On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 21:06:28 UTC, Weatherlawyer wrote:
On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 20:05:04 UTC, Bernard Burton wrote: Chaotic systems can suddenly change dramatically as a result of a very modest initial perturbation, and the atmosphere is, without doubt, being perturbed.

Surely the fact that systems are chaotic demonstrates the absurdity of climate models? Or is the hockey stick idiocy non linear? Pile in men, let's get them while they are on their own hook.

There is such a thing as bounded chaos and it is a well-known mathematical concept. The solar system is an example. The orbits of the planets could be anywhere within a fairly well-defined volume of space given long enough, but the planets will not escape neither will their orbits intersect.

The atmosphere is chaotic on various time-scales and to differing degrees and the value of climate models is to predict a shifting mean around which the normal chaos takes place. The atmosphere, though chaotic, will always have an "attractor", maybe more than one, and it is the purpose of climate models to try and forecast where this will be.

Tudor Hughes, Warlingham, Surrey.