Showing posts with label chaos theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chaos theory. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

The Trouble With Climate Science

The trouble with what is called "climate science" is that it is all about predicting the future, and as someone said, predictions are difficult, especially about the future.

Sometimes, it's true, science predicts the future reliably enough. For example, if you'd said on any day during the last four and a half billion years that "tomorrow the sun will rise in the East," you'd have been proved correct. Moreover, much else about astronomy is highly predictable. But that's because everything in the vast emptiness of space happens, well, in space. In other words, astronomical events are highly predictable because the objects about which predictions are made, planets, satellites, stars, and galaxies, are affected by their environment in very few and very predictable ways. These bodies exist in gravitational and electromagnetic fields the properties of which are well understood and which, on astronomical scales, change in strength and conformation incredibly slowly.