Hi combjelly; Re: "Then you can explain strange attractors and what happens when a chaotic system moves from one strange attractor to another to i-node.";
Strange attractor and chaos theory was a big hit for a few years back in the 70s but it went out of favor soon after. Nothing very useful ever came out of it. It's hilarious to see you old fossils nattering about it as if you were current in mathematics or anything else, LOL.
But as long as we're going to discuss the attractors of the climate system, that's easy enough to see from the geological record. There's a glacial state that's really really cold and there's the interglacial we're in now. The fear of the alarmists is that there's some other state, one that is extra hot, but there's no evidence from the geological record that such a state exists (at least with the present configuration of the continents and orbit, etc.). And anyone who understand chaos theory will have real doubts that one does exist. All indications are that the transitions are between glacial and interglacial. Since we're currently in an interglacial, the risk is a sudden transition to colder temperatures.
The mistake the climate scientsits are making is the same as one that was made in early elementary particle physics experiments. What they need to do is to (a) obtain a very long climate series, and (b) divide the series up into two parts; use the first part to tune their model, and then check how well it tuned by using the second part. And (c) they need to recognize that if you iterate this process with random number generators, eventually you'll get a model that matches both parts of your data. That doesn't mean you've got a useful climate model, it just means that you finally got lucky with the old data. But what they're doing instead is publishing their model results without also including the number of attempts that were made before their one that was "good". (I've read their papers, they do not discuss this, and I can tell you for sure that they didn't match the data on their first attempt.) This is one of the reasons why elementary particle folks like to get 5 sigma data before they announce a new particle has been "found". That's accuracy far beyond what any climate group is attempting. Hey, it's not like there is still a debate over how accurate climate modeling is. Nature *proved* that their models were garbage. This is why the debate is over.
If you analyze a sufficient amount of data from a chaotic system, you can eventually work out the differential equations that describe the motion. You just have to wait for the thing to fill up phase space, LOL. After you've done that you might, if you're very smart and very lucky, be able to figure out the relationships between the variables and the system. The reason you can't do this with climate is that there are too many input variables. Not just the sun but orbital parameters, present state of the planet, etc. You'd need a hundred million years of data, along with the series for the various things that contribute to it. You can't even get data for a single spot on the earth, as far as its climate history over the last hundred million years. There are too many external influences that drive the behavior but even if the sun were stable, etc., the climate itself is chaotic. Instead, you have to simulate it from first principles and you will know when they have first principles simulation working because they'll start issuing predictions for next year's weather.
-- Carl |
