Climate is what we expect. Weather is what we get. -- Mark Twain I believe in climate change -- at minimum, the climate in Georgia where I live changes four times per year. I call the phenomena "seasons." However, I don't consider "climate change" as something humans understand anywhere near well enough to control. Neither do I believe the sky is imminently about to fall because of human consumption of fossil fuels. Oil and natural gas seem to exist for a reason. Why shouldn't we efficiently put our natural resources to good use? As someone with a couple of decades worth of experience and formerly considered as something of an expert in the field of software development, I can say with complete confidence that only sheer hubris allows climate science experts to insist with any degree of certainty that their computer models can predict the future. The problem is simply too complex. There are far too many unknowns. For example, the forecast in Atlanta today is calling for between 3 and 7 inches of snow...quite a margin of error, wouldn't you agree? Now if the weather experts can't even accurately forecast how much snow is going to fall later today, how can they possibly say with total confidence they know what the weather will be like several years into the future? The butterfly effect is part of the chaos theory of mathematics. The term was coined by Edward Lorenz to describe his discovery that very slight changes to the input data for his weather models could produce a significant variations in the outcome, as if the flapping of a butterfly's wings in a … [Read more...]