3 ms·
Yes, that's all true. But I've also never heard a plausible argument against the simple observation that if I kick a football it will accelerate away from me.
by gd1 12y ago
Yes, that's all true. But I've also never heard a plausible argument against the simple observation that if I kick a football it will accelerate away from me. F=ma and all that... Unless I'm standing at the bottom of a hill, in which case it will roll straight back to my feet. See, the wider system may be more complex, and have negative feedbacks that overwhelm any perturbation you introduce. The onus is on the climate scientists to show that the system as a whole will behave as they've predicted, which is a great deal trickier than your simple observation... since it's just about the most complex system imaginable. I model for a living, and I'd dead-set rather model the human brain than the climate of our entire planet. At least you've got 6 billion of those to gather data on. Or experiment on. They've got one.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoIf you kick a football it will accelerate away from you, but only while you are kicking it and it does that in both cases. And if you have got as far as F=ma then you will presumably be bright enough to apply it to gravity and the shape and material of any hill as well as the action of your foot. Besides, the people who are saying that the system is too complex to make a prediction are not saying that there will be no effect. There is an increase in the energy going into this system and saying that things are so complex that we should bet on there being no effect is not saying that there is no global effect, but that there is a global effect that more or less exactly counterbalances the initial effect and that to me sounds like wishful thinking from the viewpoint that nature is somehow magically in balance.