Disaster Trifecta 40,000 Years Ago

Supervolcanos may likely be the earth's answer to halt global warming. Earth's atmosphere does swing between hot and cold in geological records.

There is the Gaia movement (popularized and presumably started (or inspired) by James Lovelock) which looks at the earth as a living organism composed of it's component parts of sub-organisms. What on a smaller scale we would call a terrarium.

My common sense (??) would agree that in a closed system there are laws dependent on thermodynamics that govern processes observed in the system. In the case of the Earth, the interdependence of the different processes that can be identified is obvious. Weather prediction shows these dependencies between ground, water and atmospheric temperature. It is a very complex "sea" of temperature "movement" scattered throughout different densities of matter. We have gotten pretty good at weather predictions, relatively speaking.

It also seems obvious that if we really knew how global temperature affects volcanic and tectonic plate activity, we might be better able to predict volcanic eruptions. The complexity of understanding the Earth's geological processes as an aggregate of these temperatures seems a magnitude beyond weather prediction, as it ("weather") is a component of the overall system.

I haven't studied geology in detail, so my assumptions might be off-base; possibly naive, too. But it does seem commonsensical, that if we had enough data would could likely see how the "closed-loop" system works and develop calculations for a "basic" model. At that point, we could possibly back-calculate the influence of the component parts. Without having an "x-ray" view of the Earth, encompassing the needed data-collection points (quite a challenge), it would seem almost futile. But then decoding the human genome probably seemed that way, too, in the beginning. Certainly computers, provided the necessary aid to achieving it as quickly as it was done. Without them so many hypotheses couldn't be as easily tested.

If "the" mechanism of self-correction happens before we can figure it out, it will, probably, be catastrophic, and be moot, if the outcome decreases the population enough. Technology, if it survives cannot be sustained without a large enough population of people with the knowledge needed. Even if we do get a handle on the process, it may be too late, just like the fate of the fictitious planet Krypton. (And the other complication/component in all of this is Chaos Theory and the "Butterfly Effect.")