>>And the whole point of the debate is we don’t know if the average is 3.5 or not, and whether we should trust people who claim they can predict the next throw to predict even further and more complicated models down the road.<<
To predict weather is complicated because weather is a chaotic system - it’s not even practically but theoretically hard to predict.
Compared to that predictions about climate and especially long term average temperature are far more easy to do.
Therefore it’s plain nonsense to claim that climate models cannot be trusted because there is so much uncertainty in weather forecasts.
On top of that no scientist has ever said that the long term average temperature will be growing by a certain temperature like e.g. 2.5 degrees.
The climate modells always yield a bell curve of probability. For Europe this bell curve tells us that most probably a temperture rise of 2 degrees until 2050 will occur. But in the area of 90% certainty of that curve 0 is also included - it’s just half as probable as 2.5.
“Therefore it’s plain nonsense to claim that climate models cannot be trusted because there is so much uncertainty in weather forecasts”
Predicting an entire winter stands in the category of climate model, not weather forecast.
This isn’t the first time NOAA has been wrong on an entire season, either. A few years back it was something like 95% confidence on a nasty hurricane season for one that turned out extraordinarily calm.
The line that the very long-term models are easier to predict, so we should ignore the frequent less long-term model failures (especially when NOAA claims such certainty in them), is not one that inspires any confidence from me. Or the fact that the cause(s) of the Little Ice Age are still being debated 150 years after it ended.