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Comment by SaasDeveloper12 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and they are repeatedly wrong in their predictions. We can't accurately forecast the weather a few days out. All our great hurricane model forecasts are off and that's typically a day or two out in the future. There are just far too many variables at play that we don't even know about for us to accurately forecast anything climate related that far into the future.

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You don’t have to be able to predict weather to predict climate.

Think of it this way: it’s impossible due to quantum uncertainty to predict the path of a single particle in a gas. Yet out of the chaos, you can still draw out nice mathematical rules like the ideal gas law PV=nRT

I think you have it wrong. Gravity and momentum are very well understood, but a double pendulum or three body problem is chaotic such that prediction past a certain point is useless.

So is the climate well behaved like the ideal gas law, or are there complicated sources of feedback like clouds, plant growth, and albedo which make it chaotic? There are quasi-periodic alternations between the fairly cold periods of the current ice age and the interstitial we're now in, so you should recognize it's substantially more complicated than just averaging the speeds of all the molecules.

I'm all for a cleaner better world, but I'll never believe someone who says they can usefully predict a chaotic system.

I agree. My issue is the climate predictions that we do have over the last 50 years have been grossly inaccurate. We don't have any mathematical proofs for climate at this point like ideal gas law. But yet that is not how it is presented to the public.

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