Physics Or Falacy?

First, full disclosure of ignorance: while I have had an interest in many of the sciences  for nearly all of my life, from the time I hit Junior High on, I never had a course in physics. Not officially. I picked up bits and pieces throughout my life since, from science magazines, TV, and even science fiction. Some made sense, some were dismissed as pure baloney, and some still puzzle me to this day. Anything with "quantum" in front of it I freely admit I will never understand, nor does that bother me.

Many ideas - we can call them theories - didn't make sense when I heard them, still don't exactly, yet I can see a tiny window into how they might work. Of those, a couple still bother me in that they seem polar opposites yet both are widely accepted as true.

In my personal education, the concept of entropy was the first bothersome concept. Everything is winding down, in over simplified form. I can see that on a mega scale. We die, stuff decomposes. Speed without input of continuous energy will slow, because other factors like friction still exert their forces. One concept that was drilled into me very early is the conservation of energy. You can't destroy it, merely change its form. Entropy argues against that, to my mind, with its declaration that everything winds down. It doesn't say how energy changes to non-energy, different energy, or where it goes, just that it becomes gone.

Sure, I learned how to pass the test to get a good grade, without accepting it for a second except on a macro scale. But decomposing matter feeds different recipients like fungi, which in turn support other life, and/or become oil over the ages, which then gets brought to the surface and burned, creating again energy. New form, not nothingness.

Then there's the supposedly competing theory, popularized as the "butterfly effect". Remember the original "Jurassic Park" movie? One butterfly can create a hurricane, in over simplified terms again. It kind of makes sense in explaining unintended consequences, like a tiny piece of gossip can ruin a reputation of somebody who would have invented/accomplished/influenced something really big and important through a series of increasing consequences. But looking at it as a physics theory, the problem with the butterfly effect is that each subsequent effect requires a huge input of energy which has no source nor explanation. It tickles the fancy without standing up to examination, in my - again admittedly inadequate - education and understanding. I tend to see those effects dying out in the face of stronger forces, not getting a boost from them. The wingbeat from a butterfly won't change a breeze, but the butterfly will get knocked off course by that breeze.

If you've gotten this far, you're likely wondering just where all this musing came from. It branched off an online conversation this morning with somebody about climate change and some new research pointing in a seemingly very unlikely direction. Have you heard of the AMOC? OK, I hadn't either, but suddenly it's popping up with greater frequency in climate discussions. It refers to the ocean current tipping point, the point where the Gulf Stream slows to a stop and what we think we know about how our temperatures will change goes out the window. If that's too oversimplified for you, research it. (If you want extreme detail, try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH-Nb2N7WY8 for a fairly easy to follow presentation, or the 54 page document full of statistics and formulas it's based on. I'll see you back here in a month. Maybe 5.)

What stuck out for me is how places we expect to heat sky high don't, and how some actually get really really cold. I queried the person I was talking with about why the really cold spot off Greenland - or another in Hudson Bay - didn't change when everything around it did. I brought in effects like brownian motion on the molecular level plus the effects of our planetary motion with days and seasons bringing in atmospheric forces to affect change. His personal day/night schedules are different than mine so I haven't gotten an answer yet, though I suspect he'll come up with acknowledging those effects working, but on a much much slower time scale to bring a fairly even change over the planet into being. Like the difference between ten years and ten thousand, for example. Maybe ten million is more likely. But he often surprises me.

The answer to my question likely won't have any effect that many of us will be around to observe. The tipping point is projected to arrive possibly as late as 2095. Sighs of relief I hear? It also could arrive as early as ... 2025. These graphs are not straight lines but trends of where highs and lows are going. They're getting more extreme in depth of change as well as how long the changes last. That's why they can't pinpoint the exact when. Just the what and where. Tipping points mean there is no return. We are already in many feedback loops.

Also note that what you are hearing about planetary climate change, if you live in the US, is mostly about our own weather here. More spring storms with tornadoes, for now, though it seldom mentions climate change. There is a start of forecasting more and stronger hurricanes later this summer. Almost nobody tells you it's climate change AND it's our fault. Your home insurance rates are rising - where you can still get it - but nobody tells you the real cause, or the fact that insurance companies' profits are still very healthy. You're probably not hearing about Central and South America, the death of the Amazon rain forest, the end of bananas, coffee, and cocoa in those regions, and even,  because it "seems funny" to some people, the frequency of howler monkeys falling out of trees from heat stroke, dead upon impact. The howlers get some press, the other animals don't. The forests are going quiet.

Try some foreign news sources, like The Guardian. While groceries and other things get more expensive, also note, when you can find it, the profits the big corporations are making while raising your prices, and how high executive paychecks have gotten these last few years. Corporations are people too, my friend, and those "people" are becoming Oligarchs running what we think is still a Democracy.

That, for sure, is not falacy.