Global warming. It's not worth the risk

The effects of global warming and how long it will take is generally misunderstood. Global warming is not the real problem. The climate of the world has been changing since it came into being. Temperatures go up, temperatures go down. Ice comes and goes. Life on the planet adapts.

We might have to relocate because of changing conditions and the world's population may decrease with time, but if that was all there is to it then things won't be too bad. The real problem is that the world weather system is chaotic and transitive, and could flip to a completely different pattern that would make human life on this planet impossible. To explain this and the possible consequences of ignoring global warming I will go through it step at a time.

Chaos

Chaos has always existed, but our modern understanding of chaos began with Edward Lorenz in 1961. Lorenz was studying weather patterns on a primitive computer. The idea was that Newtonian determinism said that everything has a cause and effect so if we could feed into a computer all the present data about the weather (the cause) together with the formulae for the dynamics of the system the computer could model the effects for years to come. The computer program was run continuously and Lorenz’s colleagues used to bet on the next day’s weather according to his machine.

Lorenz wanted to look at a particular sequence of weather predicted by the computer and because of the slowness and awkwardness of computing in 1961 he decided to enter the data immediately before the sequence and run a new sequence rather than run the whole program from the beginning. To save time he only entered the data to 3 decimal points instead of the six decimal points that the computer worked to. So 0.2658352 would become 0.266. This was in line with the thinking of the day that minor variations would dampen out with time.

But although the weather patterns started the same, before long the patterns began to drift from the original weather patterns of the original computer run. Soon the predictions looked nothing like the original predictions.

The effect of a very small deviation was that it expanded to become totally unpredictable and this is what we call chaos theory today. Chaos theory started with trying to predict the weather and so it is not surprising that it is often explained in terms of the weather, or the Butterfly effect. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause a cyclone on the other side of the world. It was originally a seagull that flapped it wings in Argentina that caused a storm in New York, but a butterfly on the other side of the world sounds better.

At the time Lorenz was working on his program many billions of dollars where being spent on trying to predict and control the weather. The assumption was that if we had enough data we could predict the weather forever, and that we could give it a little “nudge” now and then to make it rain when we wanted it to, make it sunny when we wanted sun and so on.

This was not all for the benefit of mankind. It was seen in some circles as being a very powerful military weapon. Whoever controlled the weather controlled the battle, and whoever controlled the weather controlled the world’s economy.

The guru of weather control was John Von Neumann. Von Neumann built an early computer and thought that the machine would give all the answers needed to make little adjustments, such as cloud seeding, to give us control over nature. By the 1980’s Von Neumann’s bureaucracy had super computers continuously churning through models that had over 500,000 equations, but still could not get past two to three days of predictions with any accuracy.

Von Neumann worked on the old mathematical theory that any minor discrepancies would settle down and disappear.

Lorenz saw it differently. Yes, you could change the weather. You could make it do something different from what it would otherwise have done. But if you did, you would never know what to would have otherwise have done. It would be like giving an extra shuffle to an already well-shuffled pack of cards. You know it will change your luck, but you don’t know whether for better or worse. Gleick, James. Chaos, Vintage. Sydney 1998.

There are two important properties to chaos theory. The first is that the smallest of events will have a profound effect on the overall system, and second, no-matter how much data a scientist or financial advisor has they are as powerless as you and I in predicting the weather next Tuesday or if the stock market will rise or fall tomorrow.

The Butterfly effect has a technical name. It is “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” This does not mean the system is chaotic in the usual sense of the word, it means that the system cannot be predicted because we would have to do every calculation with perfect information continuously. Each calculation depends on the calculation before so there are no short cuts. Even the slightest variation will change the course of the system.

This means that every little we do will have an effect on the future, and there is no way of predicting how.

Dreams about controlling the weather have long since gone. The seven-day forecast on the television is at best a wild guess. But there is a glimmer of hope in all this chaos. The hope lies within the form of the Lorenz attractor.

The Lorenz attractor shown plots the 3D position of point over time for a stream of chaotic data. A 2D representation is shown above, and it shows also why butterflies are so popular in chaos theory.

It is total chaos. Nothing is predictable and nothing ever repeats, but is does stay within certain limits and seems to move according to an attractor (or two) of some sort. If you go onto the internet you will find any number of Lorenz attractor generators. Some you can change the input and see how the chaos changes. I have one as a screen saver. I watch it for hours when I should be working. It produces very beautiful patterns.

