Why weather prediction got brilliant – but not climate predictions
6 hours ago Guest Blogger 19 Comments
From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Great video by Peter Ridd:
AI formatted transcript below.
Here is the transcript with grammar and spelling corrected, content unchanged:
Computer models predicting weather and climate are actually fairly similar to each other. They use basic physics — the laws of motion, Newton’s laws of motion, thermodynamics, radiative transfer — and a very big computer.
And the weatherman often gets a very bad rap for predictions that don’t always work out. And it’s very unfair, in my opinion, where the models are actually fabulous, and there’s no doubt they’ve improved hugely over the last decades.
But climate models? Not so much.
Now, I live in an area where we have to dodge a few cyclones each year, and I reckon it’s incredible just how good a job, for example, the Weather Bureau does at predicting the future paths of those cyclones. They did a magnificent job for, for example, Tropical Cyclone Narelle. They said it would head across Cape York Peninsula and into the Northern Territory. And that’s exactly what it did. I remember a time when those predictions were pretty well useless — if there was a cyclone in the Coral Sea, the predictions were basically that it could go anywhere.
So let’s have a look at why the weather predictions have got so much better in the last decades. There are four reasons, and we’re only going to concentrate on one.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/04/why-weather-prediction-got-brilliant-but-not-climate-predictions/
