I don’t know much about climate change and I don’t have a position on it, except to say that we should tread carefully. But I do find two points interesting:
First, climate scientists are in the unusual position of arguing that while short-term phenomena (weather) are highly chaotic (butterfly effect), long-term phenomena (climate) are relatively stable (or at least can be modeled). This is the opposite of most other environments when we discuss the future. It is usually acknowledged that bigger and longer-term projects have much higher uncertainty in their schedules compared to short-term projects. In the markets, even with the “Central Limit Theorem,” participants are careful about the really long-term future and will readily agree that short-term market behavior is better grasped than long-term behavior. I’ve never seen anybody actually address why weather-climate uncertainty is switched relative to other systems.
Second, there is talk about “runaway global warming.” The model states that melting polar ice will release even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which drive temperatures even higher, melting more ice… and the cycle repeats. This model is invoking a positive feedback loop that will result in very high temperatures. A small change causes a relatively large state change in the climate. But this is pretty close to the definition of a chaotic system which cannot be modeled. It seems to me that climate can either be modeled (non-chaotic) or have large state-changes resulting from small perturbations (chaotic), not both.
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