Reading the first few pages of the book (http://www.amazon.com/Balance-Nature-Ecologys-Enduring-Myth/dp/0691138982) makes it clear that this is a "since the dawn of time" book. The author starts with the Big Bang and ends with the Earth a cinder. Over that time scale it is certainly pointless to speak of a balance of nature.

Looking through the other end of the telescope, on a moment-by-moment basis the universe is governed by a rich set of differential equations. Give nature a push in one place and surprisingly dramatic things can happen somewhere else. The only balance here is the balance of a complex multi-dimensional teeter-totter with sometimes very intolerant boundary conditions.

A question of balance is a question of regression to a mean. As Laurie Anderson says:

You're walking. And you don't always realize it,

but you're always falling.

With each step you fall forward slightly.

And then catch yourself from falling.

Over and over, you're falling.

And then catching yourself from falling.

And this is how you can be walking and falling

at the same time.

What applies to our ever deferred kinesthetic collapse applies to the collapse of all those wave functions vibrating in our neighborhood. Satellites don't so much orbit as fall with style (and sideways).

Is there some timescale over which balance (in the sense of homeostasis) asserts itself? Lots of bad science fiction, not just lots of naive dogma says yes. The Gaia Hypothesis says yes.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis says no. No need to drag Natural Selection and the Uncertainty Principle into it. The (weak) Anthropic Principle is enough to emphasize how lucky we are to be here.

The qualification that the second law applies to isolated systems is hardly meaningless. Any accurate statement of the second law contains this qualification because it is central to correctly understanding and applying the second law. While it is true that the concept of an isolated system is an idealization, that certainly doesn't mean that the second law can be applied willy-nilly to any system whatsoever. (Apply the second law to a charging car battery and tell me what is happening to the entropy of the battery.) The second law is universal precisely in the sense that it universally applies to isolated systems.

From a thermodynamics point of view (where thermodynamics is understood to include chemical thermodynamics), I am certainly not a mixture of water, carbon dioxide, molecular nitrogen and minerals. Among other things, I am nucleic acids, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. I would have to die and fully decompose to achieve thermodynamic equilibrium with my environment. As I said, equilibrium is death. All life processes are necessarily in a state of disequilibrium in their metaphorical fight against entropy. Life does not tend towards thermodynamic equilibrium, as a naive application of the second law would suggest.

The fatal flaw in your argument is in trying to draw an equivalence between ecological balance and thermodynamic equilibrium. But living things do not tend towards a state of thermodynamic equilibrium with their environment. And ecological systems are made up of living things. Reductio ad absurdum. The equivalence cannot hold.

Global warming is a hoax. The evidence is coming out now, in torrents, that it is just a gimmick to tax people and make more money.

If the evidence is coming out in torrents, post some. Just one peer-reviewed scientific paper will do. Think-tanks do not count.

They've been colluding since 1896, when GW was first proposed, I guess, and FINALLY their evil plan is about to come to pass. Sure, all of the original plotters have died off, but they started the conspiracy for their great-grandchildren to make a profit.

stop posting your garbage on Salon.

Did you receive any special training to be this dumb? If not, how the hell did you manage to find the nipple and feed yourself as a baby?

The subtleties and complexities of trying to understand ecology, evolution, and life systems are indicative of the views and rhetoric on global warming.

That sentence has zero linguistic content, as do many of your blathering rants.

Most people who support and condone the global warming agenda talk nonsense, and do not understand evolution, biodiversity, geology, the Earth’s history.

Oh, now you're an expert on evolution too. Let me guess, it didn't happen?

“Global warming” is a mythological universe unto itself.

Only in the minds of idiots like yourself. There is so much evidence of CO2-based global warming, that it is occuring now, and that humans are making it worse, the best you can do is say, "Nuh Uh NoThere'sNotINFINITY." There is evidence from almost every scientific discipline. You want us to believe, solely on the basis of your big mouth, that there's a vast conspiracy, involving thousands of scientists and government officials, to make money from global warming.

Well, there isn't. The same science that went into making the computer that you're using to post your lies has proven that warming is real, it's happening, and we're causing it. Now that I've told you that, hopefully you'll realize that your computer doesn't exist either, and littering Salon with your trash.

The qualification that the second law applies to isolated systems is hardly meaningless.

You don't know what constitutes a law in physical science. They do not mysteriously appear and disappear when you take things in and out of bottles, yet you pretend that physical laws do not pertain to the physical universe generally but apply only in specific limited circumstances, and that magic is otherwise loose in the world.

Your latest post contains another misstatement of fact, two evasions, and three additional logical fallacies, two of them repetitions, quite aside from your demonstration that you have no real understanding of physics or its basis in biology and ecology. You really shouldn't bother. Sorry.

I think you're arguing with a high school student, Dr. Map. His argument is that the laws of physics are valid only under controlled laboratory conditions. That would make them completely useless and would make physics itself useless period, along with every other hard science. His position is simply bizarre. Don't bother with him.