http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

The scenario I anticipate is increased warming, disruption of the normal Jetstream, until the influx of fresh water to the oceans disrupts the gulf-stream, and Europe experiences weather like it’s partner in latitude, Canada. That will be the new normal.

Did you see the temperatures in Alaska last week?

Take the climate over the last few hundred thousand years. It has fluctuated between glacial and interglacial states, much more so than most of the planet’s history. We can see these two conditions (ice / no ice) as attractors in the current climactic scenario. Most of the time is spent in one condition or the other, they tend to remain stable more than they change. However, if one of the controlling climactic forces changes past a certain threshold, the whole system flips to another attractor – a new normal, if you will.

So it is not the fluttering of a butterflies wings that changes things. Personally, I hate that metaphor. But the variation of one variable, in seemingly small ways, can throw the whole system to another state.

If I understand these things, and I’m not sure I’ve groked it yet, this set up of strange attractors exists in the weird space between chaos and predictability. Picture a smooth stream of water as predictable. Things are going in pretty much a straight line. Put an obstruction in the flow and you get turbulence – ripples and eddies and a decreased predictability. The eddies are the strange attractors, in a way. Plunge the flow over a cataract, and all bets are off…that’s chaos.

It has been my observation that all the really cool stuff takes place at that edge of chaos, where things are stirred in fractal ways, orbiting around strange. Life begins there. Creativity dances there.

I’ll try to remember that as I watch them dig up my basement to replace a sewer line, watch others repair the LCD screen on my brand-new computer, fix the sprinkler system, mow the yard, finish that map project, check the bee hives, brush the cat, clean the car, read that article about the origin of the Colorado Mineral Belt, call Mom, swat down the current rush of spammers on the HZ …

Edge of chaos indeed.

“I ride tandem
with the random
Things don’t run
the way I planned them…”

Peter Gabriel

I suppose we can always go back to slash-and-burn, or hunter-gatherer. Or cannibalism. Remember, the honeybee is not a natural creature, it is a domesticated animal that we have modified and adapted to our needs. There are many species of wild bees in the world, but only a few varieties of Apis mellifica pollinate our crops.

The same may be true of global warming. No doubt the earth will stabilize at some new level of equilibrium, but its unlikely we will be able to adapt fast enough to make the change. Consider a world where a great desert spreads from the Rockies to the Appalachians in just a generation, where the Sahara becomes the new breadbasket of the planet, and the glaciers reclaim Europe.

Of course, we don’t really know what will happen, or if anything, so it will be hard for us to adapt or plan for it–especially if our leaders insist that nothing is going on, that its all a hoax, or that its all somehow just in our heads.

Then again, the changes may be quite survivable, when looked at in context. We may just kill each other off fighting for water, arable land, fishing grounds, or the oil and minerals we’ll need to get through the change.

The world is always changing, what’s different this time is its changing so fast. And we tend to forget that the world got along fine without us, it will still be here long after we’re gone. The earth will take care of itself. But it doesn’t have to take care of us.

In Rapa Nui, the seafarers came in fleets of sea-going canoes. They cut down the trees to clear farmland, and when the population became too big for the island to support there were no trees left to build boats. The population fell from 15000 to 3000 in just a few years.

Some people refuse to believe that story, but the moral is true even if the history is wrong.

Wouldn’t that be true of global warming?

The butterfly effect tells us a tiny change now can result in enormous consequences later. But there is another effect that tends to counter this. Many changes have results that tend to damp out, that is, a change now will cause future changes, that tend to progressively minimize until equilibrium is reached further on down the line. Jump in a flat pool and you create waves; wait long enough and the pool becomes flat and smooth again. Perhaps the water temperature will be slightly higher, but that change will be uniformly distributed, spread out so its effects are negligible.

A major asteroid strike may wipe out the dinosaurs and totally disrupt global climate, but a meteorite hit that takes out only one dinosaur may have no long lasting effect at all, except to the dinosaur and his immediate surroundings.

Complex systems have the ability to absorb perturbations and then “relax” back into a state of equilibrium, and the induced changes diminish over time, not continue increasing over time. This effect depends on the nature of the affected system, the nature of the perturbing effect, and the period of time you are considering. Put in its simplest form: tap a cone resting on its base. A small tap causes it to tilt over, but eventually, counteracting forces cause it to fall back onto its base again as before. It recovers. But if you strike the cone hard enough, it will tip over and never recover it’s original position. If you jump into a pool hard enough, with enough weight, the water splashes out and you never go back to a state of smooth water. Complex systems can absorb change and recover, but they also can experience so much change that they exceed their ability to return to a ground state. You can bend a stick and it springs back to its original shape. If you bend it far enough, it breaks.

Our common everyday experience (and the laws of thermodynamics)tells us this is the case. Both effects occur simultaneously, and operate at different scales of time, space, energy and complexity. A Jurassic butterfly won’t necessarily cause a hurricane tomorrow, but everything that happened in the Jurassic plays a role in what is happening right now.

I once read a science fiction story where these counteracting effects were a property of space-time itself. If small events lead to big consequences, time is “curved” negatively. If they tend to damp out and return to equilibrium, then time is curved positively. We know that both these curvatures simultaneously exist, depending on the scale in space and time you are considering. But what is the overall curvature, summed up over all space and all time?

At one time, (about 50 years ago) there was some controversy about this. Most scientists tended to believe the universe was essentially static and unchanging: the steady-state theory. Oh sure, things were very busy, but if you looked at a large enough area over a long enough time, the distribution of matter and energy and the organization of the galaxies and the proportions of the elements would always be about the same. Today, science tends to believe the universe is evolving. It had a beginning, it has morphed into its present configuration, and it will eventually disperse into a thin soup of near-vacuum and radiation at constant temperature. Big Bang, cosmos, and heat death. I.e., it will go from singularity, to infinity, to nothingness; birth, life, oblivion. Sort of like us.