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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Last month, as much of the United States shivered in Arctic cold, weather models predicted a seemingly implausible surge of balmy, springlike warmth. A week later, that unlikely forecast came true—testimony to the remarkable march of such models. Since the 1980s, they’ve added a new day of predictive power with each new decade. Today, the best forecasts run out to 10 days with real skill, leading meteorologists to wonder just how much further they can push useful forecasts.
A new study suggests a humbling answer: another 4 or 5 days. In the regions of the world where most people live, the midlatitudes, “2 weeks is about right. It’s as close to be the ultimate limit as we can demonstrate,” says Fuqing Zhang, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College who led the work, accepted for publication in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.
Forecasters must contend with the atmosphere’s turbulent flows, which nest and build on each other as they create clouds, power storms, and push forward cold fronts. A tiny disruption in one layer of turbulence can quickly snowball, infecting the next with its error. A 1969 paper by Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz introduced this dynamic, later dubbed the “butterfly effect.” His research showed that two nearly identical atmospheric models can diverge widely after 2 weeks because of an initial disturbance as minute as a butterfly flapping its wings.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday February 19 2019, @06:14PM
Of course, the problem is that as the climate warms, poles melt, etc. we are moving into a area where we don't have the relevant data. The models make predictions, but we have no idea how accurate they will be when the climate is, say 2 degrees warmer. All we know is that it will be hotter, and that water will evaporate more quickly. Moving into a modified Venus scenario is not impossible...though doing so quickly is, since that depends on a lot of photo-dissociation. Still, a large increase of water vapor in the exosphere is not desirable by any means. Etc.
The really dire scenarios are believe to be less likely than, say, a large meteor strike setting of another "Siberian Traps" chain of volcanoes and cooling everything back down again, but that's a guess. And the intermediately unpleasant scenarios which are deemed more likely are also guesses. My real guess is that we'll either have an AI Singularity or a nuclear war before the poles finish melting...which will cause global warming to cease to be a problem in one way or another.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.