Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (7714)	11/26/2006 8:53:20 PM
From: A.J. Mullen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12246

Hi MAurice, Sorry for not responding earlier, and this one must be short too. (Edit: I wrote that yesterday. This hasn't been short!) I agree that it's easy for the media to find an "expert" who will get his/her 15 minutes of fame by attributing any change to "The Greenhouse Effect." Often that "expert" might know no more about climate theory than you or me. That's no reason to decide that it's all bunk. Or to argue that icebergs show a coming iceage. It just adds FUD. (Was that the term used for the GSM protagonists?) Supposedly, [according to both you and me] we have reduced the prospect of another ice-up. With that I disagree, but I very much agree that the climate is not in equilibrium. I used the term as short-hand and regret it. My sense of the climate is that, as a complex and possibly chaotic dynamical system, it ranges around in state-space. Theoretically, one might be able predict everything for evermore, but it's impracticable. With just the atmospheric weather, we know we are pretty good at predicting tomorrow's weather, not so good at the day after's and so on. Errors in our models grow larger exponentially with time. With a different degree of precision though, we can predict what next summer or winter will be like in New Zealand and California from experience and recent records. We also know from the studies of geologists, paleontoligists, ice-cores, etc., that climates have been different at different times. I suggest that those other climates are times when the dynamical system that is the ocean and atmosphere's weather system is knocking around within a different part of state-space. The regions are not closed. It's possible and therefore inevitable that the trajectory that is the Earth's climate will eventually slip from one region to the other without any external agent forcing it. An asteroid can change the climate by giving the system a big knock, almost instantaneously sending everything out of wack. After such jolt, the climate might settle down just a few years after all the dust settles, still the summers and winters might be different than before. By enhancing greenhouse gases, we're exerting asteady pressure in one direction, but if the climate is so complex, it might run-off in a direction different from where we are pushing. If you push a gyro in one direction, it reacts by moving at ninety degrees to the direction of your pressure. Thus I don't know that by enhancing the greenhouse effect, we're decreasing the chances of an ice-age. It's a huge experiment. Exciting.