Comment Re:Right, just past the mini-ice age.... (Score 1) 1044
I personally do not care WHY the climate is changing.
I DO care that it not only is apparent that it IS changing, but that the rate of change has been masked by reduced solar insolation in the past few decades
I also care that, like most systems, chaotic interactions can, have and will cause major undesirable changes over extremely short time periods--i.e. we can expect the temperature to change slowly until it becomes warm/cool enough to trigger some key event--whereupon it will change at extremely higher rates.
The down shot is that politicians (and the general public) have no understanding of chaos theory--despite their empirical knowledge of this kind of event(i.e. earthquakes, tsunami, etc.) Thus, everyone is willing to assume that such changes will occur on some sort of smooth function, when in fact it is much more likely that massive change will happen with a discontinuity.
This is, at least politically and emotionally, related to the existence of extinction level events in the geological record.
While there are arguments about the major events (i.e. asteroid? Volcanic activity? Whatever?) There is no argument that such events DO HAPPEN at semi-regular intervals, and that major changes in the ecology, i.e. die-offs, happen every few million years.
Do you really care if you die because of an asteroid impact or because the temperature got too high to support your ecosystem? Last time I looked, dead is dead.
I DO care that it not only is apparent that it IS changing, but that the rate of change has been masked by reduced solar insolation in the past few decades
I also care that, like most systems, chaotic interactions can, have and will cause major undesirable changes over extremely short time periods--i.e. we can expect the temperature to change slowly until it becomes warm/cool enough to trigger some key event--whereupon it will change at extremely higher rates.
The down shot is that politicians (and the general public) have no understanding of chaos theory--despite their empirical knowledge of this kind of event(i.e. earthquakes, tsunami, etc.) Thus, everyone is willing to assume that such changes will occur on some sort of smooth function, when in fact it is much more likely that massive change will happen with a discontinuity.
This is, at least politically and emotionally, related to the existence of extinction level events in the geological record.
While there are arguments about the major events (i.e. asteroid? Volcanic activity? Whatever?) There is no argument that such events DO HAPPEN at semi-regular intervals, and that major changes in the ecology, i.e. die-offs, happen every few million years.
Do you really care if you die because of an asteroid impact or because the temperature got too high to support your ecosystem? Last time I looked, dead is dead.
