Agreed. And even then, the system you're dealing with is so 'chaotic' (i.e. massive effects can be caused by very small changes in data) that you get diminishin

Agreed. And even then, the system you're dealing with is so 'chaotic' (i.e. massive effects can be caused by very small changes in data) that you get diminishing returns the more data you have. Take the weather forecast as a (very) slimmed-down version of this problem. Yes, weather forecasts are better now than they were 20 years ago, but how much better? In the UK now, the 24h forecast is pretty accurate most of the time, but the three-day is very iffy, and a week out is still a crap shoot. That's despite a metric fuckton of satellite data and some serious hardware (the UK met office numbercruncher consumes more than a megawatt!). We're always going to be making guesses here. It seems, to my non-climatologist brain anyway, that the most up-to-date models produce predictions that are fairly consistent with the real world data we have. I would say the political and economic problems are much more important, and harder to solve.