The math of chaos: Why weather and climate are unpredictable
By David Wojick
|February 10th, 2023|Climate, Science, Weather|137 Comments
That the weather is often unpredictable is well known. What may surprise you is that it will always be that way, especially long range weather, like a season or year ahead. And since climate is just average weather, it too will always be unpredictable. More on that later.
Before we look at why long range weather is perfectly unpredictable, let’s acknowledge that there are a lot of people selling long range weather and climate forecasts. They often disagree with one another, which is a strong hint that it can’t be done. Given a lot of different predictions, someone is likely to be right but that is like winning the lottery, pure luck. But there is no money in unpredictability, so the paid-for forecasts keep coming. Do not rely on them, because relying on a bad forecast is often worse than relying on none.
Now to the perfect unpredictability. It is a matter of math. Not that we are going to do any math, but I am going to describe what is says and why, in very nontechnical ways. In fact the math has a nontechnical name, which is “chaos”. Its technical name is “nonlinear dynamics” but we will not go into that.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/02/10/the-math-of-chaos-why-weather-and-climate-are-unpredictable/
