Apologies if you know all this. It just wasn’t clear to me if you did from your comment, and I thought I might spell it out since it might be valuable to someone reading the thread.
I did know this, but thanks for spelling it out! One of the troubles with making short comments on this is that it doesn’t work, and adding detail can be problematic if you add details in the wrong order. Your description is much better at getting the order of details right than my description has been.
I will point out also that my non-expert understanding is that some suspect that the attractor dynamics are themselves chaotic, because it looks like it’s determined by a huge number of positive and negative feedback loops whose strength is dependent on the state of the system in possibly non-obvious ways. My impression is that informed people are optimistic or pessimistic about climate change based on whether the feedback loops that they think about are on net positive or negative. (As extremes, consider people who reason by analogy from Venus representing the positive feedback loop view and people who think geoengineering will be sufficient to avoid disaster representing the negative feedback loop view.)
I did know this, but thanks for spelling it out! One of the troubles with making short comments on this is that it doesn’t work, and adding detail can be problematic if you add details in the wrong order. Your description is much better at getting the order of details right than my description has been.
I will point out also that my non-expert understanding is that some suspect that the attractor dynamics are themselves chaotic, because it looks like it’s determined by a huge number of positive and negative feedback loops whose strength is dependent on the state of the system in possibly non-obvious ways. My impression is that informed people are optimistic or pessimistic about climate change based on whether the feedback loops that they think about are on net positive or negative. (As extremes, consider people who reason by analogy from Venus representing the positive feedback loop view and people who think geoengineering will be sufficient to avoid disaster representing the negative feedback loop view.)