Lovelock isn't, in fact, a qualified scientist at all; I have done some studies of the Gaia theory and all is rather arbitrary and poetic and full of sound-bites largely based on things he'd been growing in his garden shed. not that we should dismiss his theories on the grounds thatthey are almost wholly philosophical; and he is not a professional hype-artist in the slightest. but maybe it should cause less hair-tairing panic.
That was rather the impression I'd gathered re the Gaia hypothesis, though it's news to me that Lovelock isn't actually a scientist.
The basic trouble is that the ecosphere is a massive nonlinear chaotic feedback system, which is to say that predicting its behaviour is a very complex example of the hardest type of problem there is. It could be self-healing like an organism (another example of a complex feedback system), or not. Or somewhere in between. In general, we know bugger all about the behaviour of such systems, and their nature is that numerical modelling is of strictly limited use - tiny discrepancies between the model and reality quickly blow up in short order to become huge errors in predictions. Butterflies' wings and all that jazz.
* I may be using the word "chaotic" incorrectly here.
Comments 3
not that we should dismiss his theories on the grounds thatthey are almost wholly philosophical; and he is not a professional hype-artist in the slightest. but maybe it should cause less hair-tairing panic.
Reply
x
Reply
The basic trouble is that the ecosphere is a massive nonlinear chaotic feedback system, which is to say that predicting its behaviour is a very complex example of the hardest type of problem there is. It could be self-healing like an organism (another example of a complex feedback system), or not. Or somewhere in between. In general, we know bugger all about the behaviour of such systems, and their nature is that numerical modelling is of strictly limited use - tiny discrepancies between the model and reality quickly blow up in short order to become huge errors in predictions. Butterflies' wings and all that jazz.
* I may be using the word "chaotic" incorrectly here.
Reply
Leave a comment