Chaotic Behaviour of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

Abstract

It is shown that the Earth System (ES) can, due to the impact of human activities, exhibit chaotic behaviour. Our arguments are based on the assumption that the ES can be described by a Landau-Ginzburg model, which, in itself, predicts that the ES evolves through regular trajectories in phase space towards a Hothouse Earth scenario under a finite amount of human-driven impact. Furthermore, we find that the equilibrium point for temperature fluctuations can exhibit bifurcations and a chaotic pattern if human impact follows a logistic map. Our final analysis includes interactions between different terms of the planetary boundaries in order to gauge the predictability of our model.