Irritable Bowel Syndrome is one of those. I am absolutely positive there is no such thing. Nor is there such a thing as Ulcerative Colitis. Don’t get me wrong, these symptoms are definitely real and destroy or seriously hamper people’s lives, but what I believe is that these ailments are actually descriptions of symptoms of an as-yet not understood illness or disease. I am sure, for example, that some people diagnosed as having IBS actually have Coeliac Disease, and others have other conditions.

Similarly, in physics and mathematics we are told that some systems are so complex that they cannot be modelled mathematically — the climate is one. To such an extent that a butterfly flapping its wing in Africa could make the difference between a hurricane developing or not in on the way to Florida. This, it seemed to me, was admitting defeat. We are, by calling a system chaotic, I thought, saying “That’s too hard.”

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But it turns out, not for the first time, I was wrong. What chaos theory actually says is that for a sufficiently complex system minute changes to input can make no difference for a long time. Much later in time the difference in input can suddenly manifest itself in a different result. Far from saying “This is too hard” Chaos Theory says that we can expect different results but without knowing all the parameters, we cannot know the outcome due to the massive influence of minor changes to conditions. It is not defeatist, it just describes a counter-intuitive mathematical phenomenon.

But this blog is mostly about politics, why am I telling you this?

Actually, I am telling the lay-people in the hope of getting an answer from a non-lay person. Climate models that predict climate change (and, according to some, global warming) cannot have all the necessary inputs for obvious reasons: no climate model could monitor the flap of every butterfly’s wing, nor could any model monitor the location even of local gusts of wind. To try to get around this flaw, scientists have used models that accurately report the past from the early 1800s to today.

If a model successfully models temperatures for 200 years, they assert, then that model must be a reasonable approximation of actual events and so can be used to predict future events. If a model is ‘right’ in this sense, then if it says the climate will warm by a certain amount with a particular amount of carbon added to the atmosphere, that is what will happen.

I don’t know enough about the climate to know whether they will be right or wrong, and surely evidence to date does point towards an increase in global average temperatures but doesn’t chaos theory suggest that these climate models cannot possibly have a clue?

If the tiniest inputs to the climate models could have unexpected results at unpredictable times in the future, and if we are using approximations by necessity, doesn’t that mean that even the best model could spike wildly in one direction or another? And if the inputs are slightly (1 tenth of one percent even) different, doesn’t that throw into doubt any results that come out of those models?