Excuse me for writing a post that simply refers to someone else’s blog post, but there’s a fellow who describes himself as a “cowboy scientist” around the climate blogosphere, who has a gift for clear writing, and has attacked what I think it a very core but very difficult issue pivotal to understanding what the whole climate food fight as all about. His name is Willis Eschenbach. Remember that name.

At the highly recommended climate-weather-science blog WattsUpWithThat, Willis has a somewhat long, but very clear and insightful piece on why the “basic physics” argument used by the alarmists – the claim that  the greenhouse effect is 150 years old, and dates back to Joseph Fourier in the mid-19th century, and thus is well established and well understood (which is more-or-less true) – is a specious argument.

Please read the whole piece; it will give insight into why this is as silly as saying that rivers should be straight lines. But (spoiler alert!) here’s the final paragraph:

Final conclusion? Because climate is a flow system far from equilibrium, it is ruled by the Constructal Law. As a result, there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make any difference to the global temperature, and the Constructal Law gives us reason to think that it may make no difference at all. In any case, regardless of Arrhenius, the “simple physics” relationship between CO2 and global temperature is something that we cannot simply assume to be true.

Or put another way, the “simple physics” is a small, and likely not dominant part of a chaotic system. What he’s describing is related to the butterfly effect, which is part of chaos theory, and the reason why, for practical intents and purposes, certain things in nature aren’t deterministic, or at least in the way that we would at first blush think.

That, in addition to the fact that anyone who claims that we really understand all the factors involved is either ignorant or lying. There is much that isn’t well understood at all. Knowing how a quarter of something works isn’t likely to allow you to predict how it’s going to behave.