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Re:A ragtag band of internet friends became the best at fore... by surgicalcolor on Wednesday March 13, 2024 @06:43AM (#39689939)
Eh, the second part to me seems like a less useful forecasting. Generally it seems fore asting is focused on human/political events that obviously don't already have useful modelling.

For climate change, there's already a lot of existing models out there calculated by much more rigorous metrics than "the Laplace rule" or just naively adding together averages.

Re:A ragtag band of internet friends became the best at fore... by hackerlight on Wednesday March 13, 2024 @07:00AM (#39690037)
Climate models just give us scenarios. Conceptually they give us the function f(emissions) = warming + error. But we don't know the probability distribution of emissions, so we don't know the probability distribution of f. Coming up with a reliable probability distribution requires considering things like politics, world events, economic growth, technology breakthoughs, etc.
Re:A ragtag band of internet friends became the best at fore... by exe34 on Wednesday March 13, 2024 @09:11AM (#39690923)
> the probability distribution of emissions

We know that every species consumes all available resources until an external force, whether it's predators or environmental collapse checks its growth. Humans are no different - any time a poor person uses a paper straw, a rich one will fly their private jet. Muh backyard arguments on nuclear means we will continue to burn coal and gas as fast as possible, even while renewables help drive up more demand.

So I think it's safe to assume that emissions will continue growing.

Re:A ragtag band of internet friends became the best at fore... by hackerlight on Wednesday March 13, 2024 @09:50AM (#39691201)
I'm hoping for a rigorous analysis. For example, X := "arrival time of fusion with a cost lower than natural gas in $ per kWh" is a random variable with a distribution. Our assumptions about the distribution of X will impact our estimated distribution of emissions, and hence impact our estimated distribution of f(emissions). There's lots of these questions that contribute, both technological and behavioral in nature.
Re:A ragtag band of internet friends became the best at fore... by tasuki on Wednesday March 13, 2024 @10:51AM (#39691893)
Yes there's a lot of existing models, and a lot of the existing models have been wrong in the past. Climate science has always been very politicized. I for one would welcome predictions from people who have a track record of predicting things correctly. Climate science has a mixed track record [0].

[0]: https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...

FWIW, I'm very much NOT endorsing cei.org, nor saying climate change is not a big problem. Just saying that the track record of climate scientists is not great. Climate change is important enough to warrant the attention of people who can actually predict things.