Increased Climate Variability Is More Visible Than Global Warming: A General System-Theory Explanation

While global warming is a statistically conrmed long-term phenomenon, its most visible consequence is not the warming itself but, somewhat sur-prisingly, the increased climate variability. In this paper, we use general system theory ideas to explain why increased climate variability is more visible than the global warming itself. 1 Formulation of the Problem What is global warming. The term “global warming ” usually refers to the fact that there is a statistically significant long-term increase in the average temperature; see, e.g., [1, 2, 3, 4]. Somewhat surprisingly, what we mainly observe is not global warning itself, but rather related climate variability. Researchers have analyzed the expected future consequences of global warming: increase in temperature, melting of glaciers, raising sea level, etc. A natural hypothesis was that at