[mlyle]

Yah, the point is if we draw a set of hills with bumps and stable equilibria for a ball to roll down-- there is resistance to perturbation near an initial point, and then a sufficient "nudge" to get over a hill and roll somewhere else... but the ball always ends up in a stable region at the bottom of a hill.

How different a place that new equilibrium is ... is open to debate and not really known. What climate scientists have shown is that it can be, and likely is, pretty bad.