On 2006-03-02, Jay Honeck wrote:
Weather forecasting computer models are so incredibly flawed that they can't
reliably predict the weather 12 hours in advance -- yet, for some unknown
reason, many people trust computer models that purport to show what the
climate will be like in the year 2100.

Weather is not equal to climate.

Here's an analogy - take a large pan of water, switch on the gas stove
at a medium setting.

The equivalent of weather forecasting is predicting where exactly each
convection will appear in the next X minutes, and how the water will
flow with the gas heating it (probably unevenly, no burners are
perfect), and what temperatures will be found at different points inside
that volume of water.

The equivalent of climatology in this pan analogy is predicting the rate
of temperature change in the entire pan if, say, I turn the burner from
medium to full power.

The person predicting where all the eddies and temperature variances
within the pan will be pretty accurate for what will happen in the next
few seconds, but fairly inaccurate if you ask him to predict where the
eddies, temperature variances and convections will be in five minutes
time.
However, the person predicting what happens when you go from half burner
to full burner can give you a much more accurate general prediction of
what the heat will be in 30 minutes.

It's the same with climatology versus meterology. If you add a certain
chemical to the atmosphere which has a known effect, you can say with a
reasonable degree of confidence what it will do to the total energy
state of the atmosphere as a whole over a period of decades.
However, you can't say what it will do to an individual eddy current
in the atmosphere from one day to the next.

Dismissing climate change because the NWS 5-day forecasts isn't always
accurate is a complete and utter misunderstanding of the difference
between climatology and meterology (in fact it's so wrong it's not even
wrong).

--
Dylan Smith, Port St Mary, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net