An attractor in the sense used is a point that the data tends towards. The Data in a non-chaotic system would tend towards a point and then stop there. A pendulum will swing backwards and forwards in decreasing arcs until it stops in the vertical position, attracted by gravity. The length and timing of each arch is predictable down to the point where motion ceases.

But in the chaotic system nothing is predictable except by inspection it does seem to be kept within certain limits by unseen attractors.

One way of looking at attractors is a system’s natural state. In a non-chaotic system the system will reach and stabilise at the attractor in a predictable manner. In a chaotic system the system will never reach a closed state at the attractor and will never be predictable.

We cannot predict the weather seven days in advance, but we do have some idea that it should stay within certain limits over a longer time span even if never repeats exactly. It will stay within these limits unless the attractor is changed by an overall change in the conditions of the system. We have the conditions for spring, summer, autumn and winter within general limits unless we do something to change the overall conditions, like pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

If we keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere the weather could flip to another set of rules. That is the transitive nature of our chaotic weather pattern.

Transitive systems

A transitive system is a system that can work with different sets of rule, but not at the same time. An example of a chaotic transitive system is the human heart. Even though there is a pattern no heartbeat is exactly the same as the last. There is always a slight variation based in part on the heartbeat that went before. This is a perfect example of chaos not being chaotic.

Sometimes the heart can flip to a fibrillation cycle. A fibrillation cycle is where the heart beats very rapidly but does not pump blood. Sometimes it happens for medical reasons, and sometimes for no definable reason. The heart can be kicked back into a “normal” beat with an electric defibrillation device. If not, the patient dies.

Has anyone not seen a medical drama where the doctors crowd around a patient lying on an operating table? Someone shouts “clear” and the patient bounces up and down on the table because he/she has been given a rather large electric shock. That is a defibrillation machine at work.

Our weather system seems to have flipped cycles more than once, and there is nothing to say it won't do it again.

Carbon absorption cycle

If our weather system does do the metrological equivalent of fibrillating what will it be like? We don't know, but we can look at what the earth must have been like when fossil fuels where formed. This is also difficult because there are several theories about how fossil fuels where formed, but they come from fossils somehow. This was a carbon absorption cycle.

The favorite, and most likely, begins with oxygen depleted seas with dead creatures sinking to the bottom. No oxygen means acid. So we would begin with still, stagnant seas devoid of life. There have been recent occurrences where normal seas currents have stopped flowing for short periods. If they stop completely and become still and stagnant we would be in real trouble.

The poles have a major influence on keeping the oceans aerated so if the currents stop flowing aerated seas from the poles would not spread oxygen through the sea systems. That would mean acid seas, sea life dying and sinking to the bottom of the seas to begin their transition into oil.

That would also mean that when it rained it would rain acid. The follow on to that would be no fresh water. We must have fresh water to survive. Desalination would not be any good, that only removes salt. This new world is beginning to look like a very unhealthy place to live.

To reach the stage I have described so far would take one event and one event only: the ocean currents to stop flowing. That is a real possibility with what we know about the effects of global warming. Melting ice caps take away the mechanics that cause seas to flow to the poles, sink to the bottom, and then flow out again on the bottom to rise at the equator.

Our atmosphere does the opposite. It flows to the poles at high level, sinks and flow outwards as winds at low level, to rise again at the equator. It the winds stop blowing and the seas stop moving we can say good bye to the weather system as we know it. Our chaotic weather system will flip to another chaotic system that is unlikely to be conducive to human life. We could all end up as a barrel of oil.

Economic factors

The events I have described may not happen. The weather system may not flip over to a dead sea system. In which case there will be an economic cost in avoiding an event that was not going to happen anyway. The up side to that is that we will all live in a cleaner healthier world and we will never know if it would have happened or not. If it does flip it will not take years, it will happen as an event.

If we do nothing and the weather patterns do flip over the economic factors will not matter because there will not be an economy. If any of us do survive we will not be worrying about the stock market.

It comes down to risk management. What is the risk against the cost? My vote is that the risks are far too high to worry about the cost, and that the number one economic goal throughout the world should be to combat global warming and make this a clean and healthy planet. The weather system may not flip over to another system, but we need to make certain it doesn’t.