4 ms·

Your response is, that you don't understand, so nobody else should.

catlifeonmars 1y ago
That’s not what I said. But ok. Weather systems exhibit chaotic behavior which means that small changes to initial conditions have far reaching effects. This is why even the best weather models are only effective at most a few weeks out. It’s not because we don’t understand how weather works, it’s because the system fundamentally behaves in a way that requires keeping track of many more measurements than is physically possible. It’s precisely because we do understand this phenomenon that we can say with certainty that prediction at those time scales with that accuracy is not possible. There is not some magic formula waiting to be discovered. This isn’t to say that weather prediction can’t improve (e.g I don’t claim we have the best possible weather models now), but that predictions reach an asymptotic limit due to chaos. There are a handful of extremely simple and well understood systems (I would not call weather simple) that also exhibit this kind of behavior: a common example is some sets of initial conditions of a double-jointed pendulum. The physics are very well understood. Another perhaps more famous one is the three body problem. These two both show that even if you have the exact equations of motion, chaotic systems still cannot be perfectly modeled.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  > That’s not what I said. But ok. This is what you did say > Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Like - how the fck would you know? Even more so, why the fck does your ignorance and inability to think of possibilities, or fully grasp the nature of anything make you think that that sort of comment is remotely appropriate. You have the uniquely fortunate position to never be able to realise how inept and incompetent you are, but putting that on to other people is definitely only showing everyone your ignorance to the facts of life. And there was no reply - just downvoting people, like a champ...
  - habinero 1y ago
    No. They're correct and you are not. Nothing to do with "inability to think of possibilities", it's impossible because of literal physics. It's like saying perpetual motion machines could exist if we just think outside the box hard enough. No, we don't have them because thermodynamics.
    - awesome_dude 1y ago
      No, you're conflating something provable with something that isn't. Chaos theory only describes difficulties, in no circumstance does it describe things as "impossible" If you don't understand the difference between the two terms, that would explain a lot. What it means is that it takes more work (Computational Power) to properly model what's happening. Just because you don't know the answer, doesn't mean there isn't one (as I have repeatedly pointed out). I get it, you think that you already know everything that is to be known, but, the fact of the matter is you don't, nobody does, and pretending that you do is the real problem.
      - catlifeonmars 1y ago
        > What it means is that it takes more work (Computational Power) to properly model what's happening. The issue isn’t computation. It’s measurement. It’s not possible to measure all of the factors that go into weather it will rain on a Tuesday at 3 pm 3 months from now (sorry for the terrible pun). It’s small perturbations in initial conditions.
        awesome_dude 1y ago
        You've been wrong about everything else, so why stop there. The models we have are very coarse, and work for 24 hours (kind of, there are still extreme events that are difficult to be accurate about) More sensors are being deployed this very second - which will present a finer grained picture. It's not even at the rocket science part yet
        1y ago

That’s not what I said. But ok. Weather systems exhibit chaotic behavior which means that small changes to initial conditions have far reaching effects. This is why even the best weather models are only effective at most a few weeks out. It’s not because we don’t understand how weather works, it’s because the system fundamentally behaves in a way that requires keeping track of many more measurements than is physically possible. It’s precisely because we do understand this phenomenon that we can say with certainty that prediction at those time scales with that accuracy is not possible. There is not some magic formula waiting to be discovered. This isn’t to say that weather prediction can’t improve (e.g I don’t claim we have the best possible weather models now), but that predictions reach an asymptotic limit due to chaos. There are a handful of extremely simple and well understood systems (I would not call weather simple) that also exhibit this kind of behavior: a common example is some sets of initial conditions of a double-jointed pendulum. The physics are very well understood. Another perhaps more famous one is the three body problem. These two both show that even if you have the exact equations of motion, chaotic systems still cannot be perfectly modeled.

awesome_dude 1y ago
> That’s not what I said. But ok. This is what you did say > Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Like - how the fck would you know? Even more so, why the fck does your ignorance and inability to think of possibilities, or fully grasp the nature of anything make you think that that sort of comment is remotely appropriate. You have the uniquely fortunate position to never be able to realise how inept and incompetent you are, but putting that on to other people is definitely only showing everyone your ignorance to the facts of life. And there was no reply - just downvoting people, like a champ...
- habinero 1y ago
  No. They're correct and you are not. Nothing to do with "inability to think of possibilities", it's impossible because of literal physics. It's like saying perpetual motion machines could exist if we just think outside the box hard enough. No, we don't have them because thermodynamics.
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    No, you're conflating something provable with something that isn't. Chaos theory only describes difficulties, in no circumstance does it describe things as "impossible" If you don't understand the difference between the two terms, that would explain a lot. What it means is that it takes more work (Computational Power) to properly model what's happening. Just because you don't know the answer, doesn't mean there isn't one (as I have repeatedly pointed out). I get it, you think that you already know everything that is to be known, but, the fact of the matter is you don't, nobody does, and pretending that you do is the real problem.
    - catlifeonmars 1y ago
      > What it means is that it takes more work (Computational Power) to properly model what's happening. The issue isn’t computation. It’s measurement. It’s not possible to measure all of the factors that go into weather it will rain on a Tuesday at 3 pm 3 months from now (sorry for the terrible pun). It’s small perturbations in initial conditions.
      - awesome_dude 1y ago
        You've been wrong about everything else, so why stop there. The models we have are very coarse, and work for 24 hours (kind of, there are still extreme events that are difficult to be accurate about) More sensors are being deployed this very second - which will present a finer grained picture. It's not even at the rocket science part yet
        1y ago