Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1462288 Comments:2390
How could the models have been so wrong? First, models cannot really predict dragon-king events. The prediction of a regime change for a dynamic non-linear system simply can't be shown in models. Obviously one of the missing ingredients of the models is a full accounting of all ways that energy enters the Arctic and affects the total volume of sea ice. The net energy flow to the Arctic has been increasing for many years through multiple channels, some of which have strongly interacting positive feedback processes. 2007 represented a cascading series of feedbacks that brought about the extremely low years. Even thought the energy mix between 2007 and 2012 is different, the net energy flow and total enthalpy of the Arctic changed to a new regime in 2007 and has been increasing ever since. The upshot of all this is that 2012 is continued confirmation that 2007 was not a black swan, but a dragon-king. 2012 is in the direct line of inheritance from that dragon-king and the new regime that is rapidly becoming apparent in the Arctic. The years prior to 2007 were the set-up for the entrance of the dragon-king. 2007 was the dragon-king, and 2012 is proving to be of royal blood. "
"We develop the concept of ``dragon-kings'' corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of self-organization that are not apparent otherwise from the distribution of their smaller siblings. We present a generic phase diagram to explain the generation of dragon-kings and document their presence in six different examples (distribution of city sizes, distribution of acoustic emissions associated with material failure, distribution of velocity increments in hydrodynamic turbulence, distribution of financial drawdowns, distribution of the energies of epileptic seizures in humans and in model animals, distribution of the earthquake energies). We emphasize the importance of understanding dragon-kings as being often associated with a neighborhood of what can be called equivalently a phase transition, a bifurcation, a catastrophe (in the sense of Rene Thom), or a tipping point. The presence of a phase transition is crucial to learn how to diagnose in advance the symptoms associated with a coming dragon-king."
