The Atlantic's Undecided State of Affairs

摘要

The vast scientific topic of climate change embraces many different time scales, ranging from billion-year old undercurrents of paleoclimate (hothouse and snowball Earth), through cycles of glacial retreat and advance (spanning periods of 10,000 years and more), to the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO; which flips back and forth between warm and cold phases every one to three years). Like gears in a transmission, there are cycles operating within cycles. Some of these cycles are fairly regular and tied to Earth's orbital variations (the glacial advances), while others are quite aperiodic (ENSO) or evenrnepisodic, and fall within the realm of chaos dynamics.