Originally posted by Prof_Fate:
Is meteorology a science? I'd say most would agree it is. The Science of Climate and Weather.
If so, and a meteorologist can't predict the weather accurately for even a week (or often less), how can they (climate scientists) predict the future of the climate/weather on the planet? |
This is a good question, and strikes at the difference between climate and weather. I cannot with any certainty make predictions about the weather tomorrow. I can, however, sitting in this chair, make reasonable assertions about how global temperatures will change between now and July, many months away. Why can I do that? Because I'm looking at large-scale effects, not the day-to-day oscillations that are weather. Modern climate models actually do very well at recreating the historical global climate, so it's difficult to argue that they don't.
Originally posted by Prof_Fate:
What is the normal climate of earth? It's been a lot hotter than now and a lot colder too. All before humans. |
You are correct that the climate has changed dramatically in the past. What you don't point out is that most of those times would have been extremely inhospitable to human life. We live in a climate that is unusually amenable to our existence; it seems silly to roll the dice on that.
Originally posted by Prof_Fate:
There's still a lot they don't know. Until 10 or 15 years ago they didn't know that gamma rays could come from stars and some suspect it was responsible for a mass extinction in the distant past. 20 years ago a meteor killed the dinosaurs, which were of course, lizards. Now they're birds and they were dead before the meteor hit the yucatan area. |
Not sure what you're saying about the dinosaurs; the mass extinction 65M YBP is still real, and the fact that some small dinosaur-like creatures survived to become birds is neither here nor there. As to the assertion that because scientists were wrong in the past nothing they say now can be trusted: you've just conclusively disproved the existence of televisions. Scientists once thought disease was due to an imbalance of the humors; does that then disprove modern medical science? Of course not.
Originally posted by Prof_Fate:
I take most of what I hear with a grain of salt. Doctors used to give out salt pills in my dad's era, then they said salt was a terrible thing and to be avoided, and now it's back to being rather benign.
Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute. But don't lose sleep over carbon dioxide emmissions. We fixed the ozone with a lot less difficulty than the scientists claimed it would take. |
The ozone hole is a fundamentally different problem, which lent itself to a much easier solution. The chemicals causing the ozone hole were (A) relatively few (B) had relatively short half-lives in the environment, and (C) were fairly easy to replace with others. |
