But they can predict yesterday's weather perfectly, and isn't that clear evidence of the validity of their model?
It works like this. I use a mathematical equation to correlate the last 7 days of weather to a 1962 edition of TV Guide. It is 100% accurate, so how could you possibly dismiss its accuracy for predicting tomorrow's weather?
Where could the flaw be in that?
I agree with the sentiment you express, assuming we can accurately predict long term behavior of a non-linear system with multiple inputs we don't even know yet is pure hubris.
However, this article isn't about weather. It's about the earths crust moving about. That this could happen was theorized about it the 1950s by a guy named Charles Hapgood; as he put it the crust can move about the core of the earth like the loose skin of an orange being able to move around while the inner orange remained stationary. Einstein bought into it enough to write the intro to Hapgood's book so it's not (on the surface) a nutty idea. He was inspired in part by the famous old Piri Reis map from the 1500s and likely based on much older sources. He claimed this map accurately showed the coast of Antarctica which is currently buried under miles of ice and only recently was mapped by us using radar and the like. He came to the idea that Antarctica must have been at a warmer latitude at some point for man to have been able to observe that coast without ice and map it. He thought that was about 10,000 years ago. I think he also suggested that the pole shift was rapid and probably responsible for cataclysmic events like the global floods described in numerous ancient texts.
Modern analysis of ice cores shows that can't have been true, Antarctica wasn't ice free 10,000 years ago at all. Furthermore, the theory of plate tectonics came to dominate and it seems most dismissed the idea that polar shifts and plate tectonics can both happen. Basically I had thought Hapgood's theory was considered quackery by scientists, so I'm surprised to see some reputable ones now saying it actually does happen. Of course they are saying it happens much, much more slowly.