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Originally Posted by Wookie
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I'm not sure what he is trying get at. If he is implying that system complexity isn't considered by scientists when researching global climate change, then he is mistaken. If anything, people who look at individual years or days in isolation when it's cold and use that to try and disprove global warming are the ones who don't consider system complexity.
Even with system complexity, cycles are still predictable. Chrichton acknowledges this with his Yellowstone Park ecosystem management example. He notes that observations of biological abundance were misinformed because people back then did not understand the natural cycles of ecosystems.... I don't dispute that.
But to use Chrichton's own examples; the same cycles are easily disrupted from man-made interruptions. If you kill off a particular species, then other species will be affected due to the same system complexity, it doesn't matter if it is natural or not. Climate patterns are very similar... if you change a particular function of the environment, predictable changes in the patterns can be noticed. If you add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, it adds to the Earth's natural greenhouse effect, just like if you add more biological life to an ecosystem (like in Chrichton's Yellowstone example), you change its properties. If anything, system complexity theory works in favour of global climate change science...
I agree with Chrichton when it comes to ecosystem management. People see fewer deer in some years and right away think the ecosystem is collapsing because they don't understand the complexity, but I don't think his example is applies to climate change very well.