Good points, Wolfgang.I'm certainly no physicist but I believe the earth's atmosphere and oceans still obey the laws of fluid mechanics. If you've ever watched a pan of water placed on the stove to heat, you've seen how it behaves. At first there is very little change in the water but as the temprature rises, currents are set up in the pan that you can see as distortions of your view of the pan's bottom. These currents become more violent as the water is warmed.
It's reasonable to expect that our atmosphere behaves something like that. As long as it remains cool, air masses tend to stay put. The warm regions stay warm and the cold regions stay cold. But increase the temprature and the system becomes more fluid; things start to move more rapidly. More movement in the atmosphere means air masses don't necessarily stay put any more.
As Wolfgang pointed out, global warming doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be warmer where you are. It may mean that cold air that used to be more or less stationary somewhere else now moves through your region. As air masses begin to move more rapidly, the frequency and energy of violent storms is likely to increase.
As we all have now learned, the motion of the atmosphere (weather) is not a liner system. It is subject to the whims of chaos theory. The butterfly effect predicts that local weather can suddenly jump from acceptable to catastrophically violent with only a negligible increase in energy input. In theory, the point at which the system becomes discontinuous could be predicted by a computer but in practice the calculation is impossible because the initial state of the system can never be known in enough detail to be useful.
I don't believe we can rely on Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis to stabilize the earth's climate for us—even if it comes to be regarded as science—because, as I recall, it makes no allowance for the excesses of mankind's industrial excesses.
To do nothing, in my opinion, is like doing nothing about a tumor because it hasn't yet been shown to be malignant.
- Mark