mairihb’s Recent Comments

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  good grief

  'If a system is predictable 100 years from now, it should be just as easily predictable a thousand years from now, no? The only situation wherein it wouldn't be is if we couldn't trust the 100 predictions, and that's exactly where we are at now!'

  The argument that 'something that isn't predictable on 1000 years timescales therefore isn't predictable on 100 year timescales' is rubbish.

  Let's go back to baseball. suppose the pitcher throws the ball and we happen to know the velocity of the ball and the bat at the moment the batsman hits it. We can then, based on classical mechanics, predict with reasonable certainty where the ball will be a second later. We cannot predict where it will be 100 years later.

  That makes the point, though it in't a perfect analogy. The question is how accurately you wish to know what will happen. The climate models predict a spread of answers for the temperature rise by 2050, the minimum of which, according to the latest IPCC, is a 1 degree. Those models could be run for a thousand years but the uncertainty would become so great that it wouldn't be worth doing.

  However all we really want to know is whether the chance of something terrifying happen to our planet, due to our own actions, is large enough that we ought to change our actions. The answer to this is clearly yes!On 'We can't even predict the weather next week'--But weather is not climate posted 2 years, 2 months ago 11 Responses