Warming Spike Predicted

A new study from the Global Carbon Project predicts the average global temperature could rise 11 degrees by 2100. Cataclysmic scenarios would unfold if this were to occur. Massive flooding of populated areas due to rising sea levels and larger, more devastating storms would wreak havoc. Scientists are viewing the results of this study as "scary" and believe we may be "locked into more warming than we thought."
Creative Commons Image : "smokestacks" by curran.kelleher on Flickr
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- 10-8-08
- Bill M's blog
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climate projection
I have a problem with coming up with accurate long term climate projects because of the following ...
If you look at the history of how chaos theory was developed, you can get a good grasp on why projecting and extrapolating long term temperature trends is an asinine task.An early pioneer of the theory was Edward Lorenz whose interest in chaos came about accidentally through his work on weather prediction in 1961. Lorenz was using a basic computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to run his weather simulation. He wanted to see a sequence of data again and to save time he started the simulation in the middle of its course. He was able to do this by entering a printout of the data corresponding to conditions in the middle of his simulation which he had calculated last time.To his surprise the weather that the machine began to predict was completely different from the weather calculated before. Lorenz tracked this down to the computer printout. The printout rounded variables off to a 3-digit number, but the computer worked with 6-digit numbers. This difference is tiny and the consensus at the time would have been that it should have had practically no effect. However Lorenz had discovered that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome.
first of all we need all of the variables that go into climate change (impossible)
then we need to know the exact initial conditions of all variables (impossible)
then we need to know how a change in one variable affects ALL of the other variables and to what extent (impossible)
furthermore, each variable has a differnt lagging effect both on other inputs and the final output itself (the observable climate change)and every little decimal point we are off in ANY of these gets further magnified by time and the extent to which we are off in the first place
Surely, what we are doing is not helping the Earth. The fact of the matter is that the Earth was warmer during the Medieval Warming Period, and other planets are undergoing strange atmospheric changes. Could there possibly be another more "big picture" origin? Another question to ask is how human contribution is changing the climate in the midst of what the naturally occuring trend is.
" If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
when I first read about chaos theory and meditated on it...
speed