Is it me, or is it getting hot in here?

In today’s Western culture we tend to lock on to catch phrases that can give us a comfortable frame of reference. Global Warming is indeed a catch phrase and a phenomenon related to the fact that the average temperature of the Earth is increasing. The past one hundred years have seen a tremendous warming trend. See the following link for some good data (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/) . The threat, however, does not lie specifically in the fact the Earth’s temperature will become too hot for human life. Our planet’s atmosphere is a nonlinear dynamical system that is primarily driven by the sun, and the Earth’s movement in reference to the sun. A dynamical system is one that is constantly changing, hence the word ‘dynamic’. There are periodic swings that occur. For example, regions of the earth reach cold temperatures in the winter, to very warm temperatures in the summer. In the same manner we can look at temperature changes on a daily basis, which may swing from cool in the evenings to hot in the mid-days. These cycles repeat with some variation, yet with periodic regularity. Even when you look at Earth temperatures over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, you see the same periodicity evident. Physicists and mathematicians have studied phenomena like this called chaos. As a matter of fact, one of the first people to study chaotic behavior was a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz. In an attempt to mathematically predict the weather, he ended up showing that even the simplest chaotic systems lose predictability after a short time. He never was able to predict the weather for very long in the future. Apparently, that is still the case. I will admit that my doctoral work involved the study of chaotic phenomena. Therefore, I do tend to look at things with this eye.

What’s the point here? Well, driven chaotic systems have ‘states’ that their behavior occupies. A current state for your region of the world may be a very hot summer of a few months with peak temperatures at about 100 degrees, a short, cool, fall, then a long harsh winter with lows near or below zero, followed by a mild beautiful spring. If this is what you have lived with for several years then that is the state that your weather system is residing in, at the moment. One of the most studied, and identifiable characteristic of a chaotic system is sensitivity to small changes. This has been called the butterfly effect. There is an enormous amount of literature on this subject. Three books I would suggest are, Chaos: The Making of A New Science by James Gleick, Chaotic Vibrations, by Francis Moon, and Chaos in Dynamical Systems by Edward Ott. The states of a chaotic system can be changed by changes to the elements of the system itself.

Everything within our atmosphere is a part of this dynamical system we call our weather. Everything we do or don’t do can have an effect over the long term. The debate rages whether the changes to our climate a coming as a consequence of what we as human beings are doing, or is it naturally occurring. This matters because we can modify our behavior if it that modification will have a positive effect. The problem is that we don’t know enough about our climate system to be able to predict with certainty what our actions will or won’t do. What we do not want to happen is for our climate to change state. It has happened in times past. One such change is called an ice age. According to data from the Illinois State museum (http://www.museum.state.il.us), over the past 750,000 years, the Earth has had an ice age every 100,000 years or so. It is therefore possible that we may be heading for a change of state regardless of what we do. If that state is one that will not sustain life, there will be nothing we can do.

Global climate change is an extinction level threat (ELT) without a doubt. However, I would like to re-iterate here that the purpose of this blog is not to frighten, but to motivate. There are some potential global problems that may be outside of our capability to solve. What are we doing to make sure that the human race continues to thrive 100, 500, or even 1,000 years from now? No cosmic law says that a planet must sustain an intelligent species indefinitely. My position, as it will always be in these discussions, is that we, as a species, should be expanding outward to the stars. Earth colonies should be springing up first in orbit, then on the moon, then in our solar system, then beyond. I believe the technology necessary to do these things will make itself available as we push forward. Who could have imagined the things that we are accomplishing technologically now, just a hundred years ago?


Next time: ELT #2 – Global Pandemic