This doesn't make sense, it's like taking a spoon full of water from a barrel. Shouldn't affect anything.

“This doesn’t make sense. We’ve only added 200ppm of CO2 to our atmosphere. Shouldn’t affect anything.”

Systems at a roughly stable equilibrium can be surprisingly easy to shift out of that equilibrium by pushing them ever so slightly outside a local minima. Nobody right now is saying this particular situation is going to result in catastrophe, but we should exercise some caution when we are causing observable effects to the one planet we inhabit.

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ForOldHack 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The person who briefed me on the change in prediction of global climatic modeling, pushing the recovery back 75 years, also said this:

"If you are in a flying 747 flying directly at another one, then it appears as a very very tiny spec in the sky, until you get close enough to see it, and then it gets really really big, really really fast, and then you are dead."

He also said this about stable equilibrium: You can roll a glass in a circle on a table, and it can roll in a circle for a long time, but if it falls off the table, it is going to take some effort to get back to equilibrium.

We have little idea what equilibrium is, and we also have less idea about what it will take to get back to it, after leaving it.

See: "The Day After Tomorrow." (2004)

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nothrowaways 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I can bet the missiles and space rockets we launch have a higher effect to unbalance planet Earth's equilibrium.

	▲	stouset 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I accept your bet. Please contact me and we can work out the details for your payment.

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panarchy 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This doesn't make sense I only applied 0.01n of force to this balanced inverted pendulum that took a whole 1n to get into place why did it fall over?

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ceejayoz 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s 31 inches in a planet that’s about 500 million inches wide. Would you notice that proportion of a change in a standard sized barrel?

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ForOldHack 3 days ago | parent [-]

If you take a basketball, and breathe on it, the frost collected on it, is less than the thickness of the atmosphere. Many phenomenon are even less detectable, but see the prior comment about 747s.

	▲	ceejayoz 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. Or parts-per-million of polonium in tea. Our ability to perceive it is different from our ability to be affected by it.