Re:The melting of Antarctica
by epistasis on Monday March 16, 2015 @03:31PM
(#9213746)
>It seems like magic to me that you can see the climate twenty years from now, but not e.g. whether it is going to rain next week.
If that seems magical to you, then most of the world should seem like magic rather than science. We can predict all sorts of things over long time scales that we can't predict over short time scales, and we do it all the time. We can't predict turbulence or the exact way that steam will rise from a hot cup of tea, but we can predict the amount of steam and the average speed of its rising.
And if you think that you have any sorts of technical chops, familiarize yourself with things like the Lorentz attractor, for which we can not predict exact trajectories, but we can predict where the two attractors are.
If that seems magical to you, then most of the world should seem like magic rather than science. We can predict all sorts of things over long time scales that we can't predict over short time scales, and we do it all the time. We can't predict turbulence or the exact way that steam will rise from a hot cup of tea, but we can predict the amount of steam and the average speed of its rising.
And if you think that you have any sorts of technical chops, familiarize yourself with things like the Lorentz attractor, for which we can not predict exact trajectories, but we can predict where the two attractors are.