Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds

Tibor the Hun writes "NPR reports that Susan Solomon, one of the world's top climate scientists, finds in her new study that global warming is now irreversible. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that even if we could immediately cease our impact on pollution and greenhouse gasses emissions, global climate change would continue for more than a thousand years. The reason is the saturation of oceans with carbon dioxide. Her study looked at the consequences of long-term effect in terms of sea-level rise and drought."

Comments

Re:First post

[NeutronCowboy]

If you read some books on complexity and chaos theory you will find that chaotic systems have a high degree of unpredictability.

That's incorrect. What's difficult to predict is the evolution of the chaotic system over specific time periods. However, all chaotic systems (note that they're not random) exhibit inflexion points, attractors and other super structures that make it possible to predict future behavior patterns within a certain boundary.

That's where the difference is between weather and climate: weather is the path that a chaotic system takes over a specific time period. Climate is the general trend that a chaotic system exhibits - and those can very easily be modeled, analyzed and used to make predictions.