Josh weighs in on this story, writing:
What is it with the new measuring climate in terms of money? Just bizarre.
As Carl Sagan* might say, “billions and billions”.
* Carl Sagan didn’t actually use that term but it is universally attributed to him due to how he often used the word “billions” in the 1980’s TV series “Cosmos”.
It’s Zillions now
Sagan’s thesis in his last book “Billions and Billions” (1997) was that despite any conceivable scientific-technological advances a detailed catalog of cosmic objects would be “defeated by (sheer) number.”
Spread over near 10-million light-years our Milky Way’s “Local Group” of some 54 galaxies is but a part of the Virgo Supercluster centered 65-million LYs off in a great galaxy roughly 3 – 5 times our size, comprising three trillion stars plus many tens-of-million enormous globular clusters. At 110-million LYs, the diameter of this “local supercluster” of some 100 galaxy-groups and sub-clusters is less than one ten-thousandth of the cosmic radius.
On this scale, what “weather” on what basis governs a 12.5-billion LY “climate”? Yet as a complex dynamic system, Earth’s prevailing climate patterns (sic) are precisely analogous to those (if any: See Edward Lorenz) of the cosmos as a whole. Number aside, this system’s chaotic/fractal nature renders meaningless any extrapolation
whatsoever.