Thread: Eaarth
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Old 01-06-2011, 10:37 AM   #385 (permalink)
sid
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Quote:
Having it both ways ? Hmmm.
Yes, possibly.

I'm an electronics engineer whose specialty is control systems. An underdamped control loop that is on the verge of going totally out of control often starts exhibiting wild oscillations that get more and more extreme before the loop finally goes completely out of control. With some loops, the system will always go hard over in one particular direction when they finally lose it. But other loops could end up in either extreme.

The earth's climate is a control loop. The repetitive cycle of ice age/warm spell looks curiously to me like an underdamped control loop with a relatively long (compared to our lifespans) time constant. We could be altering the conditions enough with our behavior to dramatically reduce this time constant or to bias this loop hard in one particular direction. My experience with borderline stable loops that are already ringing is that it often takes surprisingly little to push them completely unstable.

In other words, I would not be surprised if the climate went permanently (relative to our lifespans) extremely hot OR extremely cold in a matter of decades and that we shouldn't be tempting fate with a system we little understand and may already have been borderline stable before we started mucking with it.
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