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Does unpredictable weather imply unpredictable climate?

Many skeptics of Anthropogenic Global Warming argue that our difficulty in predicting weather even a week ahead, demonstrates that it's foolish to try to predict long term climatic changes. Climatologists respond by pointing out that predicting specific short term events is unlike predicting general long term trends.

Implications to Other Questions

Is it possible to accurately predict climate?
Does unpredictable weather imply unpredictable climate?

Experts and Influencers

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Agree
Experts In Climatology


Roy Spencer    Meteorologist
Agree
The climate modelers assume there is no such thing as natural climate variability…at least not on time scales beyond maybe ten years. In effect, they believe that chaos only exists in weather, not in climate. But this view is entirely arbitrary, and there is an abundance of evidence that it is just plain wrong. Chaos occurs on all time scales. Climate change happens, with or without our help.
30 Mar 2009    Source


Experts In Politics


Don Aitkin    Politics Professor
Agree
Common sense tells us that if our knowledge of climate and weather cannot provide forecasts with much accuracy past 24 hours, we don't know enough about the inter-relationships inside the model, no matter how much data we have, even supposing it to be perfect data. Models are models: they are highly simplified versions of reality and cannot provide evidence of anything.
09 Apr 2008    Source


Disagree
Experts In Climatology


RealClimate    Climatology Blog
Disagree
In this post, we will try to explain a little about chaos theory, and its relevance to our attempts to understand and forecast the climate system. The chaotic nature of atmospheric solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flow has great impact on weather forecasting (which we discuss first), but the evidence suggests that it has much less importance for climate prediction.
04 Nov 2005    Source


Experts In Science


Geoff Davies    Geophysicist
Disagree
[Some skeptics] reveal [their] superficial understanding by claiming that if they can’t make a reliable 24-hour forecast then one shouldn’t believe long-term climate forecasts. [They] evidently lack the elementary understanding that weather causes erratic fluctuations around a relatively slowly changing mean, and that climate is about the long-term means.
16 May 2008    Source



Comments

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0 Points      Benja      12 Jul 2010      Stance on Question: Disagree
The skeptical argument that unpredictable weather implies unpredictable climate is falsified by the existence of numerous predictable patterns in climate such as seasons and milankovitch cycles.