity issue.>>>
At this point, R. Gates is still relying on the original compliment to serve as cover that the logic chain presented is sincere. But the leap in logic is even greater this time. The article speaks not to sensitivity at all. In fact, the article is to a considerable extent a discussion of the variability that can exist within a chaotic system with stable inputs. The article speaks NOT to how much we might expect the earth to warm for a given increase in CO2 (which is what sensitivity is) but to the fact that it is quite possible for the earth to exist in wildly differing temperature distributions while still having the same “average” temperature. For example, large ice caps with a very hot tropics may have the same average temperature as an very small ice caps with a moderately warm tropics. There is no discussion of sensitivity at all, and in fact, the discussion is about factors that influence temperature distribution but have NO effect on average temperature! Having built a second house of cards that floats, unsupported, in thin air above the first house of cards, R. Gates continue the discussion and, anashamedly, draws a naked conclusion wrapped in the emperor’s magical new clothes:
R. Gates;
Studying the attractor that existed for the system in the most recent time in which CO2 levels were this high is a very valid approach, and certainly can offer insights which linear climate models do not afford.>>>
The formulaic comment now concludes with the same strategy with which it began. A conclusion that appears complimentary (and hence more sincere) refers to the original article as a “very valid approach” not, to compliment the original article however, but to confer the validity of the article upon the completely unrelated and unsupported conclusion drawn by R. Gates. This perception management trick attempts to fool the mind into connecting the endorsement by R. Gates of the article in such as manner as to make it seem that the article endorses the conclusion, when in fact the article and R. Gates entire logic train are completely unrelated.
I shall conclude on two notes:
1. The paleoclimate data has been thoroughly discredited by the leading paleoclimatologists themselves. Phil Jones and Michael Mann conspired to replace data that did not match the thermometer record (hence proving it was invalid) and got caught doing so. Keith Briffa attempted to slide in as factual a 1000 year temperature reconstruction from paleoclimate data that was 50% reliant on a single tree. The paleoclimate data rests upon the notion that a tree records annual temperature despite only growing for a few weeks per year. The paleoclimate data has zero validity, and all the pretention from R. Gates to the paleoclimate data somehow being valid because of an out of context excerpt from an article on a completely unrelated matter is nothing more than a huge, steaming, bowl of excrement that R. Gates would like to pass off as gourmet soup.
2. Readers should be aware that the techniques used by R. Gates in one comment after another are formulaic for a reason. They are, in fact, a formula. It has long been known in various studies of human psychology that there are known patterns by which information may be presented that are very persuasive despite the fact that the supporting data and logic used in the formulaic presentation are invalid, unrelated, and outright wrong. These techniques pervaid marketing and politics. We make fun of the practitioners of these techniques, calling them “snake oil salesmen” or writing humorous plays about them using such techniques to turn the mischief of a few boys into a driving need for a small town to buy wind instruments and start a band. Some practitioners of these techniques stumble upon them and learn them by rote, or are perhaps taught the techniques by an experienced practitioner. If you want to see a fine example, rent the movie “Paper Moon”, and don’t think for one second that trick with the change for a $20 they use over an over doesn’t actually work. The worst offenders in my mind are, however, those who study the psychology in detail and turn their knowledge to no good purpose. We call them shills, propogandists, “ad men”, and other terms…when we recognize them for what they are. They could not have careers doing what they do it they did not fool most of the people most of the time.
For clarity, I don’t know that R. Gates isn’t, in fact, sincere. If he isn’t, then I further don’t know if the techniques evident in his writing are there because of colossal coincidence, natural ability, learned on the job, or the result of advanced degrees in marketing and/or psychology.
But I have my suspicions.
Dr Brown, great post. Thanks.
One thought: You state “One final very important point — systems that oscillate almost always have negative feedback. In fact, that is the fundamental thing that defines an oscillatory system”.
I would add “systems that oscillate *and persist through time* almost always have negative feedback. i.e. are dynamically stable. Those with positive feedback will end in catastrophe.
I am put in mind of airplane flight dynamics. Early planes often were dynamically unstable (would not fly ‘hands off’) where oscillation would increase progressively (positive feed back) to catastrophic loss of control unless dampened by pilot input. A modern plane is designed to be dynamically stable. When trimmed it will maintain level flight by ‘hunting’ up and down around it’s equilibrium altitude by alternating negative feed backs of speed and lift without pilot input. A change in power setting results in a new equilibrium altitude.
Our climate regime has displayed dynamic stability and has persisted across the geologic record with excursions up and down ‘hunting’ for equilibrium but historically staying within the window hospitable to life. The fossil record is clear. There have been bumps in the road but life is tenacious and opportunistic. In my opinion it is clear that the sun is the independent variable that drives the system.
More CO2?…More sugar.
Your thoughts on modern aircraft are in part wrong. The Eurofighter/Typhoon is dynamically unstable and cannot be flown only by the pilot. full computer control is required at all times with pilot input. This makes the Typhoon one of the world’s most agile aircraft. Hopefully passenger aircraft are dynamically stable.
Oh yes, this was the main point of my incessant arguments with my late father, A. I. Fet, who embraced the global warming guilt trip during the last decade of his life. He would assert that the “obviously exponential” increase of CO2 in atmosphere would “inevitably” result in the destabilization of the climate system, and that the point of no return is near (therefore, we must stop burning coal and oil, making cars, etc., etc. — the rest we all know). He would also insist on direct application of Boltzmann’s black-body equation to Earth, oceanic, atmospheric and biosphere’s feedbacks be damned.
I would argue that it was strange that he, being a mathematician, wouldn’t take into account all those multiple states of stability and variance ranges possible in the system that depends on so many interacting factors, that we cannot talk about a simple linear or exponential relationship here. We frequently discussed, within this context, Lagrange attractors and Mandelbrot sets — oscillating diversity of orders evolving out of chaos over billions of years, which returns to one of the states within a wide range of states as surely as a tumbler toy, and which we, human beings, are simply unable to throw off its track (unless we blow all of our thermonuclear warheads simultaneously — and even in that case the consequences wouldn’t, probably, exceed the range of impacts already experienced by the Earth’s climate system in its past). I would name a plethora of natural disasters and impacts that exceeded anything that human beings ever did to the environment. I would also refer to Fred Hoyle and appeal to the common sense.
In vain. In the end, my father would always resort to what I would call the “Leif Svalgaard argument“: “I am a scientist, you are not. I know what I am talking about, you don’t. So shut up already!”
My father died an AGW believer, and even co-authored a Russian book on this subject, being prodded in this direction by toad-eaters and apple-polishers who surrounded him in his late years. Unsurprisingly, he never achieved anything in science since he gave himself up to the world of environmentalists, musicologists and other artsy-named mental prostitutes.
RIP.
I am sorry that your father never became convinced that AGW was political rather than a fact. As a friend of mine always said, ‘a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still’.
We skeptics must keep up the argument.