This post will come as no surprise to Engineers who have studied controls, or to others like Nate Hagens and Gregor Macdonald. But, looking at the earth like a multi-variable-non-linear system, with feedback loops designed to keep her in equilibrium, have been struck by the equivalent of a delta function it has never felt before.
See, when engineers go to model a problem, in order to create forecasts they use an impulse, or a step function, then measure the response. For linear systems, these responses are additive. That is, to create a forecast for what would happen if there were two impulses, you can simply add the two responses together. This gets extremly math intensive, and “convoluted” would be the best appropriate pun, but what happens to some systems is – instability. Unstable systems don’t have the appropriate feedback necessary for the system to find an equilibrium, or they have feedback that overshoots, only to cause overshoot in the other direction.
Applying this to earth, in a crude qualitative way, what you get is things like supply and demand problems, extreme weather and extinction…because natural systems, will attempt to find equilibrium. Anyway, below is the basic mathematical template that instability often embodies. My theory is that between the law of large numbers, a growing population, and information continuing to flow faster – this is the path we’re on…I can’t prove it, but there are many signs that oil, water, and other variables will follow a more complicated path, but one like this:
