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How Nonlinear Dynamics Complicate the Issue of Global Warming

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Complex Evolutionary Dynamics in Urban-Regional and Ecologic-Economic Systems

Abstract

I have been involved with studies about global climate change since the early 1970s when I was working at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a project led by the late climatologist Reid Bryson.1 This large multidisciplinary group was attempting to model the impacts on world food production of changes in global climate (there had been a big run-up in world grain prices that lasted for 2 years, due to drought in the USSR in 1972, the so-called “great world food crisis,” now largely forgotten). Among the changes the group expected that I was working with was global cooling, and Bryson was among those who would later be labeled “global warming skeptics” (Bryson and Murray, 1977), as were some of his students, most prominently, Patrick J. Michaels (1992). This does not mean that I am one of those who wish to doubt the current science of global warming, and I am certainly not one of those who wish to ridicule science by pointing out how at an earlier time many were worried that we were in danger of experiencing global cooling, as some have done, only to have some of those concerned about global warming proceed to make themselves look foolish by denying that there was ever a time that anyone was worried about global cooling, except for a few “cranks” here or there.

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” 1922

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, James Madison University, South Main St. 800, Harrisonburg, VA, 22807, USA

    J. Barkley Rosser

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Correspondence to J. Barkley Rosser .

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Rosser, J.B. (2011). How Nonlinear Dynamics Complicate the Issue of Global Warming. In: Complex Evolutionary Dynamics in Urban-Regional and Ecologic-Economic Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8828-7_11

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