3 ms·

At first I shared your frustration, but I glanced at the paper and it looks to me (as a layman) as though the authors did their homework. It was published in Na

At first I shared your frustration, but I glanced at the paper and it looks to me (as a layman) as though the authors did their homework. It was published in Nature after all. Here's a high level intuitive argument: Imagine that lots of important parameters about the Earth's climate and ecosystems could be modeled using a bunch of differential equations. Right now, due to humans, our current state is deep in historically unexplored territory. To be safe, it makes sense to try to modify all the parameters we can back to where they were in case weird stuff happens in the unexplored territory.

scarmig 14y ago
It's also important to note that this is a review article: it's an attempt to distill an opinionated consensus in the field, not to fully flesh out the models and provide all the empirical evidence. For that, the reader should check the copious end notes.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Just because they have plenty of notes doesn't mean that they've come up with something worthwhile. Their "theory" is nothing more substantive than New Age mysticism. They talk about states, state shifts, and forcings but do not fully describe any of them except at the most superficial levels. They put forward no tests (quantitative or qualitative) to determine the boundaries of a state or to test whether a "state shift" has occurred. That is a flaw at the very lowest level of their "theory". On top of that they build many fanciful constructs which have even less basis in the scientific method. I've commented on this before, but it bears repeating. Here is "Figure 2" from the article: http://i.imgur.com/Zi3uB.png http://i.imgur.com/Zi3uB.png. Neither axis is meaningful, they both lack a definition for what is being measured, let alone how, let alone how to sort it, even qualitatively. This is junk. It's no better than a diagram with "mood" on the y-axis and "emotional energy" on the x-axis, it's utterly, utterly meaningless.

scarmig 14y ago

It's also important to note that this is a review article: it's an attempt to distill an opinionated consensus in the field, not to fully flesh out the models and provide all the empirical evidence. For that, the reader should check the copious end notes.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Just because they have plenty of notes doesn't mean that they've come up with something worthwhile. Their "theory" is nothing more substantive than New Age mysticism. They talk about states, state shifts, and forcings but do not fully describe any of them except at the most superficial levels. They put forward no tests (quantitative or qualitative) to determine the boundaries of a state or to test whether a "state shift" has occurred. That is a flaw at the very lowest level of their "theory". On top of that they build many fanciful constructs which have even less basis in the scientific method. I've commented on this before, but it bears repeating. Here is "Figure 2" from the article: http://i.imgur.com/Zi3uB.png http://i.imgur.com/Zi3uB.png. Neither axis is meaningful, they both lack a definition for what is being measured, let alone how, let alone how to sort it, even qualitatively. This is junk. It's no better than a diagram with "mood" on the y-axis and "emotional energy" on the x-axis, it's utterly, utterly meaningless.