re: #501 Unakite

I responded earlier and may have had an attitude. I apologize, and it’s a fair question. Part of my response would be that school here (in eastern Virginia) was canceled a couple of weeks ago because the meteorologists were forecasting snow. My wife took a day off from work to stay home with the kids and, guess what, no snow. The local government made a decision that affected thousands of families in this area based on a weather forecast of snow (in the wintertime no less) made only one day ahead. If the models and forecasts are that inaccurate only one day ahead, I respectfully acknowledge that I have very little confidence in models that are claiming to predict climate patterns and trends decades into the future.

Local prediction is a differnt problem then large scale trend. These are actaully unrealted problems and completely different sorts of modeling.

For instance, if you handed a group of doctors 1000 smokers and asked them to predict exactly which ones will get sick and when, they would have a hard time doing that reliably. On the other hand, the satement that x percent are like to be sick in ten years can be calculated with much more accuracy.

We can not predict individual storm systems all that well. However, we can say that warming the Earth by x degrees is likely to have certain effects.