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Environmental Skeptics and Critics, 2012, 1(1): 1-7
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Some thoughts on global climate change: will it get warmer and warmer?

WenJun Zhang , Chunhua Liu
School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China; International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Hong Kong

Received 16 September 2011;Accepted 3 November 2011;Published online 10 March 2012
IAEES

Abstract
Many studies discussed climate change without considering the complexity of climate system. In our view, climate system is a complex and non-linear system. It possesses all properties that a complex system will have, such as non-linearity, chaos, catastrophe, multiple stable or unstable equilibrium states, etc. It is increasingly obvious that the equilibrium state of climate system is being broken by destructive human activities. There are several possibilities that global climate will proceed. We would not exactly predict what outcome will finally occur if destructive human activities continue. In the farther future, in addition to the scenario of continuous warming, there is also possibility that the climate would proceed and reach a new stable or unstable equilibrium state, and the new equilibrium state would be realized in a smooth and continuous way, or realized in an abrupt way by jumping or plummeting. Recent years' and the coming tens of years' unusual change in global climate would be a prelude for dramatic climate change in the far future. We found that global annual mean temperature since 1880 has been rising in sinusoidal-type, similar to a superposition of sine curve and exponential curve, in which a periodicity of about 60 years existed and in the first ~40 years the temperature rose and in the second ~20 years it declined or approximately to be constant. Accordingly, we predicted that the global annual mean temperature had reached a peak around 2005, and would decline or be approximately constant until around 2030. Some models, equations and parameters on climate change were also developed based on past hundreds of years' historical records.

Keywords climate change;climate system;complex system;nonlinearity;uncertainty;equilibrium state


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