I won't say for certain, but I suspect that ecology (terrestrial and oceanic) are
also chaotic systems — or at least extraordinarily complex and not necessarily well - modeled.
Not exact matches
It is
also a fact that if one imposes a small perturbation of some kind in a
chaotic dynamic
system, its effects on the details of a particular trajectory will not be predictable; but its effects on the averaged behavior of both regular and
chaotic trajectories will be more predictable, evident, and broadly understandable in terms of notions of stress and response.
The full U.S.
system is «doing its thing,» and the result of that decentralized, bottom - up — and sometimes
chaotic — process, which involves not only the three branches of judiciary, legislature, and executive, but
also civil society, will ultimately result in a correction of draconian policy.
Also, I note that by common usage the term «abrupt» (w.r.t. SLR) implies that «mainstream» experts would be surprised to observe such a response to AGW; nevertheless, the Earth's circulatory steams are inherently
chaotic, and chaos theory clearly demonstrates that such
systems can be subject to «strange attractors» that can increase the probability of occurrence of phenomenon towards the tail of a «fat - tailed» probability density function (PDF), such as that shown in Figure 3.
Chaotic systems are
also usually very not well understood.
Also, because of the complex, possibly
chaotic, nature of the climate
system, it may never be possible to accurately predict future climate or to estimate the impact of increased greenhouse gas concentrations.
If you take some time to learn the mathematics behind
chaotic systems you will learn that even though they are unpredictable in some ways, this is the part that is emphasised in the popular science books, they are
also highly predictable when it comes to averages.
But since the climate is dependent on chaos - driven events, such as: sunspots, solar flares, vulcanism, and the actions of humanity, it can
also (I believe) be considered a
chaotic system.
Also the behaviour of our numerical simulations of the atmosphere would continue to be affected by the problems typical of model simulations of
chaotic dynamical
systems even if we could have perfect initial conditions, write perfectly accurate evolution equations and solve them with perfect numerical schemes, just because of the limited number of significant digits used by any computer (Lorenz, 1963).
(The climatic
system is
also chaotic, but on much longer timescales.)
The first scientist who identified the climate as a
chaotic system (still deterministic, but not predictable) was Edward Lorentz —
also one of the first people to try modeling it with computers.
But there are
also similarities in that both the climate and returns on financial assets are complex,
chaotic systems about which making predictions about future events are fiendishly difficult.
I do think weather and climate clearly
chaotic (as per fact, Lorenz and the rest), but I
also think the time and effort being put into the forecasting of both suggest a lot of fine minds think useful prediction of this
chaotic system possible.
Can we not
also point out that these two states are attractors in a
chaotic - nonlinear
system?
I wouldn't ever be so bold as to propose that a completely
chaotic, and
also quite fractal
system that is earth's climate, could ever be accurately described; well in any way that was useful; which would imply some ability to predict future behavior.
A different type of uncertainty arises in
systems that are either
chaotic or not fully deterministic in nature and this
also limits our ability to project all aspects of climate change.