Entangled Histories: Climate Science and Nuclear Weapons Research

Two comments -- just to be picky. One: Read Taleb's "The Black Swan". It is basically a systematic proof that in fact most experts aren't experts, with narrow exceptions in non-complex scientific fields such as physics. In complex systems, experts in fact are rarely experts, and almost invariably claim more knowledge than time and data prove that they have/had. It's quite understandable -- in the end you can understand why many experts aren't expert.

Two, chaotic systems are often made less so by increasing a driver. In fact, many of them have narrow parametric regions where they are chaotic, and if you move any parameter out of that region the system stabilizes.

As a single example, the most violent weather tends to occur when warm fronts and cold fronts are in close proximity, when/where high pressure systems and low pressure systems collide or interact. For any given heat input, temperature differentials on the surface of the Earth actually increase cooling efficiency because outgoing power is radiated proportional to the fourth power of the temperature but only the second power of the relevant surface length scale. The more uniform the temperature, the warmer the average temperature. It is therefore entirely possible for a warming climate to have more uniform temperatures and less violent weather. It is similarly quite possible for a globally cooling climate to be setting local temperature records (concentration of heat in a comparatively small area, from which it is relatively rapidly lost) while only cooling very slightly elsewhere, and to have more violent weather when cold fronts impinge on those heated areas.

I have code and descriptions if you want to numerically study a very simple actual chaotic system (or two, or three) so that you can see for yourself that you have to drive it at just the right frequencies, amplitudes, and dampings to observe a Feigenbaum tree (period doubling into chaos) and equally rapid emergence from the chaotic regime as you increase amplitude or frequency or damping. That doesn't make this a universal truth about chaotic systems, BTW, it just points out the danger of making sweeping statements about something you don't really know much about. One could go on -- is there a proof that adding more CO_2 creates greater instability? What, exactly, is greater instability (how do you define it)? I fully agree that adding more CO_2 (e.g. taking it to 600-700 ppm by 2100) is likely to raise global temperatures by some amount (the exact amount is a matter of considerable debate even among experts with a lower bound that is just over nothing).

It is by no means clear -- and to the best of my knowledge there is no statistically sound evidence to support the conclusion that -- the warming of the late twentieth century resulted in "greater instability" in the form of more violent weather, nor has any other kind of "instability" other than the motion of the mean global temperature itself been convincingly demonstrated. It has been drier, wetter, stormier, hotter, colder, both locally and globally, in the past without CO_2 forcing.

The really interesting thing is that many climate scientists are quite open about their lack of certain knowledge in climate science -- in a scientific forum where they might be called on it if they utter something really speculative as if they are sure. A George Mason survey of actual climate scientists found that roughly one in seven think that there will be little to no warming and no catastrophe by 2100. Over half think that there will be significant, but probably not catastrophic warming. In the end, I agree with you -- this honest lack of consensus among climate scientists probably rates some consideration.

For one thing, it makes the entire field more credible. When was the last time you were in a room full of scientists who agreed about everything, even important things for which there is far better experimental data and far more computable theory

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/2xmyA5D5RlQ/entangled-histories-climate-science-and-nuclear-weapons-research

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