Stephen: >> <...> Rick, you're of the opinion that things have gotten hotter <...>
Please insert "may" (have gotten hotter), since it seems to be a trend, although trends in complex dynamical systems are notoriously untrustworthy. Jed: The planet's weather is less complex than a bacterium? Funny you should mention that. There are more kinds of bacteria than all other animal and plant species combined by a factor of perhaps some hundreds of millions. Yes I wrote factor, as in multiples of. They are by some incredibly vast margin the largest biomass there is. And those bugs behave in ways that are not known or understood. They affect the climate. They sculpt and alter the makeup of the surface, ocean, and atmosphere of the entire planet, changing everything alive and not. (I wasn't going to mention it, but in addition: "for every bacteria, there's a phage" - interacting with all those bacterial hosts, and on and on it goes.) Some climate models use cows, sheep, etc. because of the gasses their bacteria make. If we were all vegetarians, greenhouse gasses would be reduced. Maybe - I'm a veg-o so I do my part. <g> But that's such a trivial portion of the bacterial load in the earth and oceans, and those others also interact with and process all sorts of chemicals and things connected to other significant processes. There must be astronomical numbers of possible reactions between and among them and their inputs and outputs that can cause one thing or another to cross some tipping point and all of a sudden our atmosphere is made of cyanide or something, or is frozen solid or evaporated into space. Apparently it happened before and it's why we have grown to like oxygen. Did someone program all that into their models? You think science *could ever* understand or make useful predictive models in that range? Really? And bacterial interaction, immensely complicated as it is, is just *one* (albeit significant) variable parameter in the enormous climate mix! There's one thing of which I am absolutely certain when it comes to interpreting a system this complex: from all starting points save perhaps overwhelming total runaway conditions, only a god could comprehend and predict what would be likely to happen. And they would have to be a very big and important god at that. Al Gore is kinda big, but he's no god. Despite all that, I think there is yet another way we might get better clues about how this single planetary climate system might evolve. Hint: Kepler's a good start. - R.
