Chapter 19 Identifying the inclination of a system towards a terminal state from current observations

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter addresses the issues of exploring environmental change of central concern, and discusses a binary classification of the behavior of an environmental system. Retrospective analysis of the collections of collapse- and survival-oriented models can reveal relationships among the parameters of the models, from which it may then be possible to make a categorical judgment on the inclination of the system's behavior. The issue of extrapolating a future from the record of the past, of expressing something about the entire mosaic from observation of just a single tile is discussed, The chapter raises questions in this context: if, given a model and given a set of historical observations, the behavior of the system is more inclined towards entry into some target domain of the state space in the future when the model is reconciled with the data than when the data, in effect, are ignored. That, this particular phrasing of the question is a fruitful way of attacking, yet again, the problems of general concern in contemplating structural change in the future behavior of an environmental system, is an important issue discussed. Current results are encouraging, but there is every reason to maintain a healthy skepticism regarding the likelihood of success in addressing other, more fully defined problems of structural change in the behavior of environmental systems.