"Togless" wrote in message
...
"Alan Murphy" wrote:

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The work of Lorenz on the
chaotic nature of weather was to suggest that very small
changes in the initial conditions of a chaotic system could cause
huge and unpredictable variations on the final outcome. Amazing
that his work has fallen out of fashion so quickly :-)

I think perhaps we're getting mixed up here between weather and climate
(I know that's a bit of a cliché now). When Krakatoa and to a lesser
extent, Pinatubo, had a detectable cooling effect on the planet for
several years, that was a change in climate (albeit relatively
short-lived).

The work of Lorenz you refer to is probably more to do with the chaotic
nature of day-to-day weather, popularised by the term 'butterfly effect'.
On the basis of the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions that you
mentioned, a nuclear explosion in one part of the world could conceivably
result in a storm somewhere else that wouldn't otherwise have happened,
but that's still just weather.

I'm not sure that long-term climate is chaotic in the same kind of way -
I think it's more deterministic, which is why scientists can make
projections of climate climate 50 or 100 years away, but weather
forecasts are limited to a few days. The beat of a butterfly's wing
might change the weather but it won't change the climate.

That's how I understand it, anyway.
I was very careful not to mention climate in my
posts - only weather!

Alan