Re: OT: interesting global warming quote found elsewhwere

bill.sloman@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 29, 4:19 am, James Arthur <dagmargoodb...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 26, 5:40 pm, bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:





On Jul 26, 1:31 pm, James Arthur wrote:
Indeed, maybe we're in a big relaxation oscillator:
o the plants go nuts, gobble all the precious CO2, driving
us into an ice age,
o the Earth freezes, life fades,
o volcanoes erupt, restoring the depleted, life-giving gas,
o warmth returns,
o and the world sputters on for a time.
Repeat.
There's your long-term negative feedback.
Some of it. And it constitutes exactly the kind of climate modelling
whose predictive value you've just denied.
I agree it constitutes a vital, mitigating influence. But as
I've documented in the parallel "OT: Hydrogen economy, not?"
thread, the IPCC models do not include it.
The model pro I communicate with indicates the models are
great tools for understanding the workings of the Earth's
climate machine, and useful for predictions up to several
months in advance. Beyond that, they diverge hopelessly.
Understanding a butterfly's wings does not tell you where
the butterfly will go.
I think you are confusing climate and weather. Weather is chaotic.
Climate has regularities.
--
Bill Sloman, Nimegen
Which see-sawing, spikey graph would you point a fellow to, then, to
demonstrate these regularities, and on what time scale do these
regularities apply?

El Nino eludes prediction, despite great effort to model it. Is El
Nino then a weather event?

I note that any given day's weather is very often much like the
previous day's, any given minute is usually much like the previous
minute, and I could make a nice model predicting--with great accuracy
when taken overall--that the next second would be like the one before
it.

And then I could extrapolate that result out a few centuries, and I'd
have a climate model projecting out the trends. And it might even be
right. But probably not.

And that work's already been done.

Yep. It is called agricultural science, and it monitors how summer
follows winter, and the rain falls in close enough to same place in
close enough to the same volume from year to year to let you plant
crops and harvest enough of them to make money out of your
predicitons.

Your chaotic weather systems are unpredictable, but they deliver
roughly the same sort of statistical distribution of weather from year
to year, and you can model them well enough as statistical
distributions.

Your modeller's efforts freeze out the atmosphere and melt lead in the
same way that my LTSpice circuits occasionally produce megavolts and
mega-amps. This doesn't stop more carefully constructed models from
providing useful information.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
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