Physicists Warn Earth Could Feasibly Descend Into Chaos

TokenBoomer@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 131 points –
Physicists Warn Earth Could Feasibly Descend Into Chaos
sciencealert.com

ScienceAlert.com

25

Skimming through the cited paper, it looks like their conclusion is based less on a detailed model of the climate as much as a general property of dynamical systems and how plausible it is that current climate processes could result in a chaotic state.

What I’d like to see is if the more detailed models used in most climate forecasts are able to capture the sort of dynamics they describe. (Not predicting the outcome, obviously, but maybe predicting the circumstances in which a transition to a chaotic regime could occur.)

We could feasibly blink out of existence in one quantum fluctuation, so I just try to enjoy this life while I can.

What if we're already living inside a false vacuum decay? We're only the result of a random arrangement of matter in an infinite amount of time. It's similar to the infinite monkey theorem right?

Vague doomerism

Actually, no.

The science is quite precise, if largely theoretical. Neither the article nor the study it is based on are doomerism. If you'd read it you would have found the following paragraph:

Their results showed that we're not necessarily headed for certain climate doom. We might follow quite a regular and predictable trajectory, the endpoint of which is a climate stabilization at a higher average temperature point than what we have now.

Basically they are saying "this new method (which is a very macroscale perspective) does not predict a stabilization at preindustrial climate given the amount of change the system already has experienced. Also if we really want to we can probably kick earth into a runaway greenhouse system".

They do not claim that we are already at that point nor that we will inevitably cross it. Only that it is possible for us to do it.

Thanks for the gist.

but it's not helpful that they just: 'so you're saying there's a chance!?'

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I prefer my doomerism to be vague.

Precise doomerism is just too depressing.

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And that's new/news exactly....how? And Why? I mean, that's been what the tipping points have been all about. Earth could end up like Mars, like Venus or some entirely different planet we haven't found yet. It could swing wildly from Mars to Venus as well... Chaos is all but a lazy definition of various states in this context. The Probabilities for that are also quite low, iMHO.

Your humble opinion being based on... what, exactly?

The rest of us aren't too smug to read the article and take interest in it

Is this a real person you’re responding to? I swear these are some AI chat bot amalgamations. I refuse to believe that a large group of people think this way.