Posted on 05/17/2018 8:31:31 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
The scientific community is working to make its predictions more accurate, but there's still a long way to go.
As debate in Washington heats up over climate change and transparency in science, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine held a quiet meeting last week to discuss just how consistent the results are across climate studies.
The verdict, for those who follow the science, wasn't too surprising. They are still seeing a wide range of results. "The spread has gotten tighter, but it hasn't gotten super tight," is how NASA climate researcher Gavin Schmidt puts it.
Scientists have several ongoing strategies for improving climate change predictions. They compare results from different methods of estimating the Earth's prehistoric climates. They also share the data and computer programs used in climate studies online so other research groups can verify the findings and spot bugs. And they run past climate data on computer models built to predict the planet's future - because if the model works for the future, then it should work for the past too.
At last week's meeting, Andrea Dutton, a scientist at the University of Florida who studies the Earth's past climates, noted a silver lining to the hostile attention the field has received from folks who deny the reality of human-driven climate change: "This public scrutiny has, I think, helped us to up our game in all these areas and be better about being transparent."
(Excerpt) Read more at psmag.com ...
Yup. It is a great illustration of the complexity of even simple systems.
Here's a better one that can be easily visualized. Imagine, if you will a table with 3 magnets in an equalateral triangle. Now picture a steel ball suspended from a string hanging down exactly in the center of the 3 magnets. If you were to move the ball to some random point and release it, could you guess which magnet it would end up on after swinging around a bit?
The three colored regions indicate exactly that. You'll notice huge areas where the landing area is easily determined. However, there are boundary areas where the exact position of the ball has a lot to do upon where it ends up. This is a classic fractal that almost perfectly describes the observed physical process. You can zoom into those boundary areas forever and see detail at what would be atomic scales and beyond.
Silly they already know the answers, they just have to tweak the model until it agrees with them.
Exactly how it works.
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