Loss of self-organization in Earth's climate

Abstract:  The climate crisis is one of the most pressing problems that humanity faces in the twenty-first century. The global land and ocean temperature average is the most direct measurable evidence of this change and has been the centerpiece of climate change discussion and research. Although these climate time series have been studied extensively, in this work we look at the modern data record -that spanning the twentieth century- in the context of the emergent properties of complex systems. The driving question is to determine whether the global temperature record exhibits some of the characteristic telltale signs of many dynamical systems when they are near important dynamical transitions such as critical points (e.g. the Ising model), and to interpret these changes in the context of an important property of complex systems: self-regulation. We have analyzed the global temperature data (both global averages and surface distribution) published by the Berkeley Earth Group using traditional tools of time series analysis. We have found significant changes in the correlation structure in the power spectra, in the autocorrelation function and in the evolution of the statistical properties of the spatial distribution of decadal temperature records as time progresses from 1880 to 2010. In order to gain a better understanding of the significance of these findings, we compare them to a classic model of planetary homeostasis and self-regulation: Lovelock's Daisyworld. By understanding the dynamical differences exhibited by the time series of Daisyworld both in the self-regulated and nonregulated regimes, we show that climate change is altering the self-regulatory stability of the global climatic system of the Earth.

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